queerbychoice | Really Weird Question

If you were inventing your own language with its own pronoun system that didn't have to be gender-segregated, but for some reason (umm . . . an evil language tyrant ordered you!) you had to divide people into some kind of categories and assign different pronouns to each category . . . what categories would be the most important in your mind for you to distinguish between? They could be categories based on mental rather than physical attributes, or chosen rather than inborn characteristics . . . they could be categories based on anything you want.

I was contemplating writing a language parody, and trying to think of a pronoun-distinction that I could really believe in. In reality I don't really want any pronoun-distinctions, but the point would have been to show how silly all pronoun distinctions are by substituting one that theoretically should seem more meaningful than gender, yet in reality would just seem sillier because we're all so used to the gender one. But anyway, the question got me interested in how differently different people value different methods of categorizing people, and I suddenly wanted to survey all of you.

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How about people you like/people you don't like? Then people would know immediately what you thought of a person.

Past/present/future. (Better known as, "Dead, alive, or not yet born.")

Oooh, I like this one...

Blatantly stolen from Robert Anton Wilson, neophiles and neophobes?

I'd have everyone's name easily and obviously abbreviatable into pronouns.

So, "David has a cat, davs cat is white" or "Sylvia? I saw syl earlier and sy said..."

I would distinguish by class, because think it's our most important and most hidden social marker. I wish people (and language) could admit how many class judgements it makes and how central they are to the way we view people, even if only subconsciously.

i don't know how famous it is- i assume it might be, because it's interesting- but i read an essay a long time ago where the author, whose name i forgot, as well, doubled up the meaning in his pronouns by making them not just gender- but also race- specific, going, instead of "him," "whim" or "blim" depending on white or black- or "wher" or "bler," you know?

have you read that? do you know who it is? man i'm bad with this.

um, i'd base my pronouns on. um. nope! can't think of a good one. on punk rock-ness, i guess, because you can't always tell by lookin'.

i really don't know. i can imagine one based on class, i guess. it's a good question. hmmm.

i thought you might be most inclined to divide people based on their appreciation of the arts, actually. though i suppose to some extent that's class-related.

i would make it a priority to emphasize the fluidity of any pronoun system. the current him/her and he/she gender pronouns are so rigid, demanding that the user choose one or the other to categorize a person. is it a HE? or a SHE? in order to be more useful and accurate than our current system, any new system ought to allow for some leeway in the way that racial classifications are struggling to accomodate mixed races.

for those who propose a class-based system, does this imply a sort of caste system in pronoun form? how easily will a person move from class to class?

People could be assigned different pronouns based on how many dollars they earned in the past year . . . or to give them more control over it, maybe how many books they read in the past year. But that would just make it into a perpetual competition.

I'd want a set of labels conveying people's beliefs, so people would just choose for themselves which pronoun set they wanted to be affiliated with. Maybe essentialists versus social constructionists, for example.

and if they are unaffiliated, they can refuse to be a part of the system altogether?

No pronouns?

I mean, if I assign a pronoun to indicate that they're unaffiliated, doesn't that sort of make them into a part of the system, and make unaffiliation into an affiliation itself?

I guess they'll have to be pronoun-free.

* went to the store today. * bought food. * took it home and ate it.

I wonder how the asterisks are pronounced. Maybe with a tongue-click are something.

But you know, even then, the unaffiliateds will soon become collectively known as "the asterisks" or "the clicks" and it will still be a statement of their beliefs which assigns them a particular role within the system. You can't ever really excape the system, no more than you can escape the universe.

The way I was picturing it, nobody gets any say in this. I certainly never told anyone to call me "she", they just do based on their assumptions.
First person pronouns, it should be noted, never tell you anything about the person, nor second. Only third.

So the idea is, if think for whatever reason that you have no class, I will say "Queerchoice was hungry, so low (for lower class) made dinner." And you can be offended as you want, but it makes no difference. And someone else might have a different impression of you, so might refer to you as "up" or "mid" or "umid" or "lowm" or whatever.

Maybe one built around age: child, adolescent, adult, elder...? Of course, so much would depend on the society you were building. I would think the pronouns would be largely determined by primary power structures--so if the castes are based on economic distinctions, or race/species, or gender/sex, age, etc, the pronouns would be too. So really, what you are asking is if we had to create a society with a set of baseline distinctions, which distinctions would we choose?

but the language I'm inventing doesn't have segregated pronouns! All too complicated, if you ask me - easier to just make one word mean one thing.

If I had to... I dunno, one for evil-tyrant-people-who-insist-on-dividing-people-into-arbitrary-groups and one for everypody else?

oops... everybody, not everypody... unless the language is for pod people...

haha.

wait, isn't it for pod people?

*goes off to change his answer*

I know! divide up the pronouns into pod people and non-pod people!

GENIUS!

Give this being a prize.

I'd be inclined to divide people up into their own specializations... more like careers or something, maybe, an extension of referring to people as "doctor" or "officer." Of course, that would be pretty elaborate and/or complicated. It could also be based on how they contribute to the world around them.

...but I do like embryomystic's idea of breaking it down into who you like or dislike.

I've gone down this road. One night I was really unhappy with engleska so I sat down and planned out rules and even wrote poems and songs in my own language... I even came up with sounds not represented in Romance/Germanic languages but useful to include, to me.

As for pronouns... I would identify people by their self-percieved mental gender. Four pronoun sets, one for mental girls as per standard definition, one for mental bois as per standard definition, one for self-identified in-between/nothing's, and one for when you are unsure... When introducing yourself including your name you would indicate either directly or by which of the sets you used. In English it would be like me saying... As a girl, my name is Juli... If someone was unsure, there would be nothing offensive in being asked Your gender?...

This just solved a personal problem with me though.

Identifying people by mental gender I saw as the best idea if you must segment... Much better than by something you have no control over or say in, like born physical sex, or race.

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well...