Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky
Status: draft
-[In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's system of singular third-person pronouns](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228). As a matter of clean language design, English's lack of a gender-neutral singular third-person personal pronoun is a design flaw: you shouldn't have to identify a subject as female or male just in order to be able to refer to her or him with a pronoun.
+[In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's system of singular third-person pronouns](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228). As a matter of clean language design, English's lack of a gender-neutral singular third-person personal pronoun is a design flaw. The function of pronouns is to have a brief way to refer back to entities already mentioned: it's more user-friendly to be able to say "Katherine put her book on its shelf" rather than "Katherine put Katherine's book on the book's shelf". But then why couple that grammatical function to sex-category membership? You shouldn't _need_ to take a stance on someone's reproductive capabilities in order to talk about her or him putting a book on the shelf.
This affects, for example, science-fiction authors writing about AIs or hermaphroditic aliens (which don't have a sex), or mystery authors writing about a crime suspect whose identity (and therefore, sex) is unknown.
-It would be wrong to suggest
-
+_she_ or _he_
+------
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228
Considerations—
* Scifi and mystery authors
* pronouns in English are less bad than Hebrew nouns
Aella https://knowingless.com/2019/06/06/side-effects-of-preferred-pronouns/
+
+If you wanted more pronoun-classes to reduce the probability of collisions (where universal [Spivak _ey_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun) or singular _they_ would result in more frequent need to repeat names where a pronoun would be ambiguous), you could devise some other system that doesn't bake sex into the language, like using initials to form pronouns (<em>K</em>atherine put <em>k</em>er book on its shelf?), or an oral or written analogue of [spatial referencing in American Sign Language](https://www.handspeak.com/learn/index.php?id=27) (where a signer associates a name or description with a direction in space, and points in that direction for subsequent references).
+
+(One might speculate that "more classes to reduce collisions" _is_ part of the historical explanation for grammatical gender, in conjunction with the fact that sex is binary and easy to observe. No other salient objective feature quite does the same job: age is continuous rather than categorical; race is also largely continuous [(clinal)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cline_(biology)) and historically didn't typically vary within a tribal/community context.)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff