Conjoined Pronouns
10 years ago
I've been pondering, in a hypothetical society where conjoined people are a considerable ammout of the population, there would probably be pronouns to adress the individual separate from pronoun to address the whole.
For instance, I think it could be a mix of he/she and they, while the individual is addressed as normal:
- Did Ali'Sa come?
- Not yet, shey were coming, but Ali decided she wanted to bring sheir brother Nan'To, so shey turned around to pick hem up at heir girlfriends' house.
For instance, I think it could be a mix of he/she and they, while the individual is addressed as normal:
- Did Ali'Sa come?
- Not yet, shey were coming, but Ali decided she wanted to bring sheir brother Nan'To, so shey turned around to pick hem up at heir girlfriends' house.
Say you have Bob and Ben. "He" can refer to either of them, "They" can refer to both. Now let's change it up, it's Bob and Jen. "He" can refer to Bob, "She" to Jen, "They" to both. Unless you feel there is a linguistic need to come up with a word for the combined Bob-and-Jen entity, it's enough as-is.
As for that linguistic need, it strikes me as needless nit-picking. I get that, if you're trying to depict a society wherein conjoinment has been a major part of its existence, I understand why, in that society's language, there would be a word for the conjoined pair. But any story you tell about that society is told in the narrator's language, not the society's language. It's fine when you have a word for which there is no ready translation, (see e.g. "grok," Stranger in a Strange Land) but when we already have genderless plural pronouns, it just seems unnecessary.