I had a thought about Eridians and pronouns on the drive home. Now, I haven't read the book yet or anything else Andy Weir has out on Eridians, so idk if I'm missing something that's already out there, these are just some thoughts I had.
As Eridians don't really have a gender, especially not like how humans experience gender, they don't have gendered pronouns. However, I think they could have different pronouns to refer to different things. Referring to a person and referring to an object could have different pronouns. So the pronoun for a person could be like ♩♩♬°♪ while the pronoun for a thing is °♫♩♫ for example. They could have other pronouns to differentiate other things like places or ideas, and potentially different pronouns, or at least inflections, that can distinguish different levels of familiarity with a person. So maybe the pronoun you use to refer to your mate is slightly different from the one used for your child which is a bit different from the one used for a friend and so on. So if ♩♩♬°♪ is standard for referring to another Eridian, maybe making the last note higher means they're a friend while adding a ♩ to the end means they're your mate.
Well, at some point the topic of pronouns will come up on the 4 year long trip when there's not much else to do. Probably from Rocky asking why Grace uses 'he' for himself but 'she' for Stratt. Which leads to a discussion on human genders and how Grace is male while Stratt is female and how important gender can be to humans. This also leads to Rocky asking why Grace used 'he' for Rockh, which leads to Grace having to analyze and explain his reasoning, which probably breaks down to some combination of a history lesson on misogyny and the patriarchy, Grace addressing his own internal biases from having existed in American society, and that he/him are the pronouns he uses and it could be some amount of projecting himself onto Rocky. But Grace can change what pronouns he uses to refer to Rocky if Rocky would prefer something else.
Which makes Rocky think. Eridians don't have different genders and so no different pronouns. To Rocky, it makes no difference if Grace uses he, she, they, or it to refer to him. That's not a concept that Eridians have and so none of the words hold any real meaning for Rocky. But I think he could decide to stick with the he/him pronouns because that's what Grace gave him and they feel more special than any of the other options because of that. Rocky isn't male, so 'he' doesn't feel right because it's aligned with his gender, 'he' feels right because that's how Grace refers to him. It's emotionally special in a different way.
But Rocky also realizes that while he would have been just as happy with 'she' or 'it' if that's what Grace had used when he first started referring to Rocky, Grace doesn't feel the same way. These pronouns mean something to him. It's like how using the pronoun inflection for a place to refer to a person would be seen as weird and rude. But Eridians don't have any pronouns for gender.
It's a simple inflection added onto the end of the standard person pronoun, a slight humm. It's the closest sound Rocky can make to the way Grace says 'him'. Rocky takes how Grace refers to himself and adds it, as best he can, onto the Eridians' pronoun so that they can refer to him properly.
