It would be really nice to have the origins and originators of all these pronouns:
Native English Gender-Neutral Pronouns. According to Dennis Baronās Grammar and Gender: In 1789, William H. Marshall records the existence of a dialectal English epicene pronoun, singular ou : "'Ou will' expresses eitherĀ heĀ will,Ā sheĀ will, orĀ itĀ will." Marshall traces ou to Middle English epicene a, used by the fourteenth-century English writer John of Trevisa, and both the OED and Wright's English Dialect Dictionary confirm the use of a forĀ he, she, it, they,Ā and evenĀ I. The dialectal epicene pronoun a is a reduced form of the Old and Middle English masculine and feminine pronounsĀ heĀ andĀ heo. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the masculine and feminine pronouns had developed to a point where, according to the OED, they were "almost or wholly indistinguishable in pronunciation." The modern feminine pronounĀ she, which first appears in the mid twelfth century, seems to have been drafted at least partly to reduce the increasing ambiguity of the pronoun system....
He goes on to describe how relics of these sex-neutral terms survive in some British dialects of Modern English, and sometimes a pronoun of one gender might be applied to a person or animal of the opposite gender. (Source)
In 1770, Robert Baker suggested use of āone, onesā instead of āone, hisā, since there was no equivalent āone, hersā. Others shared this sentiment in 1868, 1884, 1979, and even now. Others throughout this period disagreed, finding it too pedantic. (Same Source)
āe,ā with āemā for the object and āesā for the possessive (1841)
Ne/Nim/Nis/Nis/Nimself (1850)
GLOSSARY ne, nis, nim; hiser ca. 1850 NY Commercial Advertiser 7 Aug 1884 (Source: search term "pronoun Ne Nim 1850", search result "https://www.jstor.org/stable/455007")
Ve/Vim/Vis/Vis/Vimself (1864)
The history of oppression by pronoun is wittily investigated by the linguistics professor Dennis Baron in his book Whatās Your Pronoun?. He quotes an American newspaper correspondent who declared in 1892 that there was a word missing from the English language. āWhat is wanted is a personal pronoun, common gender; the singular of they ā¦ The person that invents a word to fill the vacancy will receive the benediction of other nations as well as this.ā In fact, many alternatives had already been invented. Baron lists 200 of them from newspapers and dictionaries on both sides of the Atlantic, ranging from āouā (suggested by the Scottish philosopher James Anderson in 1792) to āveā, āvisā and āvimā, which were proposed in 1864 by an American periodical, The Ladiesā Repository, as a unisex pronoun that would ensure āprecision, perspicuity and brevity ā¦ in this age of improvementā. (Source)
āZe,ā often assumed to be a more recently coined term, was created by āa writer identified only as J. W. L.ā in 1864, Baron writes. (Source)
Thon/Thon/Thons/Thons/Thonself (1884)
In her Masterās thesis from 1991 (Solving the Great Pronoun Problem), Kelly Ann Sippell provided an extensive list of gender-neutral third-person singular pronouns that had been proposed over the previous hundred and fifty years. This list included, but was not limited to, hes, hiser, hem, ons, e, heer, heāer, hesh, se, heesh, herim, co, tey, per, na, en, herm, em, hir, and shey. Sippell estimated that there had been approximately 80 suggested ways of saying "him or her" or "his or hers" in a single word that was not they or theirs. For those who are interested in a spectacularly comprehensive list of gender-neutral pronouns which never quite caught on readers may turn to Dennis Baronās magisterial treatment of the subject in American Speech in 1981 (āThe Epicene Pronoun: The Word That Failedā), in which he documents over 100 proposed lexical items, dating in use back to the middle of the 19th century (nim, talis, iro and ver are some of his findings).
Thon is thought to be a contracted form of "that one," and was coined in 1858 by Charles Crozat Converse.
The initial reason that thon caught on was that one or more of the editors at Funk and Wagnalls took a shine to the word, and around the turn of the 19th and 20th century it was included in their dictionary.
thon. Pronoun of the 3rd person, common gender, meaning āthat one, he she, or itā: a neoterism proposed by Charles Crozat Converse, and apparently complying with the neoteristic canons, since it supplies an antecedent blank, obeys a simple and obvious analogy, and is euphonious.
āFunk and Wagnalls, Supplement to A Standard Dictionary of the English Language, 1903
The word remained in various Funk and Wagnalls publications for much of the 20th century, and also saw inclusion in another dictionary, Merriam-Websterās Second New International Dictionary (1934), although it was defined slightly less fulsomely (āA proposed genderless pronoun of the third personā). The genderless pronoun sense of thon did not last as long in Merriam-Websterās dictionaries as it had in Funk and Wagnalls, and the entry was dropped for the third edition of our Unabridged dictionary, published in 1961.
People really wanted thon to work out; the word was used in crossword puzzles for several decades, generally as the answer to the clue of āproposed genderless pronoun.ā It was poked at and analyzed by linguists. The cartoonist Ryan North even devoted one of his marvelous Dinosaur Comics strips to the topic of thon. There is a considerable body of evidence of the word in print, for it seemed that whenever a newspaper columnist wrote an article bemoaning our languageās lack of a gender-neutral third-person pronoun, several people would write letters to remind the paper that thon had been coined back in 1858. (Source)
Francis Augustus Brewster coined e, es, and em. (Source)
Heāer/Himāer/Hisāer/Hisāer/Himāerself (1912)
In 1911, an insurance broker named Fred Pond invented the pronoun set "he'er, his'er and him'er", which the superintendent of the Chicago public-school system proposed for adoption by the school system in 1912, sparking a national debate in the US, with "heer" being added to the Funk & Wagnalls dictionary in 1913. (Source, quoted on Wikipedia)
also Funk & Wagnalls dictionary (Source, quoted on Wikipedia)
"The pronoun āhirā was coined in 1920 by a newspaper in California, The Sacramento Bee,ā Baron explains. āThey tried using that off and on from the 1920s through to the 1940s.ā (Source)
Ae/Aer/Aer/Aers/Aerself (1920)
David Lindsay through the book Voyage to Arcturus. (Source)
In 1970, Mary Orovan invented the pronoun "co/coself", which gained use in a cooperative community in Virginia called the Twin Oaks Community, where it was still in use as of 2011. (Source, quoted in Wikipedia)
Tey/Tem/Ter/Ters/Temself (1971)
In 1971, Casey Miller and Kate Swift coined the gender-neutral pronouns tey, ter, and tem. Writing in the preview issue of Ms. Magazine, Miller and Swift called their creation āthe human pronounā [...]
Miller and Swift did acknowledge they as the pronoun of choice whenever gender is unknown or irrelevant, or it needs to be concealed. But as professional editors, they considered singular they ungrammatical. Instead they used they, their, and them as models for the new pronouns tey, ter, and tem, offering this example: āIf anyone objects, it is certainly ter right--but in that case let tem come up with a better solution.ā (see section Te/Tir/Tes/Tes/Tirself below)
Xe/Xem/Xyr/Xyrs/Xemself (1973)
Apparently independently invented by several people, including Don Rickter (the pronoun appeared in the Unitarian Universalist publication UU World on 1 May 1973 and Mario Pei gave Rickter credit on page 145 of his 1978 book Weasel Words). (Source)
Te/Tir/Tes/Tes/Tirself (1974)
see Tey/Tem section above
Three years later, Warren Farrell did just that, "improving" tey, ter, and tem by coming up with te, tes, and tir. At the time Farrell was a self-proclaimed male feminist, though he has since become an advocate for menās rights. But in 1974 Farrell copied Miller and Swiftās pronouns without really crediting his source or explaining why his slightly-altered coinages offered a better solution than Miller and Swiftās.Ā
Farrell did note that Kate Swift was the source of ātā as the first letter for his pronouns, but he trumpeted his own version of āthe human pronounā without bothering to mention that Miller and Swift had already staked out that term.Ā
And Farrell couldnāt resist mansplaining his pronouns, though his account is a little hard to follow:
Each of the human pronouns consist [sic] of a t plus one letter from both the masculine and feminine gender of the older pronouns. Te takes the e from he and she, tes takes the e from hers and the s from his, tir takes the i from him and the r from her.
Farrell adds this final bit of pseudo-scientific authority to make his coinage more attractive: āAll words are pretested for easy readability and pronunciation.ā But perhaps the pronunciation is not so easy after all: in his illustration, Farrell feels he must explain that te sounds like tea, not tay. (Source)
Ey/Em/Eir/Eirs/Eirself (1975)
In 1975, Christine M. Elverson of Skokie, Illinois, won a contest by the Chicago Association of Business Communicators to find replacements for "she and he", "him and her", and "his and hers". Her "transgender pronouns" ey, em, and eir were formed by dropping the "th" from they, them, and their.
Per/Per/Pers/Pers/Perself (1979)
shortening of person, coined by Marge Piercy in Woman on the Edge of Time (1979) (Source)
Ve/Ver/Vis/Vis/Verself (1980, 1970)
There are several sets of pronouns that use "ve" in the nominative form, the earliest of which was created in 1970.[72] In the 2019 Gender Census, 24 participants (0.2%) used a set of pronouns starting with ve.[1]
ve, ver, vis, vis, verself is the exact set used by Egan, Hulme, and Reynolds (see below). The set's date of creation and creator are not yet known to the editors of this wiki. A nearly-identical but incompletely recorded set was ve, vir, vis, (not recorded), (not recorded), which was created in 1970, and published in the May issue of Everywoman.[19][20]
In Keri Hulme's mystery novel The Bone People (1984), a character is called by these ve pronouns.[73]
Used by Greg Egan for non-binary gender characters-- including artificial intelligence, as well as transgender humans who identify as a specific nonbinary gender they call "asex"-- in his novels Distress (1995) and Diaspora (1998).[74] Egan is sometimes credited with having created these pronouns, but it doesn't appear that he claims to have done so.
In Alastair Reynolds's science fiction novel On the Steel Breeze (2013) one character is called by these ve pronouns. The novel never gives any exposition about this character's sex, gender, or pronouns, and vis gender-neutrality doesn't influence the plot. The lack of remark gives the impression that a nonbinary gender is unremarkable, but this is also why some readers thought the pronouns were a misprint.[73]
Hu/Hum/Hus/Hus/Humself (1982)
Also known as "humanist pronouns", this set was created by Sasha Newborn in 1982, in a college humanities text. They are obviously based on the word human. (Source)
E/Em/Eir/Eirs/Emself (1983)
Ze/Hir/Hir/Hirs/Hirself (1996)
In 1996, Kate Bornstein used the pronouns "ze/hir" to refer to a character in their novel Nearly Roadkill. (Source)
Ze/Mer/Zer/Zers/Zemself (1997)
In 1997 Richard Creel proposed ze/zer/mer (taken from the last letter of him and first of her) (Source, quoted here)
Zhe/Zhim/Zher/Zhers/Zhimself (2000)
Ironically, I couldn't find a source for this one, lol.
Also this page and this page has a lot more.
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
vaporwave
janainaart
snowghoul
germansingergirl
jacobvanloon
