Thread by @sqiouyilu

all these genre stories written by native anglophones being like “what if *jazz hands* only one third-person pronoun” and my sinophone ass being like “what if *conspiracy.gif* only one third-person pronoun, so we keep mixing up all these gendered ones, because there is no gender”

I keep agonizing over what pronoun(s) my protagonist in #RazingBabel uses before I realized there was a chinese auntie in me being like “HE, SHE, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEANT, IN CHINESE IT’S ALL TA OK??”

anyway, I enjoyed seeing the ways people's brains glitched on the page after reading #InTheWatchfulCity by seeing the way people used alternate forms of the neopronouns in reviews, my linguist brain is like "ok what linguistic paradigm are they attempting to follow for this"

I also thought it was fascinating that when people don't use anima's pronouns, they consistently use she/her for anima, so I'm like *sociolinguistically steeples fingers* "what character traits are pinging ppl as feminine. this is such an incredible rorschach test"

I've done one end of *presents anglophones with completely new pronouns, observes if linguistic systems can integrate them, success, people finished reading my book and understood what was going on, pronouns as a closed class? debunked*

and now I must try *presents anglophones with existing pronouns, using them in a way that strictly maintains scope in antecedent reference but inconsistently gendering, to see if anghoplones can follow when I refer to the same character with both he & she, cuz sinophones can*

I feel like every book set in this universe is just gonna be like, some linguistic experiment 😂 and I intend this universe to be as large as discworld, someone give me a contract for 40 novellas