Nico @nihilazo@tiny.tilde.website

I completely understand that being against singular they (which I'm not, I feel like it's a good option) or against neutral pronouns is often anti-nonbinary. I'm not against neutral language - I feel like we need it, especially as a nonconforming person myself - but adoption is key, and getting constructed words and constructed change adopted into a natural language that is as widely spoken as english is very practically unlikely to happen.

Correct me if this is ignorant (and I have nothing against people who prefer them), but idk if constructed pronouns are useful longer-term. It's almost impossible to introduce constructed change into a natural language. What you accidentally do when trying to introduce a new neutral pronoun is create a gendered pronoun for the group that likes that pronoun. I 100% support introducing better neutral language to english but I feel like inventing new pronouns just isn't the way to do it.

Since we’re bashing linguistics today:

The more I learn about linguistics the more baffled I become that "at least one sign language" isn't a mandatory subject for all linguists from, like, undergrad year 1, and all skill paths like phon/phon, morphology, prag etc. aren't studied from the start using both sign and voice as first-class objects of study for contrast and comparison.

I mean I maintain that
widespread acquisition of sign languages by children of the general population – the way Australian Aboriginal and other peoples did it – would have a ton of advantages not just for inclusion, which would already be worthy the effort ofc, but for everybody else too; but, come on, us linguists? There's 2 fundamental types of human language and we base all our models and conclusions on 1?

It's as if you're training chemists and on first semester somebody briefly flashes them a periodic table for a minute and says "yeah so there are 3 types of elements, metals, metalloids and nonmetals. From now on we're going to focus on metals." And most of them, for their whole career, never think about silicon or sulphur again. They try to learn everything about bonding and reactions and molecule structure etc. using metals as the sole subject 99% of the time. Sometimes somebody who took the 8th-semester optional subject "General Introduction to the Most Common Nonmetal In This Area I" (where they do a crash run over reactions, molecules etc. now with 1 single nonmetal added into the mix) will point out "oh, actually hydrogen does not behave like that", then everybody else gets annoyed at this arrogant interrupty person who keeps bringing these weird nonmetal complications into the stuff they're already finding it hard to follow with metals only.

Putting my effort where my mouth is and my hand will soon be: anybody wants to learn Deutsche Gebärdensprache with me please send a note, I'm serious o/ maybe we could start with fingerspelling over jitsi or s/t :)

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