Custom pronouns

[Gez]

Software development is not a democratic process.

[Wereknight]

Tell this to those who are not aware of that. I'm aware, but in current situation, what else choice do you have, honestly?

[dpJudas]

Simple. Keep debating the technical merits of the PR and if there's technical issues search for a solution. Same way everything else is done by civilized people.

[Matt]

Not to repeat what others have said, but I'd feel stupid if I didn't voice my support for this feature. Really hope to see it accepted! Seeing something as simple as Hideous Destructor renaming "gender" to "pronouns" (as well as all the stuff it does to decouple the two further when it comes to player skins and sounds) was a really affirming change.

Thanks for the reminder that I'll need to go back and change this once we get it done properly in GZDoom! (And thanks for appreciating it in the meantime...)

[Kinsie]

Not really sure the menu design in the OP of having five separate text fields for individual neopronouns is necessarily the right call from a menu design standpoint.

I actually implemented custom pronouns as a feature in Lithium recently and it handles it by having it be a single option separated by forward slashes, same way people tend to do it naturally. I think that would be a better alternative to using a ton of fields.

Yeah, I was thinking something like this to utilize a single CVar that keeps things all nice and neat, but since I'm kind of an idiot who knows jack about this subject I have to wonder how to handle things where a player only supplies the usual two you see in social media bios (subject/object). How do you handle incomplete data, if at all?

[Graf Zahl]

I have to wonder how to handle things where a player only supplies the usual two you see in social media bios (subject/object). How do you handle incomplete data, if at all?

Just the same as with other CVARs maybe: Print an error and reject the input?

[Marrub]

Yeah, I was thinking something like this to utilize a single CVar that keeps things all nice and neat, but since I'm kind of an idiot who knows jack about this subject I have to wonder how to handle things where a player only supplies the usual two you see in social media bios (subject/object). How do you handle incomplete data, if at all?

The way I see it done is always through a database like this one. However, it should also be possible to synthesize new ones if necessary through some simple spelling rules. Lithium only handles fully spelled out sets because I'm lazy and it's just a mod.

[ZZYZX]

I don't like custom pronouns overall. They discriminate other languages and create massive complexities for translators. Basically, the people who invented them don't care if any other languages even exist.
Now that GZDoom has very wide translation range it would be weird to introduce features that are US/primarily English-centric and take 6 option points that don't work for any other translations.
It also looks like a transient cultural/political thing of this decade, not worth capturing it in the codebase.
Again, nothing wrong with nonbinary and intersex. Two problems with this:
1. The idea in question (custom pronouns) is still very disputable even among actual people who are supposed to use them (Google to confirm).
2. We are assuming that the language and society work the same way everywhere (or ignoring the "everywhere" entirely — this is definitely not acceptable for an internal engine feature).

Overall, downvote for ideological reasons.

As for the technical side, technically, pronouns and name alteration based on language rules are one of the most complicated parts of i18n. This is just very limited and underdeveloped.
(I don't care though generally about the technical side issues, because those are not very critical)


One idea for the author: this can be a ZScript mod and/or extension. I'm not sure if there is currently a callback/event handler/other kind of establishing a custom pronoun resolver, but I think that approach would have worked a lot better.
This way it stays within reasonable bounds for specific-ness (i.e. generic system instead of specific implementation), and also enables extending this mechanism later (if we add more format options, e.g. specifying plural/singular or tenses, which would be very much needed for languages such as Russian — because in Russian, not only pronouns matter, but also word endings).

It still sounds like a stretch to me, but makes more sense IMO.

[Marrub]

I don't like custom pronouns overall. They discriminate other languages and create massive complexities for translators. Basically, the people who invented them don't care if any other languages even exist.

Discriminate is a hell of a loaded word for something that is... as simple as this is. People express gender differently in different languages, because gender is a highly language-dependent concept as a whole. It's certainly not a bad idea to let people express theirs, as it is in English, even in a limited form?

---

I am agender. I am nonbinary. I am transgender. These words exist in English and signify particular things about my internal experience with gender and identity. In Japanese, my second language, I identify as either just "nonbinary" (ノンバイナリ) or "x-gender" (Xジェンダー) depending on context. "X-gender" is certainly not something that exists in English. But it still portrays the same internal world that I live. It carries the same underlying social signifiers that my identity in English does. It means someone who lives outside the norm, someone who does not wish to participate in the male/female binary. Same as agender describes me in many ways. Moreover, it might even be useful for me, in many cases, to simply identify as a woman (女.) It's closer to what I am, how I experience things.

Gender and language are intrinsically linked. But it doesn't change one's inner world. It doesn't change the experiences they have throughout their life. They just need to find ways to express these things differently with their language.

Overall, downvote for ideological reasons.

*sees sprite shadows get yes'd* over all, downvote for ideological reasons
in case it wasn't obvious this is a joke i don't actually think sprite shadows were a bad idea

I don't care though generally about the technical side, because it's not a significant issue

I'm going to be honest, you should probably not bring it up if it's not even relevant to your argument against this feature.

One idea for the author: this can be a ZScript mod and/or extension. I'm not sure if there is currently a callback/event handler/other kind of establishing a custom pronoun resolver, but I think that approach would have worked a lot better.

This is technically possible with ZScript as it is right now, but it's jank as hell and prone to error, and certainly impossible to future-proof. (Source: I did this already.) Having it in the engine is a much better idea.

[ZZYZX]

I don't like custom pronouns overall. They discriminate other languages and create massive complexities for translators. Basically, the people who invented them don't care if any other languages even exist.

Discriminate is a hell of a loaded word for something that is... as simple as this is. People express gender differently in different languages, because gender is a highly language-dependent concept as a whole. It's certainly not a bad idea to let people express theirs, as it is in English, even in a limited form?

As for "discriminate", I guess I'm just mad as a translator about it Makes it completely impossible to preserve original style due to authors using gender literally absent in the other language.

It's not a bad idea to let people express theirs, but it's weird to add a global feature that isn't global. From my POV the engine should be as generic as possible, I wrote that later too. Less specific solutions for specific cases.

Or, if you mean expressing their gender in different languages, well they don't and/or I couldn't find; (please send URL if you can)
A lot of languages don't allow this at all due to their structure. For example, in something like French, Russian, Spanish there would be not just the pronouns but also word endings and "word gender" concept. Trying to change just the pronouns will be massively broken because you will see custom pronoun + whole next sentence gendered as "male" just because the words are constructed differently. It will be even worse. I'm not contradicting myself here because this is not an issue with GZDoom's translation system, this is an issue with the language which prevents easily adding new concepts. As in: not that we cannot translate, but there is nothing to translate to.
In Russian people still did not fully agree on how to use feminitives in relation to existing words... let alone this. (and not just "officially", but the actual native speaking community)

So if something is so controversial and narrow, I just don't see why should it be an engine feature and not a modification.

I don't care though generally about the technical side, because it's not a significant issue

I'm going to be honest, you should probably not bring it up if it's not even relevant to your argument against this feature.

Not sure, reworded. My point was that technical issues exist but are not as blocking as non-technical. (considering a lot people derailed went deep somewhere into implementation)
For instance, discussing possibility to translate this, while in reality from my knowledge this is English-only phenomenon, at least I couldn't find such movements in other languages while searching.
So it's not as much "I don't care" (being useless statement) as "we don't need to care so much about it" (being reference to other posts before).

But honestly I agree about this part lol, I shouldn't write posts at 4 am

[Apeirogon]

A lot of languages don't allow this at all due to their structure. For example, in something like French, Russian, Spanish there would be not just the pronouns but also word endings and "word gender" concept. Trying to change just the pronouns will be massively broken because you will see custom pronoun + whole next sentence gendered as "male" just because the words are constructed differently.

Yeeeeee....
For the native english speakers, who couldnt see the problem with it, how would you translate the "the", just "the", on other language?
Eehhhhhhhh, there is no translation for it. It just a limitation of a language that require to use it because....why? why is it used at all?...along with "a", "an" and other quite interesting (no) specifics of english language.

[Rachael]

English uses those words as separators so that more important words don't get mushed together and also gives a statement some rhythm, which makes it easier to understand.

[dpJudas]

I think what Apeirogon meant is that the word 'the' doesn't exist in many other languages. In danish, for example, "the" is part of the ending of a word. I.e. the danish word for "train" is "tog", and if you want to say "the train" in danish you'd say "toget". The "et" ending is the "the" word and also implies what gender a train is (it's a "thing" in danish - we have people and objects as our two gender types). It only gets even more complex than this in other languages.

[Marisa the Magician]

In Spanish we have gendered articles. So "The" becomes "El" for masculine, "La" for feminine, and "Lo" for neuter (does not include people, only abstract concepts [it's complicated]). Of course, it also has plural forms (Los/Las).

[ZZYZX]

Yeeeeee....
For the native english speakers, who couldnt see the problem with it, how would you translate the "the", just "the", on other language?
Eehhhhhhhh, there is no translation for it. It just a limitation of a language that require to use it because....why? why is it used at all?...along with "a", "an" and other quite interesting (no) specifics of english language.

In case of translating to Russian, this would translate indirectly as these words are hints on whether some object is a specific one (same as "this object") or an abstract one ("those objects" or "all objects of this kind" depending on context).
This is not a very good example I believe because it's still possible to translate without losing significant information, especially if reworded (spoiler: for a good translation you always have to reword sentences).
You can replace "a" or "the" with some word constructs that would hint to the exactly same extent if the object is specific or abstract.

The problem here is exactly that in many languages the concept of a "gender" is a lot stronger throughout the language (what Marisa or dpJudas said), while English is very neutral. It may seem like it's simple, but it's not.
And if in English it just equals to correct pronoun usage, in Russian you would even refer to yourself, in the 1st person, differently, depending if you are male or female.
Inserting a new gender here is not as simple as just adding a pronoun. This may need at least inventing new endings or in some cases inventing whole new structures.