Imagine there was a society in which blue eyed people are referred to with blee/bler pronouns, and green eyed people are referred to with glee/gler pronouns, and one day someone from that society saw a brown eyed person and had no idea whether to categorise them as blee/bler or glee/gler
I had to check if I was in the Lemmy equivalent to /r/cremposting… There is one but it’s dead, oh well.
For context, in the Stormlight Archive fantasy series, eye color determines social standing. Blue or green eyes are “light eyes”, and are like nobility. Whereas “dark eyes” are commoners, laborers, etc. There are quite a few few linguistic things related to that, so your thought could fit right in.
Never thought of doing Jane Elliott’s lesson with transphobia
Thanks for teaching me about this!
Source if anyone else was interested
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Yeah it’s so weird when you think about how arbitrary separating pronouns by gender really is. I feel like it would make way more sense to have multiple ungendered ones that work similar to the way we have this and that to talk about two different inanimate objects
Having heterochromia would really suck, people would probably be such dicks about it.
In a similar vein, imagine if we were like cats, and there were skin colors/patterns that only women could get.
or glee/gler
um it’s called being a gleek thankyouverymuch and guilty as charged ;)
In the Stormlight books by Sanderson, society is split based on eye color; bright eyed vs dark eyed. Bright eyed people are called Brightness or Brightlord. Not exaclty the same as what you said, but it is an interesting society based on eye color.
Early Proto Indo European genders were if things had agency/was animate/acted on the world or not. Was pretty much him and it. A car would be a him because it moves around. Same with a river or a weapon. A rock would be an it. A rolling boulder though becomes outside context, since now he’s an animate rock that has enough agency to kill you. You get enough of these inconsistencies and the language just loses the original plot and you just have to memorize it points to Germanic and romance languages
