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Gender-neutral pronoun for "he/she" | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5838 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes  Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 41 of 74 14 November 2009 at 9:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks Chung - That would probably work. Good tip! The people in question aren't native English speakers anyway... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| pfwillard Pro Member United States Joined 5699 days ago 169 posts - 205 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 42 of 74 15 November 2009 at 3:35am | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree with the concept of rewriting to avoid this issue as much as possible. People get unreasonable about the pronouns.
I support the use of singular "their". History will absolve me. In no way is "him" or "his" considered neutral. If you are addressing professional women, they will let you know--the question is will they let you live... Better to be PC than unemployed, lads. Plenty of female mechanics, welders and mining engineers in the USA, by the way. As a American, "one" does not sound either archaic or pretentious to me and it is used a lot in speech. Phrases like "one would think" or "one would expect" are common. I did not know that it was reserved for the Crown. "You all", on the other had, I would avoid because it could be taken almost like a tutoiement in American anyway--not sure what it means in English. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| lynxrunner Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States crittercryptics.com Joined 5922 days ago 361 posts - 461 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish, Haitian Creole | Message 43 of 74 16 November 2009 at 4:51am | IP Logged | |||||
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"They" is the most common gender neutral pronoun in English. I've heard it all my life, read it in books, seen it on TV, had it taught to me... it seems like a natural replacement. Saying "he" is the normal pronoun just seems... silly. "A reader must read his book well." Why assume that the reader is male? "He" always refers to something masculine, whereas "they", whether singular or plural, is gender-neutral. Having a word that is both masculine and gender-neutral seems counter-intuitive.
One may say that having both a plural and singular 'they' is counter-intuitive, too. However, you can usually tell the plurality by the subject. "A student must read their book." Nobody would think that there is more than one student. Meanwhile... "A student must read his book." If we have 'he' as both a gender-neutral AND masculine pronoun, how are we supposed to know if this is genuinely referring to a student whose gender is male? I don't think it's too 'PC' to use singular 'they'. It's normal, has an established history, and it works well. He or she is cumbersome, and (if you really want to get into the nitty gritty) ignores people that identify as neither male or female. Singular 'they' is just all-aroudn awesome! As for other languages not having people making a big deal about it... well, most cultures of the world aren't exactly making an effort to be non-sexist. I can assure you that there is a lot of sexism in Latin America. Russia, from what I've read, is also a country with sexist values (or at least old-fashioned ideas about what men and women should do). Why would you expect anyone to care about sexism in the language? 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 44 of 74 16 November 2009 at 5:02am | IP Logged | |||||
With that kind of logic, lynxrunner, then sexism should be non-existent in communities which use languages such as Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Mongolian or Turkish... (in case you didn't know: these languages do not have grammatical gender and their pronouns do not distinguish between "he" and "she" as we know it in English and many other languages) The use of gender-neutral pronouns in a language should not be construed as a reliable indicator of enlightened attitudes concerning male-female relations in the relevant speech communities. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5765 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 45 of 74 16 November 2009 at 7:41am | IP Logged | |||||
But a self-conscious effort in a gender-non-neutral language is one. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 46 of 74 16 November 2009 at 3:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
Not really. Conscious effort shows that you're conscious of it, so you're clearly sexist. In another thread it was mentioned that "Chinaman" is considered racist. It is not inherently more racist that other "-man" nationalities (Frenchman, Dutchman etc) but it's the fact that it consciously makes a distinction that is seen by some as negative that makes it racist. So no-one really cares about it in Spanish because it isn't perceived as making a distinction -- the perception is that it's normal. And to those of you who say that the lack of singular/plural distinction in the 2nd person in English is a "fault" in the language, I would happily point out a flaw in your language: lack of 2nd person inclusion/exclusion in the third person plural. IE we (me and you) and we (me and other people but not you). That makes the language far more ambiguous than the 2nd person thing. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| lynxrunner Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States crittercryptics.com Joined 5922 days ago 361 posts - 461 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish, Haitian Creole | Message 47 of 74 17 November 2009 at 1:34am | IP Logged | |||||
I knew someone would say this and just completely miss my point. I am not saying that sexism is restricted to languages that determine sex in any person. I am saying that making the masculine pronoun the gender neutral pronoun is sexist. Mandarin chinese (can't say anything about the other chinese languages) does not mark a different between he or she, it's the same pronoun when spoken (though not the same character). Is the Chinese society sexist? Heck yeah! Is it lingustically sexist? In this case, no.
I would like to clear up this point. I am speaking about languages that have sexist components to them; for example, making 'he' the norm and 'she' the other. When used like that, English is a sexist language. This does not mean that English-speaking cultures are more or less sexist than Chinese-speaking cultures or Finnish-speaking cultures. It means that the English language itself has sexist components. In any case, we shouldn't go on with this. I can see it taking an ugly turn very quickly and I wouldn't like this topic to be closed. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 48 of 74 17 November 2009 at 2:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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I didn't miss your point, lynxrunner, but you are omitting what has happened when the development of a language is being pushed by a relatively small group within the speech community. In this case, the trouble that I have with the connection as presented above is that has been very open to perversion by radical feminist thought which aims to impose gender-neutrality in cases where it is etymologically unsound.
Off the top of my head, I remember reading some time ago about complaints concerning the word "history". Monolingual English-speaking feminists felt that since the meaning of "history" is the study of the past of all humans (this is true), it then followed that it was sexist or exclusionary to have such a word begin with "his-". They failed (or even worse, refused) to realize that the word "history" is a loanword of Greek origin that entered English via Latin and Old French intermediation. The Greek source 'historia' means "learning or knowing any inquiry, record, narrative", it has nothing to do with some compound using folk-etymology of "his" plus "story". Another thing is that gender distinction in language is something that human cultures have been practicing for a long time (some more than others). This is all long before contemporary concerns in feminism or humanism came about. Gender distinction in language is something that can also be put on a spectrum, with some languages going so far as to be set up so that when discussing or describing something, women must use a variant drawn from a certain stock of words or grammatical features, while men use another variant that avoids the stock that is deemed "feminine" (Japanese has something like this, but its rigidity has faded from earlier times because of the Westernization of Japan) Lastly, languages tend to divide or "organize" objects or concepts in their environments using some sort of criterion - it's just that the gendered division is very common. Other ways to organize things including differentiating between animate and inanimate (think of English where we distinguish "he/she" from "it") or some other way (there's an Australian Aboriginal language whose division of nouns is four-way and even includes a class for edible fruits and vegetables). As Cainntear hinted at, the idea of "sexist" components really depends on some sort of perception from the speech community itself. If a society is trying to signal some sort of gender equality in its communicative code by moving toward levelling of pronouns, that means that somehow, many speakers (if not the majority) have developed some sort of consciousness that current means of expression are "bad" or sexist. However this kind of "gender-neutering" would run into a lot of problems in languages that have grammatical gender. Any changes to this type would have to take much more time (for example, grammatical gender in English didn't disappear until at least in Middle English). It's also an understandable step to begin questioning the virtue of assigning gender to inanimate nouns (ignoring the effects on declension and perhaps even typology). I don't see anything inherently wrong with these kinds of divisions be they gendered or not since I've studied languages that can be placed on various points of the this linguistic gender spectrum and function for their speech communities. I really only see these schemes as ways of organizing things. These schemes aren't inherently malicious or useless for producing language. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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