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With Chinese the situation is well that in spoken language, the pronouns aren’t gendered, but in written language, they are. This was as a European influence, I believe.
All of these are third-person pronouns read as “tā” in Standard Chinese:
- 他 - masculine, originally/occasionally gender-neutral human; human radical
- 她 - feminine; woman radical
- 牠 - animate non-human, Traditional usage; cow radical
- 它 - inanimate; animate non-human in Simplified usage; historically general
- 祂 - divine, primarily Abrahamic usage; spirit radical
- TA - gender-neutral, also used in other letter case forms
- X也 - gender-neutral, handwritten form has no Unicode support
In Finnish there are hän (he/she) and se (it). In spoken Finnish people often use only se-pronoun even when talking about people.
In Dutch, “they” is the same word as “she” (ze/zij), even though the use is different. To resolve this, people who want to use a gender neutral pronoun have switched to using the Accusative “them” (hen), which is even more awkward in sentences.
Just do what humans have always done: make up a new word. The pushback from assholes will be exactly the same anyway.
Kind of funny how you say that in Dutch people are using hen, because hen has ended up being the Norwegian gender-neutral pronoun as well, but for completely different reasons. We imported hen from the Swedes I think in the early 2000s, but I only first heard about hen I think earlier this decade; the Swedes, in turn, imported hen from the Finns in the 1960s, although I think it was only in the 1990s when the use of hen in Swedish really started taking off.
The reason why hen became so successful in Norwegian is because “he” translates as han and “she” translates as hun, so a gender-neutral pronoun having the same consonants but a different vowel from the gendered pronouns is a no-brainer, right?
The Finnish pronoun hän, which refers to a singular human being regardless of gender, originated as an alteration of Proto-Finno-Ugric *sän, so you can see that hän is a close relative of the Northern Sámi pronoun son, which is used as a general third-person singular pronoun. And this relationship between hän and son is funny to me, because when I was a teenager, I proposed making Northern Sámi part of the mandatory school curriculum in Norway. The reason why I proposed this was, among other things, so that we could more easily import a gender-neutral pronoun from Northern Sámi — and end the whole gender-neutrality debate feeling a bit foolish about how we’ve lived our lives so unaware of our northern indigenous friends that we didn’t even notice that they’d had all this stuff sorted out since forever!
So while my teenage plan didn’t end up happening, Norwegians instead borrowed a close relative of the pronoun I proposed, from a close relative of that language. So I was this close to getting it right!
Some Norwegians instead prefer using singular de instead of hen, essentially as a loan translation of the English singular they. This is kind of funny to me, given the Norse history of they in English, and given the historical use of De as a second-person formal pronoun in Norwegian.
In any case, I like what you say about how “the pushback from assholes will be the same anyway”. I think that with these sorts of things, there will always be a lot of awkward-sounding proposals at first, until the speech community ends up honing in on one of the proposals through simple evolution, when there is enough of a need for standardization for that sort of honing to happen. And once that honing happens, what might’ve initially sounded awkward to your ears starts to just sound normal, because that’s just how the language is now.
Shklee/Shkler
@WtfEvenIsExistence In Romanian we use “coaie”. It’s the most gender inclusive pronoun ❤ ❤
(Edit: linked to urban dictionary for context)
Gender is just a grammar thing anyways.
I have no problem with ditching the grammar rule as a synonym for sex.
So from now on men and women should really only refer to sex, and that’s fine. People don’t have genders anyways, words do.
You are the second person today I explain the etymological fallacy to on this platform. While the origin of the word gender is in regard to words (at least in English, the etymology goes back to meaning something like category), it long since refers to people and not only words. Believe it or not but words change their meanings.
