5 ms·

I wish everyone was just named James. I had a good friend named James and it’s much easier to call everyone that than to learn a bunch of individual names.

• recursive 4y ago
  It makes sense to me that individuals should have names. Pronouns tend to be much less information dense, and are used as shorthand. It doesn't make sense to me that pronouns should capture gender, as opposed to hair color, height, or age.
  • CobrastanJorji 4y ago
    If we could simply convince the entire world to speak either Persian or Bengali, we could avoid the whole problem.
  • munificent 4y ago
    The property that pronouns capture is essentially arbitrary. That's why Romance languages assign gender to stuff like telephones and sandwiches. The point of gendered pronouns is that sentences very often have two nouns: a subject and object. If you have only a single pronoun, then any sentence can only use a pronoun to unambiguously refer to one of those. If you have two pronouns and you randomly and evenly distribute them across various subjects, then it's fairly likely that the subject and object will get difference ones and you can now unambiguously use pronouns for both. Since a very large fraction of human speech pertains to other humans and since human sex is a roughly 50/50 distribution, it makes some sense that we used gender as our mostly arbitrary thing to assign a pair of pronouns too. We could have used, say handedness instead, but with only ~10% of people being left-handed, the odds of a sentence being about a righty and a lefty is much smaller. Pronouns are basically like special variables in a REPL that let you refer to the most recent expression. It's nice if you can refer back to a couple of them.
    • jimmywetnips 4y ago
      Why even use articles or pronouns, a better way would be to unambiguously mark every word with whether they're the object subject or whatever role it is in the sentence. Maybe tack on more flags as you need them for more information as needed Hence why forcing my team to learn Hungarian has really been a no brainer and will really start to pay dividends in the next decade when we finally reach a working professional proficiency
      • munificent 4y ago
        > mark every word with whether they're the object subject or whatever role it is in the sentence No, that's not the point. (Most languages do make subject/object fairly clear.) The point of pronouns is to have a short alias to refer to a previously introduced noun.
  • burnished 4y ago
    Well, it certainly is a much stronger disambiguater than those other signals. Dividing a population in half is a pretty powerful technique. Though now that I think about it age is also potent - you get the same rough division w.r.t relative age (younger vs older than the speaker), and you can divide the population roughly into quarters with ease and accuracy. Do miss and ma'am count as pronouns here? They code for age as well as gender Hair color and height dont really have the same sort of dividing power broadly speaking. Still, your line of thought there about what a pronoun should capture is intriguing.
• ectopod 4y ago
  The whole point of pronouns is to reduce cognitive overhead. If pronouns become something you have to remember for each person then you might as well drop them from the language and use names all the time.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • ccn0p 4y ago
    Totally. Or use X for everyone. No overloading of common words well understood to be something completely different.
    • eli 4y ago
      Yes exactly: James for everyone. Some people may prefer a different name but I think they’ll understand once we explain the cognitive load.
      • mkaic 4y ago
        James thinks James meant "James'll understand" instead of "they'll understand" :P
• javajosh 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • dangerlibrary 4y ago
    I don't disagree with you in principle, but this take ignores the boots-on-the-ground reality for trans and nonbinary people. Trans and nonbinary people are using this as a shibboleth to determine whether they can feel safe around you. You are not someone who wishes nonbinary or trans people harm, but unfortunately, there is a large segment of the population that does. The act of using someone's preferred pronouns is an act of saying "you are safe with me, I do not wish you harm." This is not a default or automatic assumption they can make, as it likely is for you. Many trans and nonbinary people, through no fault of their own, have PTSD from how they've been treated by others. Even those that have not experienced hatred or violence directly are no doubt aware of the statistics.[0] You're correct that, in many cases, this is a mental health problem. It's an accommodation for a colleague or friend that needs your help, for now. I have trans relatives and colleagues, and several I knew before they came out / transitioned. They've been understanding and patient when I have made mistakes, just as any normal person would be. It's not about hating people - in either direction. It's about treating people with kindness and respect and reminding those who are scared that you are on their side. [0] https://time.com/3999348/transgender-murders-2015/ https://time.com/3999348/transgender-murders-2015/
    • wpietri 4y ago
      Yeah, I have trans friends and former colleagues, and can confirm all of this. I'd love to live in a world where it wasn't controversial or dangerous, but we are not in that world yet.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • verall 4y ago
    > I don't respect people's pronoun preferences because that would be creating reasons to hate people This has got to be peak hacker news