From 54405380a25790247c588a7a633637041a3936ce Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Andrea Vos Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2023 17:39:44 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] [en][faq] why-two-forms --- locale/en/translations.suml | 27 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 27 insertions(+) diff --git a/locale/en/translations.suml b/locale/en/translations.suml index c49d28e09..e7fecddb2 100644 --- a/locale/en/translations.suml +++ b/locale/en/translations.suml @@ -421,6 +421,33 @@ faq: Respecting other people's pronouns and identity doesn't require much effort. Even if you're a person that's solving the biggest challenges that humanity is facing, you can easily manage to not be transphobic in the process. + why-two-forms: + question: 'Why are pronouns usually given as two forms, like “she/her”, instead of just saying “she” or instead of listing all the forms?' + answer: + - > + In English there are five forms of gendered personal pronouns, so if we wanted to be precise, + we'd need to list all of them, for example: “they/them/their/theirs/themselves” or “he/him/his/his/himself”. + That's already a lot to put in your bio or introduce yourself with, and some languages require way more info than that + (eg. in Polish {https://zaimki.pl/jak-dzia%C5%82aj%C4%85-zaimki=there are up to 12 forms of gendered personal pronouns alone}, + plus different endings of nouns, adjectives and verbs). + But usually not all of that information is necessary in those situations, + the whole pronoun set could be easily “compressed” to just a “she” or “he” or “xe”, etc. + - > + On the other hand though, reducing it to just one form won't have the advantage of adding extra context. + If a person sees just a “ve” in someone's bio and they're not familiar with the neopronoun “{/ve=ve/ver}”, + they will struggle to understand the meaning of that random “ve”. + But it became pretty much a standard convention that “xxx/yyy” means a pronoun set – + so there's a big chance that upon seeing “ve/ver” they'll know immediately that those are the person's pronouns. + - > + Adding a second (or sometimes third) form also clears up some ambiguities, + eg. between {/ze/hir=ze/hir} and {/ze/zir=ze/zir} or between {/e/em/eir=e/em/eir} and {/e/em/es=e/em/es}. + - > + Basically, the two-forms convention is a compromise between keeping it brief + and making it very obvious that a given string of characters is a pronoun set, + and it also keeps things unambiguous. + This convention became so popular that it made its way into other languages + (although not strictly, for example in Portuguese people usually give three forms) + and we even incorporated the ( / ) into {/logo=our logo}. flags: question: 'Can you add this flag? Can you remove that flag?' answer: