They. They is a singular pronoun that is neutral, already in the langauge, and works with grammer the same way You does, both as a singular and a plural.
That's certainly one decent option. I have a mild twitch with it (too many years of mentally interpreting it as plural makes the gears grind a bit when I try to use it as singular), but they / them / theirs / their is probably the most real-English option. Do other folks prefer this?
GameTeX, which has been using macros for gender-neutral LARP writing for years (and presumably Template before that), uses they/them/their/theirs. This has the advantage of people being able to remember them, and the disadvantage of requiring confusing verb forms. For example, you'd need to write "\They{} wants more money." because that will evaluate to something like "She wants more money." but it's easy to accidentally write "\They{} want more money." because that's what'd be grammatical without the macro substitution
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GameTeX, which has been using macros for gender-neutral LARP writing for years (and presumably Template before that), uses they/them/their/theirs.
Useful to know -- I was wondering. This line of thought originally started the last time we had a "tools for writing LARPs" panel (a couple of years ago), and one of the things folks particularly liked about GameTeX was its support for gender substitution. Thanks!
I expect you'll eventually want to add various not-really-pronoun things as well, so people can replace words like "wife" and "sister" and "aunt" and so on with appropriate macros.
Yep, but I'm not sure yet how much I'm going to bother with in the base App -- you can always do this ad-hoc by saying, eg, [[gendered(""aunt"", ""uncle"")]]. (That's the general mechanism I was referring to.) So while we'll likely add *some* of those for convenience, I'll probably stop worrying about it when we get to diminishing returns...
(Ey might work, though; it follows the 'they/them/their/theirs' pattern, is concise, and notably different.)
Intriguing. At a gut level I like it, but I suspect it would introduce new and special problems relating to "a" vs. "an" (since Ey starts with a vowel, and is mainly being substituted with values that start with consonants)...
My personal favorite is ta, which is Chinese for he/she/it (Gendered pronouns were imposed on China in 1917, but only in the written language). But this is Querki. Can't you make it user-definable?
Oh, certainly so. This is just a question of what I include out-of-the-box in the LARP App. My rule of thumb is that stuff should be flexible, but most people will just go with the default, so it's worth trying to get the default right...
"They" certainly seems very popular these days. I only bobble at it when I don't have the context about whether the speaker is talking about one or more than one person. (Example: "I waited for them at the hospital" was one of my FB friends' recent status updates and I was somewhat worried about whether the poster's whole family was hit by a car or something - turns out it was one person, no major illnesses or injuries involved)
This one is also my favorite, and the one that I seem to find the most gender-fluid people using themselves - which is, of course, the best place to start with this question.
The runner up in that population also seems to be "they" and its dependents.
the one that I seem to find the most gender-fluid people using themselves - which is, of course, the best place to start with this question.
Useful to know, and I concur. (I've also asked the question over on the Intercon FB page, which has a fair gender-fluid community.) I'm amused at the sheer variety of z-based variants out there -- Wikipedia lists four, and this is slightly different from all of them -- but I'm happy to go with whatever seems to be most popular.
The runner up in that population also seems to be "they" and its dependents.
Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of support for that. There are grammatical problems there (due to what it's being used for here, you have to remember to write all of the matching grammar in the singular, which is a bit tricky with "they"), but I don't object to trying it. At the moment, given the discussion so far, I'm leaning towards including "they" plus one of the neologisms as built-in alternatives. If ze/zim/zir/zirs is popular, I'm happy to go with that. (I find it pretty intuitive, personally.)
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Useful to know -- I was wondering. This line of thought originally started the last time we had a "tools for writing LARPs" panel (a couple of years ago), and one of the things folks particularly liked about GameTeX was its support for gender substitution. Thanks!
I expect you'll eventually want to add various not-really-pronoun things as well, so people can replace words like "wife" and "sister" and "aunt" and so on with appropriate macros.
Yep, but I'm not sure yet how much I'm going to bother with in the base App -- you can always do this ad-hoc by saying, eg, [[gendered(""aunt"", ""uncle"")]]. (That's the general mechanism I was referring to.) So while we'll likely add *some* of those for convenience, I'll probably stop worrying about it when we get to diminishing returns...
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Intriguing. At a gut level I like it, but I suspect it would introduce new and special problems relating to "a" vs. "an" (since Ey starts with a vowel, and is mainly being substituted with values that start with consonants)...
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Jon made up/used esh in our roleplaying game years ago for he/she. I don't remember if he came up with additional an additional form for hers.
Interesting topic. Also, I didn't realize that's what you intended querki for!
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The runner up in that population also seems to be "they" and its dependents.
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Useful to know, and I concur. (I've also asked the question over on the Intercon FB page, which has a fair gender-fluid community.) I'm amused at the sheer variety of z-based variants out there -- Wikipedia lists four, and this is slightly different from all of them -- but I'm happy to go with whatever seems to be most popular.
The runner up in that population also seems to be "they" and its dependents.
Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of support for that. There are grammatical problems there (due to what it's being used for here, you have to remember to write all of the matching grammar in the singular, which is a bit tricky with "they"), but I don't object to trying it. At the moment, given the discussion so far, I'm leaning towards including "they" plus one of the neologisms as built-in alternatives. If ze/zim/zir/zirs is popular, I'm happy to go with that. (I find it pretty intuitive, personally.)
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