What do people think about putting “ona” in a bio as toki pona pronouns?
To me it feels like Anglophone influence on a language that does not have any animacy, number, or gender connotations for its third person pronouns.
There’s also the concept of a head noun, which feels much closer to me conceptually to “preferred pronouns” than like “ona.”
Some people have told me that their pronouns section serves as a languages list as well as a place to see preferred pronouns. This is an interesting usage and I like it.
Yeah, agreed. I’ve seen people use pronoun in bio to signal a lot of different things, even when it has nothing to do with gender, like to signal being indigenous with a language that doesn’t have gender.
I think people mainly do it for fun. In the Viossa server, people put sore, even though it makes no difference either. For Toki Pona, I think that putting the head noun there makes the most sense.
i personally have ona in my discord pronouns because i want to signal that toki pona is a language i prefer spewking in, and i also enjoy being reffered to as ona in english speech… as in like:
“ona is going to the store”
“i want to go to the store with ona”
I agree; I think I prefer putting a headnoun there. (We do use our profile as a language list, but we do that with ISO 639 codes, not with pronouns—they wouldn’t all fit!)
i put ona as my pronouns in english because i like speaking in toki ponglish and its simply musi tawa mi. ona represents me. mi ken ona, ona li ken mi.
Disregarding the fact that people use ona in other languages than TP and/or use it to identify themselves as a tokiponist, I also think that putting ona in your bio is just a fun thing to do. It has the same energy as putting “mute” as your age. The disconnect between TP culture and anglophone culture is sort of the point for me, it makes you giggle and then ask yourself “okay but actually, do I really need to know this person’s age/gender?”
And head nouns are definitely gender-y. They’re like fursonas but more abstract. Like, my head noun is pipi both because I don’t feel like a person sometimes, and because I see aspects of myself as pipi-like. Makes sense to put that in your bio.
I don’t myself put ona in my pronouns, but if I did, I think the most plausible reason I would be doing so is that I wanted to include every language I speak in the list. So in that case, ona would be a signal that I speak TP.
i think it’s less funny to put ona in your pronouns because everyone who does it does it seriously, but nobody who puts mute as their age as a joke does it seriously
I agree that for people that use custom head nouns, the head noun is a closer equivalent.
I have in the past added “ona”, as well as “they/them” to my list of possible pronouns, just to make the point that people don’t have to worry about what gender I am. I get that people want to be gendered correctly, and for some people online environments give them the freedom to start out expressing the gender they want if people respect their preferences. But at the same time, I don’t want to make my online presence all about my gender. I like it how the Internet is a place where we can judge and be judged by what we say rather than what gender we come with, and I don’t want to lose that.
why would putting "ona" in your pronouns field make the point that people don't have to worry about what gender you are at all? Like even a little bit?
I do agree that it's awesome that internet presence isn't about gender, especially in toki pona spaces, but I would also like to use people's preferred pronouns and for people to use my preferred pronouns. Pronoun roles are not about gender, even if they have those connotations. They're just about pronouns. Like I have a friend who was assigned female at birth and still uses she/her pronouns and presents very femininely, but she is nonbinary. This is pretty common in queer spaces, so I wanna push back hard on anything remotely similar to "pronoun roles are for gender."
It seemed that way. “ona” is a pronoun without gender. And it seemed harmless, at least when listed after my default English pronouns.
If you’d like to use preferred pronouns, then it’s a good thing I haven’t tried to stop you.
Finally, if listing pronouns isn’t about gender, what is it about? Keep in mind, my view might be naive, but I thought that we listed pronouns to say what gender we want to present ourselves with, because English doesn’t let us be referred to in the third person without specifying a gender.
In the Sajem Tan möm, we have special pronoun customs. In both English and in Sajem Tan, one refers to oneself in the first person perspective if their in-group name is something inanimate/mineral, in the second person perspective if their in-group name is something vegetal or fungal, and in the third person perspective if their in-group name is animate/animal.
For example, Stone uses “I” in English and “ţê” in Sajem Tan; Algae uses “you” in English and “vo” in Sajem Tan; Bird uses “he” in English and “ro” in Sajem Tan.
This custom only applies to members of the möm; all other vegetables, animals, and minerals would speak using the usual 1st person pronouns (" ţu", “žu”, and “ţê”, respectively).
they/them and a lot of neopronouns suggest either something in between masculinity and femininity, something outside the binary spectrum entirely, or that you dont care about presentation. its kind of ambiguous
ona/ona suggests pretty unambiguously to me that you dont care about presentation (because using different 3rd person pronouns isn’t really a thing in toki pona)
this doesnt have to “match” gender. you can identify as a woman and use he/him, but in that case the he/him usage is likely part of a presentation of butchness right? so maybe instead of “using ona indicates you dont care about gender” a better way to put it is “using ona indicates you dont care about presentation”, but the core argument checks out for me
this wording of “custom head nouns” feels a bit odd to me…it implies that jan is a default? although it may be a common convention, i don’t like that treatment
I didn’t mean it that way. People can do that if they want, but I wasn’t trying to make it happen. A lot of the fun of it for me was putting up a pronoun for another language, even if it’s just the same one for everyone.