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.. 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/
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