1 Disclaimer

These ideas originate from previous conversations I have participated in. And so, I do not claim to be the origin, inventor, etc. But since I have not heard much on furthering this topic, I feel like it needs to exist somewhere.

Some credit goes to the "Human Rayla" bit from the Dragon Prince for the snowman/snowelf idea. And to Star Trek for pop culture references used as normative baselines.

2 The state of pronouns

The last several years, introducing oneself such as, "Hello, my name is Alex Lee and my pronouns are they/them" has become the norm in many communities, if not a greater part of society.

To give some background, which might seem obvious for many of people, the default address or reference does not always take the most general term. Some people default to gendered pronouns, mainly "he" etc, when referring to someone they only know on paper.

Classification is important for people in my field, but not exclusive to it. That said, I have a particular interest in classification, casting, types, etc. When someone says "he went to the park" I want to assume that person has a known gender. Whatever the gender does not matter, other than it being correct.

I am not going to get into why precision and accuracy are important for scientists/engineers. But for computation, we usually refer to bad data as garbage, and this analogy is not hyperbole.

In addition to classification, there is also state. I will explain the projection of pronouns via a table in the next section.

Also, I don't plan on going over pejorative or non-anthropomorphic "it". Maybe I'll discuss that another time.

3 What can improve

When someone introduces themselves, including their pronouns, the above mentioned introduction only supplies the third-person pronouns (and also sometimes determiners). We miss the opportunity to introduce ourselves with a first-person pronoun. If we had such pronouns, Alex could introduce themselves simply as "Hello, my name is Alex Lee". If English had a full set of gendered pronouns, then the first-person pronoun would imply the third-person.

I don't have good naming, so letting that go, this demonstrates how this could work. Please note, this is not an exhaustive table and that I've used "general" for a catch-all case for non-introduced people or for people who do not wish to use gendered language, even if they perhaps identify with a specific gender.

So if someone who identifies as a man says, "Hello myhe name is Biff" we can avoid the lengthy introduction of Biff saying "he/him". We only need to do so if someone accepts multiple pronouns, such as if Biff felt comforible with both he and they.

This table does not account for plural third person pronouns. Icelandic, for example, has multiple gendered cognates for English they (in fact, most etymology shows English borrowed they from Old Norse). Please note that the neuter for þau does not have the same kinds of negative connotations that the singular English "it" has, unless when the speaker means it to be pejorative. And please note, this could change and maybe it already has; the pandemic has certainly had a strain on my friendships.

These holes in the data aside, there is another aspect to the pronouns/determiners that does not come up very often, at least in the United States: titles. Some titles refer to class status, age, achievement, marital status, but the two most common Mr and Ms only necessarily refer to gender. We can assume people do not become confused with Mr Data, the android who wants to become human. Data is not human, but it makes perfect sense, so the title relates to gender not the biological species or sex. Refer to also Pinocchio.

Will people be confused? "Hello, my name is Dr Alex Lee". No, they will not be confused. What about everyone else? Japanese has a suffix general title "-san". English could borrow that, and reorder it to keep convention: "Hello my name is San Alex Lee".

We could use titles intead of filling in the holes in the pronouns/determiners. It would require fewer changes, and we already have done this before in English, somewhat recently with the migration from general use of Miss/Mrs to Ms.

These are just proof of concept.

4 Additional thoughts

I also suspect some good in reducing the use of the word "man" when referring to male gendered people and certainly for people in general, regardless of gender. I think I have mentioned this before. I think we probably won't witness "man" go away any time soon, nor "woman" or "human". But if we wanted to start using an alterative to "man" I think we could just construct a new word using a male-type prefix. So we could use "karlman". No one is going to argue that that word doesn't sound manly to represent the gender.

On the other side of that, Icelandic should probably stop using the word "snjókarl" for snowman. Snowhuman works, but not necessarily for Mr Data or Mr Spock. I like snowfolk.