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by rauchp 2392 days ago
>We also analyzed the solutions currently adopted by some activists, like the use of asterisks, “x,” and “u.”

If non-binary people in Italy are already using x's or u's for their pronouns, why not just use that?

3 comments

Most gendered languages have 2 or 3 grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and sometimes neuter) with gender expressed in nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs. Depending on the language it may not be practically possible to add a new gender (or 20 new genders) due to the sheer number of grammatical forms you must memorize just to handle 2 or 3 genders. These are not trivial changes. In English, learning someone's pronoun might mean learning three words. In another language, it might mean learning literally hundreds of new grammatical rules. Instead of asking 99% of people to conform to the linguistic wishes of less than 1% of people, why not just expect them to find a solution within the existing language?
It's not pronounceable and it's not even a standard. Note how they say "some" activists, it's not a settled matter even in activist circles.
X isn't pronounceable. U is, though it sounds a bit funky.
FTA:

> I’d seen examples of this on signs before, but it had always seemed to me that asterisks and such were not meant to be a solution, but rather a way to highlight the issue and start a discourse on something that’s deeply ingrained in our language. For our cyberpunk future, we wanted a solution that was more readable and pronounceable [...] Not a perfect solution, perhaps, but eminently plausible in a futuristic cyberpunk setting.