{"id":123,"date":"2018-02-19T19:31:30","date_gmt":"2018-02-20T00:31:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kayeboesme.com\/pangrammatike\/?p=123"},"modified":"2022-05-20T19:59:40","modified_gmt":"2022-05-20T23:59:40","slug":"how-i-use-pronoun-systems-to-reflect-conlangs-and-concultures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kayeboesme.com\/pangrammatike\/2018\/02\/19\/how-i-use-pronoun-systems-to-reflect-conlangs-and-concultures\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Use Pronoun Systems to Reflect Conlangs and Concultures"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was in my mid\/late twenties, I transitioned from writing stories that used\u00a0he<\/em> and\u00a0she<\/em> to writing stories where I referred to everyone with\u00a0le<\/em>. It was extreme, and I was told that it was difficult, but it was the best way \u2014 or so I thought at the time \u2014 to drop readers into the actual experience of navigating these cultures. In many of my constructed world’s cultures, gender is conveyed through name endings, behavior, and other contextual clues.<\/p>\n

There is one story that I wrote where this actually matters:\u00a0Epiphany<\/em>, which became the podcast novel that I did in the mid-2010s. The entire story hinges on the ambiguity of the third person singular pronoun that someone uses \u2014 both the formal and informal (yup, there is a distinction!) Tveshi pronouns inflect on number, not gender. Other than that, I wrote using gender-neutral third-person\u00a0le<\/em> (singular) and\u00a0they<\/em> (plural) whenever the conlang wasn’t divided into\u00a0he<\/em> and\u00a0she<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Apart from that, after a few years, I started to soften away from that hardline literalist interpretation of conlangs and an aggressive desire to get people intimately acquainted with other ways to do grammar. (I mean, I get really excited reading linguistics papers about how pronoun changes are used to construct insults in languages spoken halfway around the world, but I am not most people.) Many English-speakers don’t even know about the variety of ways other languages do noun classes and make gender grammatical. And most Tveshi names have endings that do signal something like\u00a0he, she, <\/em>or le<\/em>! The more I thought about it, the more artificial my approach seemed. I couldn’t one-to-one convey other aspects of the conlangs without careful attention, such as the formality distinctions. Those have always come out in character behavior. I recalled having a post here (the seed of this post; the other one is now gone) in which I discussed how I use conlangs to talk about gender, and it was due for an update to reflect the state of things now.<\/p>\n

The system I use now is based on thoughtfully weighing the pros and cons of my approaches. It wasn’t until the late 10s that I wrote a story \u2014\u00a0A Matter of Oracles<\/em> \u2014 that used\u00a0he\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0she<\/em>. The third-person singular pronoun I tend to use in my work,\u00a0le<\/em>, was also present. The social organization system used in my work is very different from ours \u2014 usually with very rigid gender roles, but more categorical boxes depending on the specific culture.\u00a0A Matter of Oracles<\/em> was set on a planet where the privilege language is Classical Atarahi, and it was confronting the newfound readability and smoothness of the prose that made me think,\u00a0hey, this is actually what I should be doing elsewhere<\/em>. So I went back and started to apply that.<\/p>\n

Classical Atarahi is a S\u0101qab language that dates to a few thousand years after the human colonization of the planet Atara. It’s the international standard language on that planet, coexisting alongside many languages that evolved from creoles or the passage of time. Speakers learn it alongside their native languages. Upper classes typically take names in Classical Atarahi; middle and lower classes typically have names in their native languages.<\/p>\n

To take a bird’s eye view, S\u0101qab cultures have restricted gender-inflected pronouns that correspond to\u00a0he<\/em> and\u00a0she<\/em>. They’re restricted because they cannot be used for anyone who has not completed a gender initiation ritual, which is done in someone’s late teens after reaching the age of majority, and they’re bestowed on men and women. Men and women commit to upholding certain religious and civic activities that are seen as central to manhood and womanhood, and about 80% of the population actually seeks to train for them, with a few percent more dropping out for some reason or other. (It’s a matrilocal culture that practices visiting marriages, and marriages are not tied to gender initiation at all; families expect all female S\u0101qab to find someone to sire children while in their fertile years.) Gender initiation practices mean that S\u0101qab rarely ever use gender-inflected pronouns for cultural outsiders, barring diplomats. These pronouns are, after all, honorifics.<\/p>\n

This leads to a host of misunderstandings by outsiders, such as the idea that he<\/em> and\u00a0she\u00a0<\/em>are desirable status markers. The S\u0101qab peoples ran the last interplanetary empire before its collapse, so S\u0101qab cultures exist on four planets: Ameisa, Atara, Mntaka, and Qamaq. (Although, to be honest, Mntaka has significant Leissi and H\u01eb\u0301 Ti\u00e1 influence, too, and there are a few diaspora communities on other worlds.) On Ameisa, the Great Peninsular S\u0101qab countries confer higher status on women due to some significant cultural shifts, so many Tveshi, Iturji, and Narahji speakers mistakenly identify she<\/em>\u00a0as a formal pronoun. Karatau Meiyenesi, a character who appears in many of my stories, asks to be referred to using the Malzm\u0101 language’s\u00a0she<\/em> in formal settings and\u00a0le<\/em> in less formal settings to emphasize that jomela (similar, but definitely<\/em> not<\/em> identical, to roles like fa’afafine or hijra) in Tveshi culture do<\/em> receive initiation into their gender and are\u00a0not<\/em> ssel\u0113. Le knows Malzm\u0101 well and is completely aware that le’s adapting usage to assert the importance of ler cultural background and initiatory connection to the Goddess Likhera, to whom all jomela are dedicated as children.<\/p>\n

In S\u0101qab cultures, those without initiation, including children, use a pronoun set I am translating as\u00a0le<\/em>. Men and women learn distinct writing systems; ssel\u0113 (the culture’s opt-outs) can learn all systems, and they can move between men and women’s segregated spaces in households and society freely. Gender initiates lose the ability to move freely. In cultures ranging from Tveshi to Narahji and beyond, initiation is what changes someone’s status from boy\/man<\/em> or girl\/woman<\/em> to something else (jomela, kaju, ozkyev, yadzakma, &c.), and it’s the presence of that initiation that makes me use le<\/em> for those roles instead of he<\/em> or she<\/em> to represent their different status. The fact that ssel\u0113 are the opposite \u2014 again, the ones opting out of initiation \u2014 is very unique. In some S\u0101qab countries like Midway Island, only ssel\u0113 are eligible for Chancellor, the chief of the executive branch of government. In other countries like Demza, Chancellorship is open to anyone, but ssel\u0113 typically occupy the office.<\/p>\n

So what happens when you’re talking about someone who grows up in a story set in a S\u0101qab culture? In most cases, adults will use le<\/em> when describing someone’s childhood, with a marker in the introductory sentence that means le who eventually took she<\/em> (or the opposite). It doesn’t translate easily into English. The words\u00a0girl<\/em> and\u00a0boy<\/em> are typically not used until a child’s mid-teens, and they indicate someone who is a candidate for womanhood or manhood \u2014 le’s going to preparatory classes for gender initiation and can’t use a gendered honorific pronoun yet.<\/p>\n

Here’s an example:\u00a0\u012a\u00f0\u012b m\u0101qomu us m\u012bki h\u0113ram\u014dkotg\u0113zi gotomis. Tiso\u00f0w\u014d ram\u014dkotg\u0113zi.<\/strong>\u00a0At five, le herself loved rain. Le danced in it.<\/em>\u00a0The\u00a0-g\u0113zi<\/strong> on the verb indicates gender-neutral third person singular.\u00a0Gotomis<\/strong> is the standalone pronoun for a woman, which translates to both\u00a0she<\/em> and\u00a0herself<\/em>. Subsequent sentences use\u00a0-g\u0113zi<\/strong> without the additional pronoun. There’s also a special standalone pronoun for children, t\u012bta<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

One of my favorite things to do while writing a story is to figure out how to best convey culture\/language through my own\u00a0<\/em>language choices. When I need a gender-neutral pronoun (GNP), I almost always use\u00a0le<\/em> \u2014 at least in fiction writing. Singular inflection is important to me, but the initial consonant of\u00a0le<\/em> is also very clear even for speakers coming from non-l\/r distinction languages. None of the characters in stories set in the Seven Papers<\/em> speaks English, so I can focus on what I want out of GNP \u2014 a pronoun that reflects the social mores of the work’s reference language.\u00a0Pronouns are grammatical shorthands for specific persons, and once someone is used to le <\/em>for certain characters in a story, it should fade into the background like any other element of sentence construction. Only using it where required gives readers additional touchstones to use as they work through understanding the\u00a0a priori<\/em> cultures in my setting. This is the happy middle path that I should have chosen from the beginning.<\/p>\n

Outside of the Seven Papers<\/em> setting, I use whichever GNP makes the most sense, and that really relies on knowing the story and its character(s). I have one story that uses ze <\/em>to refer to an alien; this is set in the close future (several centuries ahead). In both, GNP coexists with the gender-inflected pronouns he<\/em> and\u00a0she<\/em>. I’ve got an idea percolating for a story set a few more<\/em> hundred years from now where\u00a0they<\/em> is singular and\u00a0th’all<\/em> is plural, but nothing has happened with that.<\/p>\n

I hope that y’all have found this interesting as a linguistics groupie and conlanger’s perspective on making active choices about choosing pronouns to use in stories.<\/p>\n

(This was originally posted on 19 February 2018 and significantly revised on 20 May 2022 to reflect changes in practice.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was in my mid\/late twenties, I transitioned from writing stories that used\u00a0he and\u00a0she to writing stories where I referred to everyone with\u00a0le. It was extreme, and I was told that it was difficult, but it was the best way \u2014 or so I thought at the time \u2014 to drop readers into the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":false,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[11,5,4,3],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-classical-atarahi","tag-conlangs","tag-grammardevils","tag-neopronouns"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9qEhO-1Z","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":57,"url":"https:\/\/www.kayeboesme.com\/pangrammatike\/2017\/12\/01\/when-great-houses-fall\/","url_meta":{"origin":123,"position":0},"title":"When Great Houses Fall","author":"kaye","date":"1 December 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"This is (another) partial repost from Tumblr, but it's relevant to the past few\u00a0Epiphany episodes \u2014 a proverb came up there that is extremely important to how the Tveshi view class and social position. 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