Pronouns

[beccaelizabeth]

Poll #17718 Pronouns

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 8

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Which pronouns do you recognise

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E, Em, Eir, Eirs, Emself.
3 (42.9%)

ou, ou, ous, ous, ouself.
0 (0.0%)

per, per, per, pers, perself.
2 (28.6%)

they, them, their, theirs, themself.
7 (100.0%)

ze, zim, zir, zirs, zirself.
7 (100.0%)

Which would be best to use in a fantasy story where gender at birth is 'person'

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E, Em, Eir, Eirs, Emself.
1 (12.5%)

ou, ou, ous, ous, ouself.
0 (0.0%)

per, per, per, pers, perself.
3 (37.5%)

they, them, their, theirs, themself.
4 (50.0%)

ze, zim, zir, zirs, zirself.
0 (0.0%)

I'm pretending I'll start writing again any time soon, and this one 'verse I've been thinking on just doesn't assign gender, they wait until someone declares themselves. So I've been wondering if to stick with 'they' or to make it more obvious something unusual is going on by using unusual words. Except not always recogniseable are the unusual words. So, poll.

Comments

[jesuswasbatman]

My personal opinion is that no constructed gender-neutral third person is likely to become seriously popular (partly because all the ones above, to me, look and sound downright ugly), while singular "they" HAS existed in English for centuries, and only upsets a few grammar prescriptivists.

[gehayi]

I prefer "they/them/their/theirs/themself" to constructed gender-neutral pronouns because the latter always look like typos to me. If I saw "per", I'd think it was a typo for "her." The same goes for "e" or "ou"--it looks like the person writing was trying to type "he" or "you/our" and didn't hit the keys hard enough. And things that look like errors yank me out of the narrative I'm trying to immerse myself in; I focus more on the odd spelling than I do on what the writer is saying. Then I mentally correct for what looks like a proofreading mistake that someone didn't catch, and that screws up the sentence. And the story.

If the pronoun is simply "they" for a single person, I know that the character spoken of is almost certainly non-binary. Information conveyed; I can go on with the rest of the story without any trouble.