[WorldMaker]

It seems like we can invent better checksums and referents than grammatical gender. Arguably that's a fascinating part of the pronoun discussions in English, being one of the last remaining bastions of grammatical gender in English (that and familial relationship words). I don't expect us to invent better things at all quickly, but it seems worth trying and it is interesting seeing various experiments.

One of the things I liked in studying lojban (a conlang of interesting background) was the use of mathematical identifiers as pronouns and "math genders" more related to linguistic role, referents like "the first noun", "the third verb" as pronouns. Referring to things by number is particularly great either, but it was interesting seeing a different approach to it.

Similarly, I think the language with the best pronouns I've experienced is ASL (American Sign Language). Signed languages have the ability to use three dimensional space in ways to anchor references that are impractical in spoken languages but so useful in signed languages.