Provide standard pronoun handling

[grhoten]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Pronouns are hard to do in many languages. It can depend on the grammatical gender of the noun or the physical gender of the person being referenced. In some languages it's an independent word. In Arabic, it's an affix to a noun, and there is no ungendered form of the word "you" or "your". Those pronouns always have gender. When the account, addressbook or other source of person data contains gender or pronoun information, we should provide a common way to use it.

Describe the solution you'd like A solution should be able to handle "he/she", "him/her", "his/hers", "you (singular)" and "your (singular)". Something that needs discussion is whether it should be an independent variable to reference or a way to modify a noun to include such a pronoun.

Describe why your solution should shape the standard It's impossible to write good sentences in Hebrew or Arabic with pronouns without this information. Without this information, sentences have to reworded in a less natural manner to get the same information across. Instead of having everyone try to figure out the syntax for doing it, we should standardize pronoun handling.

Additional context or examples I definitely recommend the following for further information. I can add other languages as needed. http://arabic.speak7.com/arabic_pronouns.htm https://ulpan.com/hebrew-grammar-3/ (notice the pronoun with the book examples)

[mihnita]

I think that pronouns are too narrow, and might also encourage bad i18n. The links to Arabic / Hebrew are very good, thank you.

We should probably look at the bigger picture. But I don't know all the facets of this. Here are a few that I can think of:

• plurality
• the gender
• "group gender" (my own invented name for that). Example: for group or 3 girls you would use a feminine-plural pronoun; there are rules for what to do in mixed groups, and these are locale dependent)
• matching the person / gender / number / case of the pronoun and the other parts of the sentence
• politeness / formality level
• dropping the pronoun. In some languages there is no need to keep saying "me" or "he". Because the other part of the sentence (verbs, adjectives) match the noun, you can safely drop it without things being confusing. And it actually feels unnatural to keep the pronoun.
• mixtures of who does the action and on whom. In Romanian I would say "O visez des" ("I dream (of?) her often"), but there is no "I" (eu), or "her" (ea). The "o" carries enough info to know that is about a singular feminine noun (grammatical gender, can be the planet Mars, or a car), caries info that this is the subject (object?) of the action (kind of what the "of ..." does in English). And "visez" tells me that the one doing the dreaming is first person singular. ("des" is often"). So I have a lot of info without any explicit pronoun.

I think we will have a really hard time finding the right balance between doing too little and trying to do too much (and end up with something that no tool will be able to handle :-)