language invention, pronouns
all of my invented languages don't make gender distinctions in pronouns (there's no he/she/they/it, just they/it or some other system)
this is because:
* the majority of languages on earth DON'T distinguish between genders
* gender neutral always is easier for literally everyone
language invention, pronouns
@lizardsquid My understanding is that the main use of pronouns is as kind of a variable-replacement disambiguator, so you don't have to keep saying <name> over and over again -- but at least one artificial language I've heard of (I think it was Lojban, but I might be misremembering) makes them sequence references rather than gender references.
...so there are pronouns for "the 1st person mentioned", "the 2nd person mentioned" and so on.
Eng equiv, maybe: 1e, 2e...?
language invention, pronouns
So... opening this up as a serious question, would it work if we tried this in casual conversation on Masto?
Like, you could say "LizardSquid was talking about pronouns, and 1'e was kind of annoyed about gender, and Woozle has an idea. What do you think of 2'es idea in response to that?" (Arbitrary apostrophes are just there to signal this particular usage.)
language invention, pronouns
@woozle well, learning words from closed classes (pronouns, prepositions, determiners, all kinds of grammatical words) is actually really hard!
language invention, pronouns
@lizardsquid I can't imagine being fazed by it, but then I have a weird brain.
language invention, pronouns
@woozle I'm gonna ern my friend's place var nit wen cuddle
language invention, pronouns
@lizardsquid Yeah, but them's not numeric. Less cues.
Use those same words in several more sentences, though, and I bet I could get at least a general sense of what they mean.
language invention, pronouns
@lizardsquid Oooh, that would be just *terrible.*
Also, I'm sure nobody could figure it out from context, because learning words from context is haaaaard.
;-)