well artificial or not they are still important. it could be argued that our connection with reality itself is a social construct, at least insofar as we think in language and comprehend the world through language.
pronouns aren’t just jewels bedazzling our language. They’re a fundamental grammatical part of it. the language through which we understand the world only holds up with some basic underlying structures. so how we choose what words to use to stand in for something really shapes how we understand that thing.
It’s even more complicated by the fact that English pronouns have historically tended to be a closed class of words. the language has never readily coined or adopted new pronouns in the way we adopt new nouns and verbs (i.e., “google it”). that’s not to say it’s impossible for pronouns to become open-class and for neo-pronouns to work, but it’s fighting a battle against not just modern biases but also centuries (millenia?) of fundamental structure.
well artificial or not they are still important. it could be argued that our connection with reality itself is a social construct, at least insofar as we think in language and comprehend the world through language.
pronouns aren’t just jewels bedazzling our language. They’re a fundamental grammatical part of it. the language through which we understand the world only holds up with some basic underlying structures. so how we choose what words to use to stand in for something really shapes how we understand that thing.
It’s even more complicated by the fact that English pronouns have historically tended to be a closed class of words. the language has never readily coined or adopted new pronouns in the way we adopt new nouns and verbs (i.e., “google it”). that’s not to say it’s impossible for pronouns to become open-class and for neo-pronouns to work, but it’s fighting a battle against not just modern biases but also centuries (millenia?) of fundamental structure.