pronouns-brainstorming

This page is for proposing and experimenting with markup for publishing pronoun information, as well as documenting experimental markup already in use.

Experimental Examples

Ashton McAllan marks up her pronouns as:

<span class="p-x-pronoun-nominative">she</span> / 
<span class="p-x-pronoun-oblique">her</span> / 
<span class="p-x-pronoun-posessive">hers</span>

in her h-card on http://acegiak.net/

Each pronoun is listed individually with it's form allowing parsers and programs to identify them for different uses. Other languages may include different forms of pronoun. This solution is suggested after reading the Wikipedia Personal Pronouns article

gRegor Morrill marks up his pronouns similarly (note corrected spelling of "possessive"):

<p>Pronouns: <span class="p-x-pronoun-nominative">he</span>/
<span class="p-x-pronoun-oblique">him</span>/
<span class="p-x-pronoun-possessive">his</span></p>

on http://gregorlove.com/about/

Jamie Tanna followed this same pattern, and blogged about implementing it, and why.

Jason Garber marks up his pronouns using the pattern:

<p>
  I use the pronouns 
  <a href="https://my.pronoun.is/he/him/his">
    <span class="p-x-pronoun-nominative">he</span>/
    <span class="p-x-pronoun-oblique">him</span>/
    <span class="p-x-pronoun-possessive">his</span>
  </a>.
</p>

Martijn van der Ven marks up his pronouns (more clearly on his gender page) using only a dictionary URL:

<p>
  I use male pronouns (
  <a href="https://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/hij#Persoonlijk_voornaamwoord" lang="nl" class="u-pronoun">hij</a>,
  <a href="https://sv.wiktionary.org/wiki/han#Pronomen" lang="sv" class="u-pronoun">han</a>,
  <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/he#Pronoun" class="u-pronoun">he</a>,
  <a href="https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/er#Personalpronomen" lang="de" class="u-pronoun">er</a>
  ) but also accept gender-neutral pronouns (
  <a href="https://sv.wiktionary.org/wiki/hen#Pronomen" lang="sv" class="u-pronoun">hen</a>,
  <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/they#Pronoun" class="u-pronoun">they</a>
  ). If you are writing about me and are in doubt: ask.
</p>

• There is no way Martijn sees himself supporting 4 cases for English (subjective, objective, reflexive, and possessive), 5 cases for German (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and possessive), and a possible 13 cases for Finnish in the future. Doubtful anyone else will be doing that either: at least 1 implementation (by Greg V) of English p-x-pronoun-* exists in the wild that only specifies 2 cases.
• Simplifying for human visitors who can instantly get started with my pronoun of choice is seen as more important than catering to theoretical computer parsers.
• His thought process has been documented.
• Danielle McLean is also using u-pronoun, linking to the popular Pronoun Island registry page for her pronouns: <a class="u-pronoun" href="https://pronoun.is/she/her">she/her</a>.
  • Started looking for a way to mark-up pronouns because the p-sex/p-gender-identity combo is “unbelievably terrible”.
  • Agreed with Martijn’s arguments for why a link is better than per-case mark-up.
• sknebel notes (2018-08-19) that he would prefer to see text (that possibly leads him to Google for proper use) than just URLs in the parser output. Although the URLs are useful, a simple name:url pair would increase the usefulness.
  • Possibly something like .[up]-pronoun.h-pronoun > .u-url paired with .[up]-pronoun.h-pronoun > .p-name. h-cite would be prior art as also expressing “a reference to [something] in some way with name and url”. [1]

Other Platforms

A GitHub issue about adding pronoun fields to Mastodon was discussed in #microformats on 2018-08-19. The comments in the issue bring up some points previously brought up by Martijn in regards to how useful it would be for machines. Also includes interesting survey data showing that just listing the minimal amount of cases does not show all inflections, e.g. does “ne/nim” refer to “ne/nem/neir/neirs/nemself” or “ne/nem/nayr/nayrs/nemself”?