[lez]

I like this point very much: "You can be as vague or detailed as you like when speaking lojban. For example, specifying tense (past, present or future) or number (singular or plural) is optional when they're clear from context.".

LMBTQ movement has came into my mind immediately. I think they would have more success by introducing a new, 'don't care about your sex' pronoun to the language instead of adding a third one that just complicates matters.

[themodelplumber]

> LMBTQ movement has came into my mind immediately. I think they would have more success by introducing a new, 'don't care about your sex' pronoun to the language instead of adding a third one that just complicates matters.

I thought it was more of a pro-caring thing than a pro-uncaring thing.

Those focusing too much on the latter are really quite good at bumbling into insulting behavior...

[lez]

Slippery slope fallacy here. Why should I care if my online customer is he/she/they as long as they pay the price? Or if I talk about technology through the Internet? All I want is effective communication with no insults.

[themodelplumber]

Is this meant to describe how a slippery slope forms, or call one out?

Effective communication involving other people only sometimes overlaps with this subjective-first, transactional approach, the: I care about, I talk about, or All I want is.

(It's a great view for designing a specific type of community, with business-transactional perspective + valuing of tightening subjective logic and avoiding fallacy. Well, this will always result in a specific type of tech community with some special focus on business and economic factors as combined with tech.)

And I guess if we effectively cherry-pick the premise, with straw people assuming their various positions on the stage, we can easily justify a more anonymizing, transactional view of language. "This is how I prefer to view my life, therefore the needed language looks like..."

In this view, language doesn't need all that extra stuff. Keep it direct, functional, logical, and avoid fallacies especially.

But this isn't really getting at the relating capabilities of language for example, like when there are bigger problems at hand and diverse mindsets working together to solve them.

Instead, it ends up bringing minds into silos, as broader personality theory predicts. So the I, I, me, is really more about self-support.

With this view, individuals effectively make relating all about the subjective-them 24/7, and about whether they are good/not good. They see relating with others as "we will each be our best and get what we each want" as if it's a universal creed. The one philosophy that just makes sense. Do others even exist?

And is this actively mean? No. Perhaps a better term is effectively: "passively careless," to borrow a phrase from Sabine Hossenfelder. And even in the subjective-first view it still does not make for a high-quality individual, which is also bad news.

It's unfortunate, because not only does this view raise the stakes on their end with no good reason, creating things like martyrdom issues, but it also perpetuates the avoidance of effective contact with others, effectively making "others" the persistent bête noir.

[scotty79]

In many languages you are obligated to care whether a table is a he or a she.

In English you are obligated to care whether it's a table or the table.

I'm all for languages with optional caring about stuff.

[vidarh]

They/them already exists and have centuries of use for that use-case. The people objecting to that are just as likely to object to an entirely new one.

There also are already multiple "neopronouns" [1], and they are frequently ridiculed by those taking issue with "unexpected" (to them) pronoun use). This is also not a new debate, with variants (other than singular they) being in use in limited contexts since the late 18th century. None of the attempts have met more than very limited success, as you can tell from the fact this is still a debate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopronoun

[xdennis]

> They/them already exists and have centuries of use for that use-case.

This is just gaslighting. People use "they" when they talk in the abstract. No one said sentences like "This is Tom. They is happy." until a few years ago.

[vidarh]

Apart from being grammatically wrong (it'd still be "they are"), this is entirely besides the point, which is that the people who object to (the corrected version of) this construction are just as likely to object to a neopronoun, and so there's little reason to assume a neopronoun will stop people from getting worked up over this even if you could get people to use them.

[dragonwriter]

> No one said sentences like “This is Tom. They is happy.” until a few years ago.

No one still says that, because even when semantically singular, “they” remains grammatically plural.

[int_19h]

You'd be surprised. I've met people with preferred pronouns like xe who were outright offended at the use of they/them, because "that's not my pronoun".

[vidarh]

Different category of objections, so not really relevant to the point, which was about the objection to their use in general, not about any given person.

[int_19h]

But it's not really a "universal pronoun" if you can't use it to denote any random person without offending them.

[vidarh]

That's moving the goalposts.