Word of the week: pronounciation

“Verbing weirds language”, as famously noted by Calvin and indeed there’s every year a new proliferation of new nouns to be verbed. However, other word classes tend to be quite hide-bound. Now there’s been a small amount of pronounciation going on in the creation of genderless pronouns, such as “E” and “Xe”. In Swedish the suggestion of ”hen” as a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun has created some amount of debate and indeed ridicule. It has however been pointed out that the gendered third person plural pronouns were dropped already in mediæval Swedish, so that the depronounciation process started a long time ago.