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small phrasing fixup in pronouns post

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@ -110,11 +110,11 @@ Frankly, this comes down to the same thing that most of the other issues came do
Let's use our trusty old friend German again as a little example of just how complex even a set of two traditional pronouns (masculine and feminine) can get in a deceptively simple sentence: "Their friend is visiting them."
In the English version of this sentence, the pronouns the friend uses aren't mentioned, because they simply don't have to be. This means that we just have to have two versions of the sentence for masculine and feminine pronouns: "His friend is visiting him" and "Her friend is visiting him". In a language like German, however, the gender of the friend has to be stated explicitly, and so we get four options for this sentence alone: "Sein Freund besucht ihn", "Seine Freundin besucht ihn", "Ihr Freund besucht sie", and "Ihre Freundin besucht sie". Notice that this isn't a simple one-word swap or ending change, either: A lot of the other parts of the sentence will change based on the genders of them and their friend.
In the English version of this sentence, the pronouns the friend uses aren't mentioned, because they simply don't have to be. This means that we just have to have two versions of the sentence for masculine and feminine pronouns: "His friend is visiting him" and "Her friend is visiting her". In a language like German, however, the gender of the friend has to be stated explicitly, and so we get four options for this sentence alone: "Sein Freund besucht ihn", "Seine Freundin besucht ihn", "Ihr Freund besucht sie", and "Ihre Freundin besucht sie". Notice that this isn't a simple one-word swap or ending change, either: A lot of the other parts of the sentence will change based on the genders of them and their friend.
And all of this has us still keeping in mind that there are languages with much more complicated, gendered features, like gendered verbs and adjectives, which would also have to be accounted for.
A lot of implementations of pronouns and gender in games will get around issues like this by just using phrasings that are as generalized as possible to avoid having to deal with all the intricacies. The trouble with that is that, in a lot of languages other than English, it will end up sounding a lot more, or equally, clunky than a blanket gender-neutral version.
A lot of implementations of pronouns and gender in games will get around issues like this by just using phrasings that are as generalized as possible to avoid having to deal with all the intricacies. The trouble with that is that, in a lot of languages other than English, it will end up sounding a lot more, or at least equally, clunky as a blanket gender-neutral version.
All in all, we've decided to embrace the clunk as a sign of societal progress that hasn't fully made it into the space of linguistics quite yet.