A conlang where which pronoun to use is determine not only by gender but by the first letter of someone’s name.
Actually this is a great idea minus the gender. Gendered pronouns are problematic but useful for disambiguation: compare
“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? He said he’d had a crush on her for a long time” to
“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? They said they’d had a crush on them for a long time” which is really ambiguous to the point where you just can’t use any pronouns and end up with
“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? Dan said Dan had had a crush on Elizabeth for a long time” which is unwieldy.
But with this system you can say stuff like
“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? D said D’d had a crush on E for a long time” which is concise, clear, and politics-free!
That requires that the persons’ names be known. It also seems to be doing the exact opposite of the thing cryptographers do to aid in keeping track of multiple-agent interactions. Of course, that technique might not be necessary in a culture with name-based pronouns.
I contend, however, that gendered pronouns are a very good choice. They divide humans into groups of roughly equal size, so the variance in the amount of information given by a pronoun is small. Which pronoun applies can almost always be determined by seeing the person or hearing their voice. No interaction or detailed knowledge is necessary. And, gender can be useful information outside of the context of remembering which person is being discussed. First letters of names, not so much.
Yeah this is a good point. I do still like the idea of having 26 categories instead of 2, though.
I actually wonder if this system would lead to more people giving their kids names that start with Q, U, X so they would be more distinguishable.