Anonymous #1 3w

no worries, I’m an English major, so let’s do a little swapping-out exercise to help you understand parts of speech see how “is he okay?” and “what does she think?” are perfectly coherent sentences? you can substitute “he” and “she” with other pronouns as you wish. now go ahead, reread my original post and compare the examples

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Anonymous #1 3w

on the other hand, if we take a noun—let’s use “cat” just for fun, but again you can use your own example if you’d like—, notice how “is cat okay?” and “what does cat think?” sound a little wonky? going by prescriptive grammar, we would generally have to insert “the” for it to fully make sense. “the cat”. or else it would have to be a proper noun, like a name. (“noun” and “proper noun” may be similar terms, but they’re not the same category)

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Anonymous #1 3w

you can also tell that a pronoun is not the same as a noun because we wouldn’t say “the she”. okay, lesson adjourned. any questions?

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Anonymous #4 3w

yoooooo I see exactly what you mean, that’s such a fascinating way of framing it? and my brain loves to tinker with this exact type of thing, applying a fictional storytelling lens to how social dynamics operate in the real-world. good shit, don’t think I ever would’ve noticed this on my own either

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Anonymous #2 3w

that’s all I got for the time being lol, but #4 built off of this foundation in a more intriguing way than anywhere I was going with it anyway 🫡

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Anonymous OP 3w

But cat and chat or bro are not the same type of noun. They act more like nicknames. Like is Bob ok? And what does Bob think? Bob fits in both of those but is def not a pronoun. Pretty sure etymology nerd has a video explaining this one.

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Anonymous #5 3w

well no, a nickname is still a proper noun, just the same as any other name. “noun” and “proper noun” are different categories—if it helps, you can think of the former as a “common noun”. there aren’t multiple categories of common noun, so what you said about “not the same type of noun” doesn’t make sense. in the examples in my post, “chat” and “bro” are being used as pronouns.

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Anonymous #5 3w

a proper noun is also always capitalized when we’re adhering to prescriptive grammar. no matter how proper we’re being, you wouldn’t see the “bro” example written as “Is Bro okay?”—it’s not actually being assigned as a nickname.

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Anonymous OP 3w

Ok but if bro and chat are pronouns why don’t they have reflexive forms.

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Anonymous #5 3w

because the words themselves were not originally created as pronouns, they have simply been adopted for that usage in certain contexts. in the past we wouldn’t have had any use for “chatself”, so it wasn’t a word, and due to that, it sounds forced and unnatural if we try to invent it now. (but for what it’s worth, as an aside, not every type of pronoun has its own reflexive form. demonstrative pronouns, for example)

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Anonymous #5 3w

this is the same reason these words don’t already come with possessive forms: what’s occurring here is that a word which was originally coined as a noun is being utilized / converted to function as a pronoun. so, naturally, a word created to be used as a noun is not going to perfectly adhere to the same rules as a word originally created for usage as a pronoun. but it might be fun to further the evolution of this process by inventing those types of forms for “chat” and “bro”!

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