First and second mentioned pronouns

[jack]

Merging "He" and "She" makes lots of sentences more ambiguous. A common idea is to instead of having 'male' and 'female' have 'first and second'. "He insulted him and he hit him" is a bit ambiguous. "He1 insulted him2 and he2 hit him1" isn't. Doesn't one of the cool artificial languages do that?

But it occurred to me -- that's exactly how geeks use "foo" and "bar". What other innovations do we have already that we didn't notice? :)

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The Leslie example sounds funny because the 'they' wants to bind to 'people' rather than 'Leslie', which makes it sounds like Leslie has a really bizarre social policy they're planning to impose when they become dictator. Apart from that... not really l-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

"Leslie wants to keep it secret if they're male or female." Better. OK, I expect I'll give up on this one sooner or later.