Random linguistic worldbuilding: A language with six sets of pronouns, which are set by one's current state of existence. There's a separate pronoun for people who are alive, people who are dead, and potential future people who are yet to be born, and the ambiguous ones of "may or may not be alive or aleady dead", "may or may not have even been born yet", and the ultimate general/ambiguous all-covering one that covers all ambiguous states.
The culture has a specific defined term for that tragic span of time when a widow keeps accidentally referring to their spouse with living pronouns. New parents-to-be dropping the happy surprise news of a pregnancy by referring to their future child with the "is yet to be born" pronoun instead of a more ambiguous one and waiting for the "wait what did you just say?" reactions.
Someone jokingly referring to themselves with the dead person pronouns just to highlight how horrible their current hangover is. A notorious aspiring ladies' man who keeps trying to pursue women in their 20s despite of approaching middle age fails to notice the insult when someone asks him when he's planning to get married, and uses the pronoun that implies that his ideal future bride may not even be born yet.
A mother whose young adult child just moved away from home for the first time, who continues to dramatically refer to their child with "may or may not be already dead" until the aforementioned child replies to her on facebook like "ma stop telling people I'm dead" and having her respond with "well how could I possibly know that when you don't even write to us? >:,C"
@witchofanguish it is also used in poetry and plays, ghosts talk like that. Imagine being in a folk story, staying overnight in an abandoned cabin and in the middle of the night there's a knock on the door and a bellowing voice going
LET ME IN.
and from the "me" alone you know that whoever is out there is not one among the living.
@well-by-jove
@juice-box-addict
This sounds fun. Is this grammatical gender system restricted only to animate nouns, or can it apply to inanimate ones as well? If your car gets totaled, do you refer to it using the dead pronoun? If you're talking about a knitting project you haven't started yet, would you use the not-yet-born pronoun? Would you use the ambiguous pronouns to dodge the question of whether or not you've actually started your WIP yet? Would you use the not-sure-if-dead pronoun to talk about a fanfic that hasn't updated since 2010?
