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Commentary and notes on folk languages

Posted on 2020-06-13

My personal rules

Work in progress.

I will strive to follow these rules from now on:

No gender specific pronouns/determiners : Use Spivak lowercase, except capitalize the nominative, because it has explict declension and seems the most dyslexic-friendly.

No god pronouns : They have no place.

Use ye for plural you : Important (ye and yers, with determiner yer).

No state of being : Use e-prime.

Do not use "as" for "because" : Just say because, or write the sentence in causal order.

Potential rules

A note on pronouns

English uses pronouns and determiners (referred to below as simply pronouns) as gender identifiers, addresses, and pointers. In general, languages do not always do this, and not all languages allow for using pronouns. For example, using a second person pronoun in Japanese can mean intimacy or informal speech and thus cause offense. English also has cases when using pronouns can cause offense when mis-gendering or neutering someone.

Without ditching pronouns completely, I suggest reducing the use of pronouns to pointers only. And then if someone requests a particular address for themselves, whether it includes gender or not, use that instead.

Words marked for obsolescence

man

This word and its cognates in other languages just means human, but isms such as sexism and classism have warped its meaning. I have the opinion that the word should no longer have any place in contemporary language, except perhaps as an exclamation or expression such as "Ah man! I almost had that!"

This one will take some time, so I don't expect to get it correct while writing it this first time. Take these obvious examples:

master

This word causes offense because it has association with slavery, often even the metaphor explicitly uses both words in practice. Thus, one should only use this word when referring to slavery.