Jukaschar’s Reviews > In the Watchful City > Status Update

Aaah, cool! I'm always done for some neopronouns. Interested how you'll end up liking it! (This is a speed dating read, right?)

Yes, it's a speed dating read. At the moment it's a solid 5 stars. I'm not finished yet, but I'm going to read it in three sittings instead of just one to draw the joy out a bit more!
The neopronouns are something that's really interesting to me, because they're definitely harder to integrate in my native language than in English, so it's really nice to see them shine so naturally here. I guess it might be similarly difficult in Czech? In German there are some hurdles that are hard to overcome (more forms needed, no pronoun in existence that you can substitute like English 'they', we have to start from scratch with neopronouns).

Jukaschar wrote: "I guess it might be similarly difficult in Czech?"

Yeah, it's kind of impossible in Czech. Pronouns aren't even the biggest problem (you can skip them sometimes), (verb) suffixes are. It's just kind of impossible to not gender someone or to not gender yourself. Ugh, it's such a pain honestly and something I don't see having any practically useful solution any time soon.

Forgot to say; glad you are liking the book!

Also, obviously meant to say "always down for some neopronouns" in the first post. My brain is having serious spelling problems since yesterday 🤦🏽‍♀️

Who cares about the spelling, it was obvious what you meant.
Yeah, it's much harder to realise in inflecting languages. Languages like English, Danish or Swedish that are well on their way to become isolating languages have much less problems even though they are really close relatives with German. And Slavic and Baltic languages are especially good at keeping grammatical categories alive that make those diversity efforts so much harder to solve. It really seems like English is going to be the new lingua franca in the Western world, it's well on its way there.

And one of the multitude of reasons why English is so good at drawing people in, is for sure how easy it is to integrate and create new features, that are so desperately needed.
But to me it's also worrying. Languages go extinct, like species in flora and fauna, at a rate that's probably exceeding everything that was before. So much cultural identity just gets lost forever when a language dies. It's hard to not worry.

Ummm, that spiraled into tragedy quickly. That wasn't even my intention when I started asking about neopronouns in Czech.
Well, let me stop here and enjoy again how I love seeing them in this book!

Jukaschar wrote: "Who cares about the spelling, it was obvious what you meant."

Yeah, generally yes. But I do keep switching words up lately that sound only vaguely similar and... it's kind of funny, but also wtf is my brain doing?!

About the languages, yes, I feel that. I mean, I love Czech, I think it's really beautiful language and I love it, but I also kind of hate it. The worst part is that such a great part of it was artificially reconstructed in 19th century and a lot of the gender language issues didn't even have to be there because those guys brought back features that already went extinct by that time. Ugh... really. They just wanted it to look fancy so they made it more complicated than it had to be.

My mom says sometimes that she wishes that we stayed part of Austria-Hungaria and I always thought she was joking about that when I was younger (because what a sacrilege!) but I mean... she is kind of right. Might be also because I was to Vienna before Christmas and I kind of loved it there, feels like they are at completely different place than us... But I guess I let myself to be a bit distracted from the language stuff 😂 (I really do need to go to sleep apparently)
I guess, it's good to hear that language-wise it's not that a huge step down. It's true that I talked with some German erasmus students and it was kind of interesting, because they said that Czech wasn't so hard for them (as for students from some other countries) because apparently there are some structural similarities. I couldn't know, I did learn German for a bit in the lower educational levels but it's so long and I never really learn much to begin with.

Also hear you about the extinct languages. It is so sad to me. I have to say that I do love learning about obscure languages. Even though I'm terrible with keeping any sort of routine with learning them. (I'm on a Romanian kick for about half-year, that language is such fascinating hodge-podge).

I feel like pronouns-inclusive language talks always spiral into tragedy quickly. Or at least around her they do. Ugh, really need to go to sleep, I feel like I'm making no sense whatsoever. I'm sorry if this ends up completely non-sensical.