Like okay singular "they" is nice to have, and neopronouns are cool and sexy, but you know what would really permanently dunk on the codification of gender roles in the English language?

Making pronouns, or at least third person singular pronouns, an open class.

What is an open class? It's a word class where new words are added all the time, and people just roll with it. Like nouns and verbs in English. You'd think pronouns can't be an open class, but guess again, because they're an open class in a whole bunch of languages like Japanese, Malay, and… well a lot of other ones, but my brain can’t really get past those two examples. (At the same time, in Japanese, verbs are a closed class. They make do with just 600-odd verbs. If they want to invent a new action, they just say "to do X", where X is some noun. Languages where verbs are a closed class are pretty interesting in general; the best one is Kalam, where they only have like 20 frequently-used verbs, and chain them to get more nuanced meanings. Anyway.) If we turn pronouns into an open class, the amount of pronouns in English will at least triple, and some of the new pronouns that pop up will have to be good for enbies. If not, it'll at least give us an avenue to force neopronouns on everyone.

How do we make pronouns into an open class? Well, first of all, it helps to have them be syntactically indistinguishable from some other word class where you can get new pronouns from. In Japanese, there's no way to tell the difference between nouns and pronouns, except that pronouns can experience binding. This means that all pronouns in Japanese are actually transmasculine. Most Japanese pronouns were nouns or noun phrases at some point, which eventually got reanalyzed as pronouns.

In English, 3rd person singular pronouns are already almost syntactically indistinguishable from nouns. The only barrier is that nouns usually have to be preceded by "a" or "the", while pronouns can never. This difference must be eliminated. The easiest way is to just eliminate "a" and "the" (a tragic but worthy sacrifice for our goals), but there's an even more interesting thing we can do.

Consider "dude". It used to be just a noun, meaning "person":

The dude went to the store.

Then it became a term of address:

Dude, go to the store.

And then finally, in Californian Skater English (or whatever), it became a pronoun:

Aiden: Where is Cayden?

Brayden: Dude went to the store.

Fascinatingly, it actually has four different forms:

Cayden: Hey dudes, have you seen Djaden's sweet new kicks?

Aiden: Yeah dude, dude's kicks are off the chain.

Brayden: Didja hear? Dude got banned from the rink 'cause the dude's sick moves were too rad for polite company.

Aiden: Aw, bummer, dude. I barely knew the dude.

At first it looks like a subject/object/possessive distinction, but if you connect the two sentences in Brayden's line, the syntax becomes clear:

Didja hear the dude got banned from the rink 'cause the dude's sick moves were too rad for polite company?

It in fact inflects like a noun: "the dude" for the subject and object, and "the dude's" for the possessive. The "the" on either form is dropped when it's at the beginning of the sentence.

You can also use "a dude" as a substitute for "you/one":

Brayden: A dude's gotta be pretty gnarly to get banned like that.

This, in turn, opens the door to reanalysis of "a dude" as a first-person pronoun:

Cayden: The dudes at the rink harrass me about my sick moves, too. A dude just can't catch a break. But anyway, do you dudes know where a dude can get sweet kicks like that?

With "a dude" being an allowed form, this makes "dude" the pronoun syntactically indistinguishable from "dude" the noun. We just need to tie up some loose ends, like the lack of a reflexive form, and the fact that you normally don't reuse it in a sentence:

Dude made himself a sandwich. →

Dude made the dude's self a sandwich.

and

Dude went to his house. →

Dude went to the dude's house.

So all we need to do is reanalyze a bunch more nouns (or even noun phrases) as pronouns like this, and the process will take off on its own. The more general and nonsensical the noun phrases we reanalyze, the better, because that way, more of them are likely to end up gender-neutral. Left to their own devices, cis people would probably just reanalyze boring, gendered things like "guy", "girl", and so on. We need to immediately go bold and exciting and weird:

Aiden: Where's Cayden?

Brayden: I looked around for the brick, but couldn't find the brick. Brick probably went home.

Aiden: Aw, that's too bad. I was looking forward to having dinner with the rain. You know quesadillas are the rain's favorite.

It will be an uphill battle, but by god, if the Uisai could invert their entire gender system just to be different from other Buin speakers, we can convince 1.5 billion English speakers that they're allowed to turn arbitrary nouns into pronouns. We can do it.

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aye rehkon aye shal du theh duhtch mehthod uv jusst saunding auwt theh werd and riting thaht

aye think aye am akchuwalee stuhk tahkin layk thiss

tel mi waht yu guiyz think :)))))

lol i wunder if thiss iz hauw peepel spehld bahk wehn thay hadint mayd spelling rules

There was quite of an uproar yesterday on the French social media. You may have seen the hashtags #reformedelorthographe and/or #jesuiscirconflexe. What is happening ?

Well, this morning, the Ministry of Education announced that, from the next school year onwards, all schoolbooks shall be written according to the 1990 revision. The product of the work of the French Academy (our “custodian body” for all things touching the introduction of new words and orthography), it put forward a proposal for a simplified orthography along the following lines:

In fact, wrestling with Ottoman texts could give students a newfound appreciation for modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who transformed the Turkish language by adopting the Latin script in 1928. More seriously, if even a tiny percentage of students do manage to learn more than just enough to pass their tests or sound out inscriptions on old tombstones, they could present a major threat to Erdogan’s carefully cultivated version of a pious Ottoman past. Last year Erdogan famously lashed out at the directors of a popular soap opera for suggesting that Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent spent more time in the bedroom than on horseback. Who knows what he would he do if young students could suddenly read the wealth of homoerotic poetry composed in the Ottoman centuries.

Among the many reforms through which Ataturk distanced his new republic from its Ottoman past, the linguistic transformation was one of the most dramatic. Within three months in 1928, Turkish citizens went from writing their language in the Arabic script to the Latin script. Alongside a sweeping shift in vocabulary –  new replacements appeared for even some of the most common words, for example “school,” “north,” “south,” and even the phrase “for example,” – the alphabet change eventually rendered anything written before 1928 completely illegible to the vast majority of modern Turkish citizens. There was, admittedly, a real mismatch between Turkish sounds and Arabic letters, though by 1928 they had been successfully used to write Turkish for a millennium or so. Ottoman script included a few characters Arabic didn’t—an extra two dots to distinguish “p” from “b” for example— but Arabic’s dearth of vowels was poorly suited for the vowel-heavy Turkish. As with English, jarring inconsistencies between spelling and pronunciation mounted with time: the Turkish word for “later,” now straightforwardly written and pronounced as “sonra,” was tortuously rendered in characters akin to s-u/v-k-r-h in the Ottoman script. A modified Arabic script could have solved these problems; indeed, Ottoman reformers had already made proposals to this effect in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. But Ataturk wanted to bring the Turks closer to the West, and so he chose the Latin script and severed Turkey from its past.

In addition to the switch in alphabets, the transition from Ottoman to Modern Turkish also entailed replacing words of Arabic and Persian origin with authentically “Turkish” alternatives (as well as words from French, the modern European language par excellence at that time),. Some replacements were found in the everyday speech of rural Anatolian villagers or the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, both of which were assumed to have preserved an untainted original Turkish. Others were simply invented by a special committee, then inserted in classrooms and dictionaries where some stuck and some didn’t.  

At best, in its early stages, this effort rendered an elite written language comprehensible to the masses—the equivalent, perhaps, of replacing Latinate legalese like “sine qua non” with a plain English term like “necessary.” A decade later, though, the reforms themselves became an ideologically driven barrier to understanding, as perfectly commonplace words were replaced with new artificial-sounding creations. Imagine the government mandating that all “Exit” signs instead read “Goplace.” Eventually the effort was abandoned, while people satirized its absurdities by imagining fake new words like “oturaklı götürgeç, or “sitting-place-having bringing-thing” for “bus.”"