What's in a pronoun?
If you hover around queer communities, you're undoubtedly going to start thinking about pronouns. A lot. You'll think about what pronouns people prefer, how you refer to people as a 'default', and about historical usage of the modern they/them.
There's been a lot of kerfuffle about singular they, especially: many people express that it's a modern convention, but hardly so! Singular they emerged in the 1300s, about a century after plural they triumphed over Old English's only third person pronoun, he.
While singular they is still not considered "proper" English, it has retained usage over the centuries, particulary by those who don't find epicene he, or combinations like his or her, to be satisfactory.
In 1884, the subject's popularity grew when several proposals were published in literary journals, and with the rise of science fiction, some authors devised their own, feeling that existing terminology was lacking for fictional social roles that were not strictly male or female. The need for epicene pronouns has grown again with the modern progressive communities, not just as a resurgance of old proposals, but with many new ones.
In some ways, pronouns have become not just a way of referring to other people, but of expressing ourselves in an online world where very little belongs to us, including our own words.
About this table
This page is a love letter to pronouns. I want this table to be a showcase— not a hoard of Words To Use, but a collection of proposals that showcase what others feel is lacking from the English language.
This table also, as of right now, includes some of my own proposals and adaptations from extant and extinct pronouns. This may change in the future as this table expands, in order to separate my own machinations from others' work.
One final note: This page is best viewed from desktop! I haven't yet figured out how best to adapt it to small screens and mobile devices, sorry. If you're better at HTML tables than me, shoot me an email or message me on social media!
| Intent | Subject | Object | Dependent Possessive |
Independent Possessive |
Reflexive | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Second-person plural | y'all /jɑl/ | y'all's /jɑlz/ | y'allselves /jɑlˈsɛlvz/ | Contraction of you all. It originated in southern U.S. dialects, but also spread to the wider queer community through Black queer influence. I thought that spread made it interesting enough to list here. | ||
| Animate singular | ki /kɪ/ | kin /kɪn/ | kins /kɪnz/ | kinself /kɪnˈsɛlf/ | Created by Robin Wall Kimmerer to counteract the objectification of the natural world by recognizing living beings as distinct from inanimate objects. The pronoun set was adjusted by Kara Huntermoon to make it more consistent with existing English grammar rules. | |
| Humanist singular | hu /hju/ | hum /hjum/
hume /hjum/ |
hus /hjuz/ | huself /hjuˈsɛlf/ | Originally used by Bandanna Books author Sasha Newborn in 1982 in several humanities textbooks. The alternative hume form was noted by Jake Shivery in 2005. | |
| Archaic feminine singular | heo /heˈo/ | hire /hɪəɹ/ | hires /hɪəɹz/
hiren /ˈhiːɹɘn/ |
hireself /hɪəɹˈsɛlf/ | This pronoun set, coined by myself for myself, is adapted from Middle English. At this time, according to the OED, he and heo had become almost indistinguishable. The object and posessive forms are also quite similar to the Middle English equivalent of they/them. | |
| Epicene singular | ou /u/ | oum /um/ | ous /uz/ | ouself /uˈsɛlf/ | According to Dennis Baron, "ou" was recorded as a dialectal, epicene English pronoun in 1789 by William H. Marshall. This is a synthetic extension of that, made by me. | |
| Altersex singular | ae /eɪ/ | aer /ɛɹ/ | aers /ɛɹz/ | aerself /ɛɹˈsɛlf/ | Coined by David Lindsay for his novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, in order to refer to an alien species that was neither male nor female. | |
| Human singular | tha | tham | thas | thamself* | Created by scifi-workshop's author, Charles, for his unfinished novel SHURPA, as a way of distinguishing humans and sapient AIs. | |
| AI singular | thax | thamx | thasx | thamxself* | ||
* — Extrapolation from an incomplete pronoun set, based on other existing forms and traditional English pronouns.