2 ms·

> The keywords it, he, she, him, her, they, them, ze, hir, zie, zir, xe, xem, ve, and ver refer to the last named variable determined by parsing order. that wa

• tzs 5y ago
  I've actually seriously suggested that we make pronouns like that for English. The conventional system with just "he" and "she" and "it" is clearly inadequate because it doesn't handle the case where you have more than one noun that should have the same pronoun. That's a very easy case to hit. We are essentially using a 1.58-bit hash function to map nouns to pronouns, which has very poor collision resistance and it is a somewhat subjective hash function when dealing with anything whose gender you aren't sure of. We could add a bunch more pronouns to support more bits in the hash--that's what many people who consider themselves non-binary gendered are advocating. That can solve the problem of not having enough bits in the hash, but still leaves the problem of the hash function being subjective. In fact, it makes it more subjective because at least with "he" or "she" the default is to go by appearance unless you know that this is incorrect. With zie, zir, xem, and the rest everyone is a special case. Position based pronouns fix the hash problem by not using a hash, and fix the subjectivity problem by not being based on any characteristics of the noun to which they refer in a given sentence. Keep "he" and "she" with their current meaning for backward compatibility, and then add new pronouns that refer to the 1st noun in the sentence, the 2nd noun in the sentence, and so on, and add a similar set that refer to the nouns in the previous sentence (and count as nouns for determining pronouns in the current sentence).