this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
991 points (95.9% liked)

Memes

45887 readers
1502 users here now

Rules:

  1. Be civil and nice.
  2. Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

well artificial or not they are still important. it could be argued that our connection with reality itself is a social construct, at least insofar as we think in language and comprehend the world through language.

pronouns aren't just jewels bedazzling our language. They're a fundamental grammatical part of it. the language through which we understand the world only holds up with some basic underlying structures. so how we choose what words to use to stand in for something really shapes how we understand that thing.

It's even more complicated by the fact that English pronouns have historically tended to be a closed class of words. the language has never readily coined or adopted new pronouns in the way we adopt new nouns and verbs (i.e., "google it"). that's not to say it's impossible for pronouns to become open-class and for neo-pronouns to work, but it's fighting a battle against not just modern biases but also centuries (millenia?) of fundamental structure.