Re: [calsify] [Jmap] JSContact: gender property

[Neil Jenkins <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, 4 Jan 2022, at 3:20 AM, Robert Stepanek wrote:
> What we might consider instead is to allow setting modifiers on the grammatical gender:
> 
> grammaticalGender:
>   - gender:  ("animate", "female", ...") (mandatory)
>   - modifiers (optional): list of
>       - value
>       - type ("formality", "deixis", "number")
>    
> where
> 
> "formality": allows values "intimate", "familiar", "distanced"
> "deixis": allows values "proximal", "medial", "distal"
> "number": allows "singular" and "plural"
> 
> This should cover a good number of human languages. However, I am not a linguist and I am afraid none on this mailing is either?

Yeah, I'm wary of adding something here without a full understanding of how it would actually be used, as there's a danger of falling in the middle group of too complex to be understood by most, but not comprehensive enough to cover the use cases of those that need it.

> That being said, I do see the additional need for pronouns and it seems services and application developers do, too. Notably, the Google People API has the addressMe field in the Person.gender property. It is a free-text field and the examples suggest to store the pronouns in the form "they/them".

I think a free text field for this makes sense. Anything else is going to be too difficult to maintain (in one language, let alone for all languages), but it's a more-and-more common field for people to store with their contacts on different platforms, so I think a specific "pronouns" field is worth having.

—Neil