Species

By default, clowns recognize four main living species: clowns, "humans", animals, and "gods". They DO have compound headwords for half-breeds; the symbols are just overlaid on top of each other (the "clown" symbol is always largest, and the others are laid over it. this reflects their belief that clownhood overshadows everything else). Also, once they've established the target, they'll often stop specifying that the person is half-anything. They'll fall back on just calling them "clown" (again, clownhood beats anything else; continuing to specify that someone is only half-clown is actually rather rude, because it's alienating).

Besides living species, they also have pronouns for places, objects, events, and abstract concepts.

(NOTE: The clown concept of "human" is different from ours. "Human" refers to anything non-clown with above-animal intelligence. The tothe’s word for a similar concept is "crate".)

Amount and Location

"Amount" includes 1, 2, 3, 4, "many", and "many many". There are also special indicators for "zero" and "negative", but they're not exactly part of the pronouns so they’re unimportant here. Location is relative to the speaker (see the headspace diagram).

Color

Color is very important to clown society. They use it for distinction in hierarchy, to express identity, and as allusions to events or values. (NOTE: the colors used in pronouns are different from the colors used in verb tense). For pronoun colors, they just pick a color, or mishmash of colors, representative of the target.

EXAMPLES:

-A jester with a motley of green and red would have a pronoun using green and red. (See example clown: Gogo)

-A mime with pink hair (example clown: Captain). Younger clowns latch onto the pink hair as something unique, and they'll use a pink pronoun for her. But older clowns might use a black-and-white pronoun, because they're more concerned with acknowledging her status as a mime.

The same goes for pronouns involving objects. They pick whichever color they think is representative. Some culturally-held colors always trump actual colors; for example, all plants are referred to as green, regardless of whether the plant is actually green.