The Pronouns in my h-card
There have been explorations for including pronouns, and I threw all of that aside for my implementation. My implementation is user focussed, not computer focussed. I apologise for that.
I use a single property – pronoun – linking to the Wiktionary entry for the specific pronoun. The following example comes from my gender page:
<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>What happened to -x-?
Recently I read an issue, build on RFC 6648, that throws doubts on this type of prefixing. I agree with the sentiment there.
What happened to the different forms?
The previous exploration has used 3 classes:
p-x-pronoun-nominativep-x-pronoun-obliquep-x-pronoun-possessive
These felt very language-gnostic to me. It might work well for the English he/him/his, but what about the German er/seiner/ihm/ihn? The classes will require tweaking depending on how different languages work.
Another language that might not fit is Esperanto. The pronoun would be best described as li/lin. Or even just as its base form li, per this and subsequent lines in the chatlog. There is no real possessive pronoun, instead any pronoun can be made possessive with the suffix -a or -aj. (This needs more confirmation.)
A language that goes the exact opposite way of Esperanto’s 2 cases would be Finnish. Looking at the inflection table on the English Wiktionary for hän it comes in a lovely 13 cases.
But what about consumers?
While the previous properties implied that you could pick-up whichever pronoun you needed for the sentence you are writing, that will often not be the case. Already some people are skipping providing all three classes (Greg V provides 2 out of 3) and without proper language detection a consumer doesn’t know if it makes sense to use any of the provided pronouns.
The single property as proposed here moves away from the implication. This will put more work on the consumer to do recognition of what it can use while making it easier for a profile to point people to information about their pronoun.
What about separate h-pronoun objects?
This is actually documented on the language parsing brainstorm and sounds like a good idea until you try it. Because of the huge disparity in pronoun cases between languages the author would need to construct HTML that outputs something like:
{
"items": [
{
"type": [
"h-card"
],
"properties": {
"pronoun": [
{
"type": [
"h-pronoun"
],
"lang": "en",
"properties": {
"subjective": [
"he"
],
"objective": [
"him"
],
"reflexive": [
"himself"
],
"possessive": [
"his"
]
}
},
{
"type": [
"h-pronoun"
],
"lang": "de",
"properties": {
"nominative": [
"er"
],
"accusative": [
"ihn"
],
"genitive": [
"seiner"
],
"dative": [
"ihm"
],
"possessive": [
"sein"
]
}
},
{
"type": [
"h-pronoun"
],
"lang": "fi",
"properties": {
"nominative": [
"hän"
],
"genitive": [
"hänen"
],
"partitive": [
"häntä"
],
"accusative": [
"hänet"
],
"inessive": [
"hänessä"
],
"elative": [
"hänestä"
],
"illative": [
"häneen"
],
"adessive": [
"hänellä"
],
"ablative": [
"häneltä"
],
"allative": [
"hänelle"
],
"essive": [
"hänenä"
],
"translative": [
"häneksi"
],
"abessive": [
"hänettä"
]
}
}
]
}
}
]
}But why Wiktionary?
The URL doesn’t actually matter. Most readers of the page will already understand how to adress me by just the single third-person nominative pronoun. But it can do well in informing foreign language users, I personally like Wiktionary’s tables of the different cases.
Specifying the language!
I use lang-attributes. A lot. Everywhere. I don’t think I need to explain these. In this case it specifically denotes which pronoun should be used in what language.
For now, microformats support for parsing language is nonexistent. But there is brainstorming about the issue.