lew (04/22/83)
We already have a genderless 3rd person singular pronoun. If anybody doesn't believe me, they can look it up in their dictionary. That should convince them! Lew Mammel, Jr. ihuxr!lew
mat (04/23/83)
I no longer agree fully with this, but Malcom Forbes suggested that there be a single 3rd person singular pronoun: he--or--she--or--it, to be doubly contracted as h'orsh'it (no flames, please, this WAS published some years ago in Forbes Magazine, in MSF's personal column). -!hou5e!mat Mark Terribile Duke of deNet
jack (04/24/83)
People who correspond (in English) about Loglan, an artificial language, and who wish to use genderless pronouns, have been using Loglan pronouns in their English sentences. Loglan has no gender inflection.
urban (04/26/83)
The problem with using, say, 'da' (the Loglan all-purpose pronoun) is that it isn't only gender-free, but also lacks the implication of being a personal pronoun. In other words, it's no better than using 'it' as a gender-free pronoun. Loglan is unique among synthetic languages in that its pronouns carry no semantic content (gender, personhood) whatsoever. For those unfamiliar, the binding of the pronoun is established by the most recently mentioned nominal phrase; different pronouns are used for second-most-recent, etc (unless this has been changed since Brown's book was published back in '76). I consider this one of its Neat Features. Esperanto, by way of comparison, is quite sexist: not only does it have the pronouns for 'he' and 'she', but the word for 'father' is 'patro', and the word for 'mother' is DERIVED from this by adding a 'feminine' suffix: 'patrino'. The word for 'parent' is 'gepatro'; 'ge' is, in effect, a 'neutral' prefix. One wonders if the more militant feminist Esperantists use the word 'gepatrino' to emphasize the point? I gather that some people have tried to introduce a 'masculine' suffix to the language, but without success. Mike "collector of useless languages" Urban [ucbvax | decvax]!trw-unix!trwspp!urban