Short story: Lojban’s acronym pro-sumti, appropriated for English.

Elaboration: Whenever you see a lone letter (or acronym) used as a pronoun, it refers to the closest (or most contextually obvious) noun phrase that begins with it (or matches it acronym-wise). I leave details such as whether it’s capitalized or ends with a period as stylistic choices for the author at this point—’cause, hey, this linguistic experiment is arguably even more avant-garde than zie/hir/ey ;).

Some examples:

• “I have a friend who wants me to tell you that f likes your shoes.”
• “Every person knows p’s own limits.”
• “Leslie has a dog but L likes cats too.”
• “A queer has two options available to q: stop being queer, or live as a warrior.”^src

You may already be gagging at how machine-like or alien this scheme looks. I’m pretty sure such words were at one point directed at the source language. Well, I would only fault you for not giving it enough time for it to settle in, because compared to zie/hir/ey, it does demonstrate some advantages. Most prominently, (a) the pronouns are mnemonic, which helps in distinguishing two things of the same gender, in the average case where they don’t begin with the same letter, and (b) the pronouns are gender-neutral in a metalinguistic sense, in that they were not constructed in analogy to gendered pronouns.

Historical aside: In fact, Lojban has inherited this feature from its Old form, Loglan.

While the purpose of gender-neutral pronouns is arguably to enable greater self-expression, my thinking has led me upon a form of self-expression with which Lojban deals poorly: arbitrary coinage. Lojban’s root words (gismu) are a truly privileged class of words. (For one thing, I am unable to call Lojban a culturally neutral language as long as cultural gismu exist.) The managed growth of the gismu set is directly tied to Lojban’s tenet of tractable unambiguity, which sets the pretext for why resistance to naturalism is such an undying component of the Lojbanic spirit.

The preferred form of making loan words is type 3 fu’ivla, a mechanism which, while it works with almost no interference to the rest of the language, is about as clunky as saying “felis catus” instead of “cat”. However, type 4 fu’ivla provide a somewhat more naturalistic way of creating arbitrary words, with a flavour not unlike much of Finnegans Wake ;). Now, I really want to like type 4 fu’ivla, but the Lojban community’s animosity towards them is staggering. The attitude is sadly quite understandable, given Lojban’s current configuration, meaning that there is a certain point along the line of natural language likeness after which Lojban would gradually lose its identifying features.

I envision a hypothetical where the Lojban-speaking population grows faster than L education does. Consequently the language bifurcates into a formal/classical/clerical dialect, a form of the language which we know today, and an informal/vulgar/popular dialect, which abandons many of the strictures of the former whose sole purpose is disambiguation and machine-parseability, preferring to establish a conventional reading for most sentences (as with most natural languages).

At the end of the day, as can be said for many things in life, sometimes it’s better to just shut up and learn the language, a potentially enriching experience, in spite of the looming sense of incompleteness.