• @abraxas@sh.itjust.works
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    21 year ago

    Generally speaking, it’s awkward in English (or even weird) to constantly use the Proper Noun every single time you refer to a person.

    Simplest example is “Jim got into his car”. “Jim got into Jim’s car” is strange. And that’s within a single sentence. Properly in English, we use gendered pronouns for all unambiguous references to a person several sentences in a row. For example:

    “Jim got into his car. He turned it on, and hit the gas. When he saw a red light, he stopped quickly. Jim got impatient, and honked on the horn”. That would be entirely proper, and virtually none of those pronouns should be replaced with Jim’s proper name.

    • @Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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      21 year ago

      Thank you. This explained how pronouns would be used, at first I always imagined you would be taking to “jim”, bur after reading I could see where you may be telling a story about “Jim” to others as a third party. I know that sounds dumb, but I never claimed to be smart.

      I appreciate you taking the effort to comment instead of just downvoting like some others.

      • @abraxas@sh.itjust.works
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        11 year ago

        Not a problem. People don’t usually think about pronouns. We could circumvent a lot of confusion if there were an agreeable gender-neutral pronoun in English… But people have gone back and forth about the only one we have (“they”) enough that it rubs both sides wrong. Gendering a person in a sentence rarely disambiguates… it only maters if you have a conversation with exactly 1 male and female subject and ZERO genderable objects.

        A man and a woman sitting in a boat, for example, and “her” still might be ambiguous.