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Appropriate pronouns for genderqueer aliens

CupofJoe

Myth Weaver
For them the most popular pronouns would be I,Me, You, Us, and Them. When in need of a word similar to He,She or it I would imagine them just saying One.

I would guess that there would be two version of You too, along the lines of the French language, with a personal/close "tu" and general/distant "vous".

I can also see that given personal names would be highly important and the default way of addressing others. You wouldn't refer to someone by pronoun but by their name. and that would make me think that if you couldn't there would be a word meaning "the name of the person I don't know the name of..." as their equivalent of him or her.

Greg Egan used ve/vis/ver, which I liked. "Ve went to the store to get ver favorite candy." "It's vis problem, not mine."

I think that like Svrtness, this would get to me, but for maybe other reasons. I see ve/vis/ver as lightly disguised he/his/her. That might not be what Greg Egan wanted but I think there is still an implied gender.
 

Steerpike

Felis amatus
Moderator
I don't think the pronouns come across as implying gender in the book, since each of them is used to refer to the same individual. Reading in an implied gender would be self-contradictory. This pronoun set was actually created as a genderless pronoun set back in the 1980s by Keri Hulme.
 

CupofJoe

Myth Weaver
Upon reflection I would say that there is an implied gender, its just that its not male or female. For me it comes across as "other".
The more I have thought about this the more I think that any society that was truly without gender would use personal pronouns such as I, One, Me, Mine You, Yours, Tu, Vous, Us, They, and Them and probably many more besides. They would create differences and definitions that are not apparent to those of us that live in a world dominated by the idea of 2 genders [sort of like there are supposed to be 65 words for snow in the Inuit languages].
 
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Gryphos

Auror
One thing to consider is from what perspective the aliens are being viewed from. For example, to humans a truly genderless species is such a strange concept that a person viewing a group of the aliens would look for subtle ways in which one could be more male or female than another. Perhaps one's voice sounds a little bit more feminine than another, so that human would always think of that one as a 'her' and the other as a 'he'.
 

Queshire

Auror
The more I have thought about this the more I think that any society that was truly without gender would use personal pronouns such as I, One, Me, Mine You, Yours, Tu, Vous, Us, They, and Them and probably many more besides. They would create differences and definitions that are not apparent to those of us that live in a world dominated by the idea of 2 genders [sort of like there are supposed to be 65 words for snow in the Inuit languages].


Just from the information given, I don't see this happening. I think the 65 words for snow is supposed to be just a myth, but as someone living in Minnesota, I do know that there's a big difference between freshly fallen snow and the type of snow that's been pounded down by a car driving over it. Trust me, such a difference is important when you're th guy forced to shovel it. =_= The point is having a bunch of different words for snow would come about by snow, and the different types of snow, comes about when snow is important to your culture. If you only have one sex then there's not even the need for His and Her pronouns. They still can have a bunch of different pronouns, but it would be the result of other parts of their culture instead of just their sex.

If I remember correctly, in Japanese they rarely use he / she / his / her / etc in day to day conversation which is why you can have characters like Crona from the manga Soul Eater whose gender is left ambiguous.
 

CupofJoe

Myth Weaver
And the Navajo [if I remember correctly] have a different word for an Uncle on the Father's and on the Mother's as these two people have different responsibilities to the child. These are the differences I talking about. To many cultures one word will suffice, to others there will be a need for many.
When it makes a difference, then there will be a difference. If it doesn't then it won't. As writers we are free to choose.
D&L Eddings had their wolf characters refer to themselves as "One" and not by a given name and all the horses thought of themselves as "We" because they were part of a herd... again if I remember correctly.
 
It is from his book Diaspora​, which is quite worth the read if you want to try something different :)

High five. Diaspora is, to date, my favorite novel of all time (insofar as you can have just one favorite novel... in reality it's a constantly warping vortex of three or four books).

CupOfJoe said:
I see ve/vis/ver as lightly disguised he/his/her.

Actually, it's equivalent to he/his/his or she/hers/her. "vis" (from "his" or "hers") is the possessive pronoun ("That book is vis."), and "ver" (from "his" or "her") is the possessive signifier ("That is ver book.")

In Diaspora, the referenced entities (including most of the characters) are actually AIs, most of which were born from pure code, so they don't have any gender characteristics at all. So they all refer to each other with ve, ver, vis, etc.
 
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