In 1765, Joachim Faiguet de Villeneuve invented two genderless third-person pronouns, lo (singular) and zo (plural), for an artificial language that he called Langue nouvelle, or ‘new language.’ English didn’t catch up until 1841, when Francis Augustus Brewster coined e, es, and em.
Faiguet was an accountant—his day job, which he did not quit, was trésorier, or treasurer, of the region of Châlons-en-Champagne—and in his free time he invented a portable oven for feeding soldiers on maneuvers and published a scheme for making the poor do community service on Sunday afternoons to keep them from idle temptations. He also contributed several articles to Diderot’s Encyclopedia, including one on Langue nouvelle, where he sketched out his modest goal. Langue nouvelle was an artificial language that would be easy to learn and perfectly regular—a stripped-down shorthand of a language rather than the more-ambitious universal languages proposed by John Wilkins or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who wanted to arrange human knowledge into categories, create a logical grammar that allowed no variation, and ditch the alphabet for a new set of written symbols that reflected meaning, not sound. Such a language—transparent and free from ambiguity—would allow anyone to say or write anything and be immediately understood by everyone else, no matter what their first or natural language was.
Meanwhile, back on earth, Faiguet's Langue nouvelle was not for everyone. It was more like a secret language that would only be understood by a few who possessed the key. But it was simple, a lot simpler than Wilkins' Real Character, and certainly simpler than French. It had one set of conjugations. No articles. No agreement of adjectives with their nouns. Only -s to mark the plural. And no gender. No gender for nouns. No gender for adjectives or past participles. And no gender for pronouns.
Here are Faiguet’s pronouns: jo, to, lo for the singulars (I, you, he, she, or it), and no, vo, zo for the plurals (we, you, they). He does not explain why the possessive of lo is se—perhaps it’s to avoid confusion with the French definite article le, but of course Langue nouvelle is not French; the language has no articles; and Faiguet supplies no possessive form for plural zo. It turns out that like the natural languages they are intended to supplement or even replace, artificial languages are inconsistent, variable, illogical, and once in a while, downright obscure.
Faiguet’s pronouns, from Denis Diderot, ed., L’Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, tome 9 (1765), p. 271 (from the Getty Research Institute, used by permission).
Despite Faiguet’s prodding, French never did go gender-free or even gender-optional, although recent proposals for gender-neutral pronouns brought down the wrath of the Académie française, which must be a sign that the language is finally bending toward inclusivity.
Although Faiguet’s invented language did away with gender altogether, the early reformers of English grammar never pushed that option. Instead they tried to correct the gender inequities in the pronoun system not by replacing he and she with a non-gendered pronoun, but by adding a gender-neutral option. The obvious choice was singular they, in common use both by literary giants and ordinary speakers and writers since the 14th century, but from the 18th century until the early 2000s, most grammarians marked singular they as an error. And everybody regarded the conjoined phrase he or she as awkward and repetitive. Most grammarians (most, but not all of them, were men) were content with generic he, but starting in the 1780s, writers began to complain that he left out half the people: there were just too many examples where he wasn’t generic, it was code for “no women allowed.”
Despite calls for pronoun reform from such well-known figures as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Stuart Mill, English remained without a coined, ungendered pronoun until 1841, when Francis Augustus Brewster came up with e, es, and em.
Like Faiguet before him, Brewster also had a day job: he received his M.D. from Yale in 1840. But medicine left him with time on his hands, so after graduation Brewster wrote an English grammar. The self-published book didn’t sell: the only remaining copy of Brewster’s English Grammar seems to be at Yale, and that's only because the proud alum gave them a copy. And it’s not clear that anyone ever checked the grammar out until I found it two years ago (after I brought it to their attention, the Yale librarians put it in their rare books collection).
Brewster’s goal was to reduce English to a few rules—he called his grammar “both simple and concise”—though unlike Faiguet, his pronoun system preserved the conventional gender binaries, the masculine he and feminine she. But Brewster also provided the long-desired gender-neutral pronoun, which he labeled “masculor feminine,” a term not found in any other grammar. That in itself is a big deal, because masculofemina is Latin for ‘man-woman, or hermaphrodite,' and intentional or not, Brewster's use of the term is surely the first hint at nonbinary gender in an English grammar book.
Brewster's coinage remains a mystery: he never explained how or why he settled on e, es, and em, he just presented his masculor feminine coinages as if they had always been English pronouns.
Brewster’s paradigm of the singular masculor feminine pronouns e, es, em, from the sole remaining copy of his grammar, p. 19 (Yale University Library, used by permission).
Brewster’s pronouns didn’t make a splash, no doubt because his book sat unread for almost 180 years, but the pronoun coining bug eventually caught on. Between 1858 and 1912, coiners came up with 70 gender-neutral pronouns, some of them invented independently more than once. These include thon (1858), er (1863), ve and ze (1864), se (1874), ip (1884), zie (1890), and heer, hiser, himer (1911-12). More recently, the need for nonbinary pronouns has refocused attention on the English pronoun system and these early gender-neutral coinages. To date there have been well over 200 invented pronouns, and although a few of them have gained some traction, none besides singular they has ever achieved widespread use. But until someone finds an earlier coinage, e, es, and em hold the record as the earliest coined genderless English pronouns.
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If you'd like to learn more about the history of gender pronouns, pick up a copy of my new book, What's your pronoun? Beyond he and she, available from Liveright/W.W. Norton here, or wherever you buy or borrow books.
