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]

I suspect laziness would tend to trim off some of the extra markers over time. For instance "He1 insulted him2" could be trimmed to "He1 insulted him" (or "He insulted him2") without losing information if there were only two masculine nouns already in context.

Then again, -1 and -2 are rubbish suffixes, I assume you're only using them as examples anyway. and instead of suffixes you might just have several entirely different sets of masculine pronouns and deduce the binding from which set was used, end up with e.g. "He insulted lui and il hit him" supposing we invented the extra ones by borrowing from other languages.

[calamarain.livejournal.com]

There's always the gender-neutral pronouns that tend to be used in various scientific essays - shi, hir, etc.