More about gender-neutral pronouns

I’ve been struggling with the concept of relearning pronouns for Serenity. The newest is the pronoun “thon” which I mentioned recently. One of my frustrations is that I don’t know how to conjugate it. So here, according to the internet, is some information about the origins of the term and how to conjugate it.

“Thon is believed to be a contraction of “that one” and was coined in 1858 by Charles Crozat Converse. Merriam-Webster has an article about it here. Thon pronouns were somewhat popular in their day. They attracted the attention of linguists and also appeared in crossword puzzles.” (https://neopronounfaq.tumblr.com/post/186909373209/thonthons-guide)

Complete Set:

• Subjective: Thon
• Objective: Thon
• Possessive Adjective: Thons
• Possessive Pronoun: Thons
• Reflexive: Thonself

Examples:

• He asked me → Thon asked me
• I answered him → I answered thon
• This was his request → This was thons request
• That book is his  → That book is thons
• He loves himself → Thon loves thonself

This list came from a post by someone who uses the pronouns ey/em/eirs, so I looked those pronouns up too.

Here is that same blogger’s explanation of those pronouns:

“Background information: Ey/em and similar sets have been independently developed several times, as early as 1890 with James Rogers’s proposal of e/em/es, then ey/em/eirs in 1975 by Christine M. Elverson, and E/Em/Eirs in 1983 by mathematician Michael Spivak. This guide will focus on Elverson’s set, ey/em/eirs, with singular verbs.”

Complete Set:

• Subject: Ey
• Object: Em
• Possessive Adjective: Eir
• Possessive Pronoun: Eirs
• Reflexive: Emself

Examples:

• He is my friend → Ey is my friend
• I saw him yesterday  → I saw em yesterday
• That is his book → That is eir book
• That bag is his →  That bag is eirs
• He thinks to himself → Ey thinks to emself

Tips:

• Ey/em/eir rhymes with they/them/their
• When in doubt, it may help to conjugate the sentence you want to say with they/them in your head, then drop the ‘th’ and change the verbs to singular forms (i.e. are → is, were → was, etc.)
• Be careful with contractions – I’ve seen people use “eir” in place of “[person] is” because it sounds like “they’re.” “Eir” does not correspond to “they’re,” it corresponds to “their,” which is a possessive, not a contraction.
• Additionally, when using singular verbs, use “ey is / ey’s” not “ey are / ey’re.”

What is interesting to me is that the attempt to institute gender neutral pronouns is not new.

Merriam-Webster says, “‘Thon’, short for “that one,” appeared in our Unabridged dictionary from 1934-1961. Though the word was dropped for lack of use…”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/third-person-gender-neutral-pronoun-thon

They go on to point out that there have apparently been lots and lots of attempts to fix the lack of singular gender neutral pronouns over the past couple hundred years at least.

“In her Master’s thesis from 1991 (Solving the Great Pronoun Problem), Kelly Ann Sippell provided an extensive list of gender-neutral third-person singular pronouns that had been proposed over the previous hundred and fifty years. This list included, but was not limited to, hes, hiser, hem, ons, e, heer, he’er, hesh, se, heesh, herim, co, tey, per, na, en, herm, em, hir, and shey. Sippell estimated that there had been approximately 80 suggested ways of saying “him or her” or “his or hers” in a single word that was not they or theirs. For those who are interested in a spectacularly comprehensive list of gender-neutral pronouns which never quite caught on readers may turn to Dennis Baron’s magisterial treatment of the subject in American Speech in 1981 (“The Epicene Pronoun: The Word That Failed”), in which he documents over 100 proposed lexical items, dating in use back to the middle of the 19th century (nim, talis, iro and ver are some of his findings).”

So there we have it, more information about pronouns! I spoke to Serenity on Thursday and they explained that it’s fine if I want to continue using they/them pronouns for them. The reason they included the “thon” option was to provide an alternative for those who are uncomfortable with using “they” for a singular person. They’re not asking us to switch to “thon” if we’re comfortable with using “they.” So for now I’m going to continue to use “they/them” for their pronouns.

There is already precedent in our language to use “they” when gender is unknown, such as in this example, “Oh look, someone left their umbrella under the table. I wonder if they remember where they left it and if they’re going to come back for it themselves soon? Or maybe we should take their umbrella to the lost and found for them?”

If we can use “they” for singular gender-unknown, we can use “they” for singular gender-neutral!

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