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authorJohannes Löthberg <johannes@kyriasis.com>2015-03-11 19:36:48 +0100
committerJohannes Löthberg <johannes@kyriasis.com>2015-03-11 20:22:57 +0100
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parent92416c15246ab8c507ce5370350816bf6079208f (diff)
downloadwebsite-d36bc730c7ec3041688d177557de1bfb5a1bb591.tar.xz
journal: Add #10: Mercurian pronouns
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+.. frontmatter
+ title: Mercurian pronouns
+ date: 2015-03-11
+ author: Johannes Löthberg
+ author_link: /~kyrias/about.html
+
+So, you might or might not know that English pronouns are sort of annoying in
+some regards.
+For example, there aren’t a canonical set of singular third-person,
+gender-neutral pronouns.
+
+Some people, past-me included, use “they” as a singular pronoun.
+There are people that try to use unfounded arguments to prove that use somehow
+wrong, but they generally use rather flawed arguments.
+Using it as a singular pronoun has been done for literally centuries, and some
+people compare the use of singular *they* to the use of a singular *you*
+instead of *thou*, though I have gotten no reasonable reply from people arguing
+against singular *they* about that point yet.
+
+There are alternatives to the singular “they” however.
+One set, which is commonly, though inaccurately [1]_, known as the Spivak
+pronouns, was first used by James Rogers in 1890, who created his set from the
+pronouns “he” and “them”.
+Later, in 1975, Christine Elverson created what she called her “transgender
+pronouns” by dropping the ”th” from the pronouns “they”, “them”, and “their”.
+Michael Spivak, who is often attributed with the invention of the set of
+pronouns, used his versions of in the manual `The Joy of TeX`_ (1983), though
+said in 2006 that he did not invent them himself. [2]_
+
+Personally I prefer the Elverson pronoun set since a simple “E” isn’t easily
+distinguishable from “he” audibly in some contexts.
+
+The previous incarnations haven't been complete though, and have left the
+possessive pronoun and reflexive versions undefined, so HalosGhost_ and I have
+decided to use what we call the Mercurian set, using the same system as
+Elverson did and dropping the “th” from the third-person plural pronouns, but
+properly defining all possibilities.
+
+The rule for making the Mercurian pronouns is just to drop the “th” from the
+plural pronouns, which makes it easily generalizable to any plural third-person
+constructs.
+
+Following is a non-exhaustive table of some of the pronoun sets: [3]_
+
+.. table::
+ :class: pronoun-table
+
+ ========= ==== ==== ========== ====== ========
+ Type Nom. Obj. Poss. Adj. Poss. Refl.
+ ========= ==== ==== ========== ====== ========
+ Masculine he him his his himself
+ Feminine she her her hers herself
+ Plural they them their theirs themself
+ Rogers e em es
+ Elverson ey em eir
+ Spivak E Em Eir
+ Mercurian ey em eir eirs emself
+ ========= ==== ==== ========== ====== ========
+
+.. [1] The different sets of gender-neutral third-person singular pronouns
+ commonly called the “Spivak pronouns” were in fact invented independently
+ by multiple people, Spivak being one of the later ones to use them, so
+ calling them the “Spivak pronouns” is a misnomer
+
+.. [2] In 2006 Spivak admitted that he had originally read about the pronouns in
+ a newspaper, but had later forgotten who it was credited to, so could not
+ give proper credits in his manual.
+
+.. [3] The table headings are abbreviated from the following: Nominative,
+ Objective, Possessive Adjective, Possessive, and Reflexive,
+ respectively.
+
+.. _`The Joy of TeX`: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=523252
+.. _HalosGhost: https://halosgho.st/