I keep seeing the “chat is a fourth person pronoun” post and it’s getting increasingly hard to avoid starting discourse in the notes of it. chat I don’t think they know what these linguistics terms they’re using mean
it’s literally just a noun. the reason it grammatically doesn’t feel like it means the same thing as any existing pronoun and must be in a different category is that it’s not a pronoun. it’s in the same class of word as “gang” or “folks” or “ladies and gentlemen”. there’s nothing new going on here it’s just an ordinary noun being used like a noun.
I know I am way, way too invested in this post and the discussion around it, but this kind of shit makes me fume.
The fluidity of language is about new words being created and accepted into the language. It’s about words acquiring new meanings. It could even be about new sentence structures forming. And, yes, it could even possibly be about the division of the English grammatical persons into four, in the distant future.
It is very much not about people completely butchering word classifications, not knowing the difference between a noun and pronoun, not knowing what a grammatical person even is or creating a new, impossible one out of thin air. That’s just ignorance, and you know what else? It’s a whole lot of disrespect for language studies, is what it is.
If you said “new math concepts are being discovered to this day, so if enough people say 3² = 6 it becomes true”, you would be considered a fucking idiot.
If you said “our notions of history change every day, so I can make up anything I want to and you can’t tell me it’s not real”, you would be considered a huge fucking idiot.
For other sciences, it’s generally understood that sometimes people just have no clue what the fuck they’re talking about. The ever-changing nature of knowledge does not mean preconceived, hundreds of years old notions about the area of study suddenly become untrue because you decided so.
Yet, when linguistics enters the picture, we can all do whatever we want. I guess the fact that the general population has control over language also means they have control over its studies and classifications, right? Fuck the rules and everyone’s an expert, because it’s so easy and simple as to be common sense, right?
Well, apparently not, as a single read through these notes would make abundantly clear.
No, chat is not a pronoun, no matter how you spin it. No, “we” is not a fourth person pronoun, it is first person plural and you are mixing up grammatical person with storytelling POV. No, the fourth person does not exist as a separate person from the more common three, and any references to it are just different divisions of English’s (and most languages’) three persons, because those already cover literally everything possible. No, a potential fourth person has absolutely no relation whatsoever to the theatrical concept of a fourth wall. No, “chat” is not unique for being simultaneously singular and plural, this is true for many collective nouns, such as “group”. No, chat is not unique for not requiring an article despite not being a name either (“Congress decided today…”). And no, the kids aren’t literally speaking to an imaginary chat anyway, they are just citing a meme, which is functionally completely identical to “girl, help” or “oh, Ariana, we’re really in it now”, and therefore nothing new.
Anyway, I’m sure I’m being pedantic or whatever, but what I’ve learned the past day is that this site is absolutely full of people who say they want to be writers and love reading, but don’t know basic, 5th grade concepts of grammar and have no respect for linguistics as a science. Shouldn’t be surprising, but oh well.
