Started writing a robot pov story (third-person limited pov, the most common for a human protagonist) and realized pronouns are a genuine challenge for realistic (hard sf) non-anthropomorphic robots. Asimov used the R suffix, but stuck to androids so didn’t need to solve it.
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i think wants to capture social classification which is today encoded in pronouns, for people. plain names do not do that. complex names, might.
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Yeah, roughly. Though not necessarily just social. Any source of variety in a population. Like the classification of ships in Culture novels is mainly by functional role/capabilities (GSV, MSV...)
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The ships choose their own names, and it is a classification followed by an attitude phrase, kinda like how we chose rover names
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i thought nobles have single word names and your rank is reflected in how many words are in your name.
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Are we talking about the humans in Culture now? They also have really long names, but usually shortened to a dimunitive
i was thinking we could copy from them. i was just reading "against a dark background" where one of the characters is proud to have shortened his name (finally) and the protagonist, lady sharrow, is recognized as such by having a single name.
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Ah I haven't read any of Banks' non-culture novels. Planning to.
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