I see that there’s several extensions for having nonbinary pronouns in Inform 7, but is there anything that can be done for TADS? In a new file I tried to modify some of the classes in english.t that involved pronouns (in a new file in my project) but I don’t know what I’m doing at all (I started futzing with TADS for the first time last night).
Even tackling singular ‘they’ seems potentially tricky (or anything that follows its construction, like vae/vem):
oldMentor: Thing 'old mentor';elderly wise;;sthey → singular they
- reflexive pronoun is ‘themself’ rather than ‘themselves’
- object is not considered ‘plural’ when referring to their proper name (‘The old mentor is here.’)
- referring to them in 3rd person still gets plural ‘to be’ form (‘They are not listening.’)
- you can still say stuff like “talk to them” and “hit them” and the parser understands it to be the person in context
Most ideally this would be some sort of extension that an author (me) could put in the extensions, and once added, the author (me) could add as many varied pronouns as I want to Things and so on using the same syntax as you do for binary pronouns:
queerKid: Thing 'queer teenager';quirky young;kid; ze might have usage like ze/hir/hirs/hirs/hirself or ze/zem/zer/zers/zemself or whatever other variations there are, as defined by the author.
I am willing to learn how to do this by banging my head against the code until it works in 5 years, but if anyone has pointers or help, that would be appreciated!