.. frontmatter
   title: Mercurian pronouns
   date: 2015-03-11
   author: Johannes Löthberg
   author_link: /~kyrias/about.html

.. role:: sc

:sc:`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/