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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16082 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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English is not my native language but "it" seems much more gramatically correct than the plural ambiguous "they".

The fact we alter language to make it more ambiguous, for humans and even more so for AIs is worrying.

At some point I was for eliminating she/he but then I remembered the little known fact that it is useful for coreference resolution. However besides this fact I'm convinced if we eliminated he/she, there would be much less identity wars between the two genders and therefore more egalitarianism.

They is only inherently plural in literary English. In most dialects of spoken English they is acceptable to refer to an unknown referent.

This is true, but only to a point. "Today I went to Allie's house and had dinner with them," has a very strong connotation to me that Allie is married and dinner was with the couple, rather than dinner being with a singular person who uses "they" as a pronoun.

But I maybe I've been under a rock for too long.

Well, yes, because in that case Allie would be a known referent. In the statement ‘I was just in the handicap bathroom. Someone made a stink beforehand, they also used all the toilet paper.’, it doesn’t imply more than one person because the referent is known.

Unfortunately in the context I heard this Allie was not a known referent (to me), but a person who goes by they. I fear the experience made me a bit jaded.

Well sure, but that’s an individual being a weirdo. Almost everyone who goes by Allie uses she/her pronouns.

More grammatically correct, but also very rude. To use "it" as a pronoun carries the connotation that you're referring to an inanimate object. As you might imagine, people don't like this.

I appreciate the desire for good grammar but using "it" as the neutral third person pronoun will never catch on because of how rude it is.

To be fair, "it" is still used for infants, and it used to be used for non-infant children as well.* Maybe it could make a comeback.

*Examples from a 1902 children's book coincidentally named Five Children and It:

Everyone [of the five] got its legs kicked or its feet trodden on in the scramble to get out of the carriage that very minute, but no one seemed to mind.

Each of the [four] children carried its own spade, and took it in turns to carry the Lamb [the baby].

They [four] looked at each other in despair, and it was terrible to each, in this dire emergency, to meet only the beautiful eyes of perfect strangers, instead of the merry, friendly, commonplace, twinkling, jolly little eyes of its own brothers and sisters.

Eugenisists, Anti-natalists, and Fabiains (but i repeat myself) have been trying to normalize the use of "it" to refer to children, infants, and the mentally impaired since the late 19th century. It hasn't caught on for reasons already covered by @SubstantialFrivolity, refering to humans as inanimate ojects just naturally sticks in a lot of people's craws, but that hasnt stopped them from continuing to try.

Eugenisists, Anti-natalists, and Fabiains (but i repeat myself) have been trying to normalize the use of "it" to refer to children, infants, and the mentally impaired since the late 19th century

This seems a bit preposterous. Could you provide a source? As far as I can tell, 'it' was simply the most common pronoun for infants in the 19th century, and considering that 50% of infants didn't make it past early childhood, it sort of made sense not to get too attached to your infant child.

It's not because something is useful than it is logically sufficient. Those culture might have gender issues for other reasons, yet the linguistic distinction promote tribalization.

Nor are there problems with coreference resolution

I don't see a proof, languages SOTA in NLP are consistently inferior to english SOTA.

That is because there are more researchers and datasets for english but not only.

Some languages are more fit for NLP, and english as it is known is among the simpler languages.

Now about the usefulness of he/she, well it trivially solves coreference resolution in case of ambiguity.

For example:

I was talking to Alice and Bob, then suddenly she passed out.

Who passed out?

Alice.

It is trivial and useful, it reduce the cognitive load of reading and writing, and works well since 49% of humans are women.

Use of he/she only resolves ambiguity when you are talking about exactly one man and one woman. If the goal is minimizing ambiguity, you might look into something more similar to obviative pronouns: something like I was talking to Alice(1) and Betty(2), then suddenly she(2) passed out.

When there is more than one third person named in a sentence or discourse context, the most important, salient, or topical is marked as "proximate" and any other, less salient entities are marked as "obviative." Subsequent sentences that refer to previously-named entities with pronouns or verbal inflections can then use the proximate and obviative references that have already been established to distinguish between the two.

Excellent comment, very much appreciated.

It's not everyday someones manage to teach me a new concept :)

Quite a crazy coincidence, I saw this word before your comment yesterday by pure luck https://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/WNjOWZiY/

It often happen to me, to see something apparently (?) for the first time in my life and then to see it again, in the following days out of pure coincidence.

While I'm tempted to believe such coincidence have a mystic nature, the insight I derive from this phenomenon is that I must have a cognitive bias of being blind to unknown words, that is until I see a proper definition of them. Kinda sad.

Anyway back on the topic, would there be a way to use an obviative pronoun in english without sounding too robotic/unnatural?

Well English surely seems deceptively simpler than it is, I often find in my quest of building the first program able to understand sentences, such hidden complexity.

The most effective way to contemplate it though is to browse this forgotten field that is Computational linguistics

https://semanticsarchive.net/cgi-bin/browse.pl?search=

what if it's Alice and Barbara? It might work in 50% of the cases then.

Exactly, this is an optimization not a necessary component of language but I believe, a useful one.

The most striking example is to learn French, where we gender objects. That seems absurd and it semantically is, but it allows to disambiguate objects in a mental scene.

Oh I just realized that's what you meant with German.

Also yes, the path to progress is a long one :)

English is not my native language but "it" seems much more gramatically correct than the plural ambiguous "they".

"It" would imply the person is an object, "they" says you just don't know what their gender is.

"It" would imply the person is an object

or an animal.

An ambiguous "is maybe an object" is preferable to "is maybe plural" since contextual confusion about the former is extremely less likely than the later.

But yeah ideally we would create a new gender neutral singular pronoun.

An ambiguous "is maybe an object" is preferable to "is maybe plural" since contextual confusion about the former is extremely less likely than the later.

I haven't seen a case where it wasn't obvious that "they" was referring to the plural over the person. Can you point to an instance where that happens? I think people just clarify which "they" is being referred to.

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