Not sure this is technically a social issue. Strictly speaking, it's a linguistic issue.
Anyway, here's the question: what do people here think about gender-based pronouns? I mean, we have only one second-person pronoun (you) that is independent of gender. Plural pronouns are also independent of gender. Nouns and verbs (in English) are never conjugated for gender. So, why do we have gender-specific third-person pronouns? (He, she; him, her; his, hers; etc.)
I don't know too much about other languages. I know that in Spanish most nouns have gender, but that has little to do with human sex (for example, a table is feminine and a book is masculine). In Japanese, they have male and female pronouns, but the subject is frequently omitted, therefore reducing the effect gender-specific pronouns might have.
Are there other languages that have only gender-neutral personal pronouns? Personally, I think that it'd be a big step toward erasing sexism, heterosexim, and discrimination against transgendered people if we would use gender-neutral pronouns. The language a person speaks has a great impact on how that person thinks.
One could say one is happy or sad?
Personally I try to avoid he or she whenever possible unless I'm specifically referring to an individual.
AFAIK any Indo-European language will have masc and fem 3ps pronouns and many will have retained the neuter one.
QuotePlural pronouns are also independent of gender.
Not always, eg French ils/elles.
QuoteI think that it'd be a big step toward erasing sexism, heterosexim, and discrimination against transgendered people if we would use gender-neutral pronouns.
Why destroy a useful distinction just for political correctness? Even if a major campaign over a century could achieve the change. Fashion and politeness have already destroyed or hijacked the singular/plural "you" differences in most European languages. The useful dual/plural distinction has vanished everywhere. Let's hang on to what we've got.
Quote from: Tank on December 16, 2011, 04:45:33 PM
One could say one is happy or sad?
Personally I try to avoid he or she whenever possible unless I'm specifically referring to an individual.
"One" does work. It would be nice to see that (or some other word) become more mainstream, though. Using it now, one comes across as stuffy and academic. Also, it could be confused with the numeral 1.
Quote from: OldGit on December 16, 2011, 04:53:15 PM
AFAIK any Indo-European language will have masc and fem 3ps pronouns and many will have retained the neuter one.
QuotePlural pronouns are also independent of gender.
Not always, eg French ils/elles.
Sorry, I meant in English.
Quote
QuoteI think that it'd be a big step toward erasing sexism, heterosexim, and discrimination against transgendered people if we would use gender-neutral pronouns.
Why destroy a useful distinction just for political correctness? Even if a major campaign over a century could achieve the change. Fashion and politeness have already destroyed or hijacked the singular/plural "you" differences in most European languages. The useful dual/plural distinction has vanished everywhere. Let's hang on to what we've got.
Japanese doesn't distinguish between singular and plural, and that's not a big deal to them. I mean, it really isn't any huge distinction anyway. We only distinguish between 1 and "more than 1". So, a plural is very ambiguous since it could mean 2 or 200,000, which is a big difference. Including 1 in the mix wouldn't be all that different, really. We're just trained to think that because the language we speak differentiates between singular and plural.
Also, I don't see why the need to distinguish between the two sexes is so important. We don't have personal pronouns to distinguish tall from short, fat from skinny, gay from straight, or any other classification. So, why distinguish between male and female? I wouldn't suggest such a change in the interest of political correctness, but in fact in contention with your assertion--because it is unnecessary. As for me personally, the only time I've ever found the distinctions "he" and "she" give are when I'm talking about a married couple. Then I can say "he" as a shortcut for "the husband" and "she" to mean "the wife". However, with more and more gay couples being open (and married), this has no benefit, since "he" or "she" could refer to both members of the couple. Aside from this one scenario, I've never found the need to distinguish between male and female. I use the appropriate 3rd-person pronoun because that is the societal (and linguistic) norm, but not because I find it useful to know whether the person being discussed is male or female.
Quote from: OldGit on December 16, 2011, 04:53:15 PM
Why destroy a useful distinction just for political correctness? Even if a major campaign over a century could achieve the change. Fashion and politeness have already destroyed or hijacked the singular/plural "you" differences in most European languages. The useful dual/plural distinction has vanished everywhere. Let's hang on to what we've got.
This ^
I've grown accustomed to using "he/his and she/her" instead of "he/his" for any generic person in English, but when it comes to other languages, the distinction is actually part of it. ???
It would seem odd to give a word with a masculine pronoun a feminine or neutral one.
Do you speak any romance language? Or German (that I know also has this feature...)They're not exactly on comparable grounds with English since the latter doesn't have that characteristic.
Edited to add: Disconsider everything I said. I was half asleep before I realised that I had confused a few things ;D (poor neurons of mine have been fried repeatably this whole semester... ::) )
There was a queer theorist who tried to come up with a whole new "neuter" language, but it didn't really work. I don't remember the individual's name.
My wife is Chinese. The word for he in Mandarin is "ta" and the word for she in Mandarin is "ta" spelt differently by sounding the same. So I think it was difficult for her to grasp the concept of "he" or "she", this made it difficult for me at times when she was talking about her siblings, I was often confused whether she was talking about her brother or her sister.
When speaking "you", the person generally knows you are talking about them, there really is no need to put a gender onto it, and sometimes it is best if you don't as with some people, unfortunately you might get it wrong.
If this is a problem in English isn't it worse in French where items have gender?
The parent Indo-European language assigned one of three genders - masculine, feminine or neuter - to every noun. This situation persisted in its earliest recorded descendants, like Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Primitive Germanic. Some languages, like Russian, German, Rumanian, Gaelic, still keep this feature unchanged. All Latin-derived languages except Rumanian have lost the neuter, assigning its nouns to the masculine. Most Germanic languages have simplified it to common and neuter, common being masculine and feminine coalesced. English is pretty well unique in Western Europe in that we have abandoned gender in all inanimate nouns.
NB
1. PLEASE don't call neuter 'neutral'. It hurts. >:(
2. Don't point out that ships are called she. It's not the same phenomenon and makes us linguistic historians reach for a heavy object to throw. ;D
OK, now we've got that out of the way - yes, all IE languages (AFAIK) make pronouns and nouns agree in gender. It's very, very useful in communication and bugger political correctness!
Quote from: OldGit on December 17, 2011, 10:39:11 AM
English is pretty well unique in Western Europe in that we have abandoned gender in all inanimate nouns.
Ah, eunuch universe, dickless by diction, wombless by wording, bereft of anima and animus thenceforward, a grayer golem.
Hmm? Oh, don't mind me, just being turgid for the Pudding's benefit. ;)
Quote from: OldGit on December 17, 2011, 10:39:11 AM
NB
1. PLEASE don't call neuter 'neutral'. It hurts. >:(
2. Don't point out that ships are called she. It's not the same phenomenon and makes us linguistic historians reach for a heavy object to throw. ;D
Sorry OldGit ;D I've become quite good at taking a shot at linguists, though psycholinguists in particular.
Quote from: OldGit on December 17, 2011, 10:39:11 AM
The parent Indo-European language assigned one of three genders - masculine, feminine or neuter - to every noun. This situation persisted in its earliest recorded descendants, like Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Primitive Germanic. Some languages, like Russian, German, Rumanian, Gaelic, still keep this feature unchanged. All Latin-derived languages except Rumanian have lost the neuter, assigning its nouns to the masculine. Most Germanic languages have simplified it to common and neuter, common being masculine and feminine coalesced. English is pretty well unique in Western Europe in that we have abandoned gender in all inanimate nouns.
Yes, I took Russian for a couple of years in University, and I found having to "genderize" everything to be very strange. It's definitely more prevalent in Russian than in French (another language I am faintly acquainted with) and both of those languages more-so than English.
Grammar.....*sigh* still the opening post seemed interesting, so it might be worth it to wreck my brains a bit to give even a partial answer.
Now that i think about it, finnish is a rather non-gender specific language in the way that we use the same word for "he/she", hän (for those who don't know, 'ä' is pronounced the same way as 'a' in 'apple' or 'I am'). even in plural it is "hänen" or "his" and "her/hers".
and this is where my understanding just falls appart. to give you some idea why, here are the pronouns in finnish and their categories:
1.Persoonapronominit
minä, sinä, hän, me, te, he
(I/me, you, he/she, we, you, they)
2.Demonstratiivipronominit
tämä, tuo, se, nämä, nuo, ne
(this, that, it, these, those, them/those)
3.Interrogatiivipronominit
kuka, (ken), mikä, kumpi (ja kumpainen)
(who, (whom), what, which one/other then?)
4.Relatiivipronominit
joka, mikä
(that, what)
5.Indefiniittipronomineja ovat muun muassa
joka, jokainen, joku, jompikumpi, jokin, kukin, mikin, kumpikin, kumpainenkin, kukaan, kenkään, mikään, kumpikaan, kumpainenkaan, eräs, muuan, itse, kaikki, molemmat, moni, muu, muutama, toinen, sama, samainen, ainoa, usea, harva
(that, each/everyone, someone, some thing, each, ..., both, both/each one, anyone, anyone, what ever, either, either one, someone, someone certain, -self, all, both, many, other, few, other, same, exact same, only one, many/a number of, few)
Refleksiivipronomini
itse (hän satutti itsensä)
(-self (he/she hurt himself/herself))
Resiprookkipronomini
toinen (toinen toistaan)
(other ((both)each other)
Quick translations by me. I have no idea if this was along the lines of the thread or not and currently my brains hurt too much to care. Hope it has given some food for thought though ;D
finnish is a Urlic language, btw, but I don't know this craziness is a result of that or if it's just us....
As you say, yours is one of the four non-Indo-European languages in Europe, so it's not surprising that it differs from IE concerning gender. I know none of it, so I am fascinated and grateful for a sight of those pronouns. It's fascinating that minä and hän/he look like relatives of their Germanic counterparts. I know you've borrowed words from Germanic throughout history (rengas/ring goes back to prehistory); but pronouns are fundamental.
Quote from: history_geek on December 17, 2011, 07:24:53 PM
finnish is a Urlic language...
Whoa, really? Finlland is farther away than I thought, then, if this is accurate: http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Urlic
Quote from: Pharaoh Cat on December 17, 2011, 11:34:41 PM
Quote from: history_geek on December 17, 2011, 07:24:53 PM
finnish is a Urlic language...
Whoa, really? Finlland is farther away than I thought, then, if this is accurate: http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Urlic
Whoops, a minor mispelling there ;D Uralic, as it were :P
However, what i found interesting was that accoarding to that source, Ukko was a homeplanet of an all-female librarians race.... :o Talk about a whole new twist, as Ukko was the name of the old Finnish Over-god who was also known as Perkele ;)
@OldGit: True, we have a good number of borrowed words, but I would suspect that at least some of them also come from our slavic neigbours, although the transaction with them has been a little, let's say, less...stable when compared to our contacts to the west.
Further more, I would like to point out that this is the so called "book language", that very few people use in their everyday life, unless in a formal reception or something. Insted we use a number of dialects, that are classified in a way by ones home area (for me it would be Keski-Pohjanmaan murre, aka Middle-Ostrobothnia diealect), though even then each town might have it's own variation or a mix of dialects, like mine is a apparently a mix of M-Ostrobothnian and South-Ostrobothnian.
In a wider use, most people use "mä" and "sä" instead of "minä" and "sinä". And from there it really starts to get weird. One example is that I might say that "Nysse tulee", "Nyt se tulee" = "Here/Now it comes/arrives". But to a person from Savo area would understand it as "Bus is comming/arriving". It's a headache as written language (thanks Agricola!), but as a spoken language it can be a ton of fun, because a word in one diealect can mean something slightly different in another. The result is sometimes a bit like the Abbot and Castello comedy act of "Who's on first?", though it usually doesn't take that long to figure out what the other means. And all of this without a drop of alcohol, ladies and getlemen ;D after a few drinks....oh dear....
And let's not forget that we also have a second official language, swedish which is another headache and a source of a lot of loanwords for us people on the western coast. A good example would be "praatata" as opposed to the swedish word "prata" and 'book finnish' "puhua".
Mitä nuo ukot sielä praataa tähän aikahan?
Mitä ne (vanhat) miehet siellä puhuvat tähän aikaan?
What are those (old) men talking [about] at this hour/time?
Fascinating insights. Do these dialects merge into Estonian, and how close are some of them to the Sami dialects? After that, your only large cousin is Hungarian. Turkish is also distantly related to you, and a teacher of Japanese at SOAS told me that Japanese seems to be close to the Eastern end of the Ural-Altaic languages.
BTW when I spoke of your borrowings from Germanic, I meant that branch of Scandinavian which is now Swedish. That word prata even turns up in Dutch and gives English prate. Obviously puhua has no reflex at all in Germanic.
Pity I never learned any Finnish, but alas, that goes for many others. :'( I once had a brief affair with a Finnish girl who taught me to count up to ten, but I've forgotten even that. (We used German.)
Quote from: OldGit on December 18, 2011, 09:34:27 AM
Fascinating insights. Do these dialects merge into Estonian, and how close are some of them to the Sami dialects? After that, your only large cousin is Hungarian. Turkish is also distantly related to you, and a teacher of Japanese at SOAS told me that Japanese seems to be close to the Eastern end of the Ural-Altaic languages.
BTW when I spoke of your borrowings from Germanic, I meant that branch of Scandinavian which is now Swedish. That word prata even turns up in Dutch and gives English prate. Obviously puhua has no reflex at all in Germanic.
Pity I never learned any Finnish, but alas, that goes for many others. :'( I once had a brief affair with a Finnish girl who taught me to count up to ten, but I've forgotten even that. (We used German.)
No our dialects do not merge into estonia, as it is a language all on to it's own. Though it is undoubtetly the closest of our cousin languages, i can say from personal experience, that to most of us Finns it is at best semi-understandable, and at worst little better then gibberish. We do have a number of shared words that even have the same meaning, but there are many more that don't. An example with a humorous note was when two Finns were visiting Estonia and chanced on a dubbed Clint Eastwood movie. they basicly giggled the hole way through because of the language differences, but finally lost it compleatly as clint was standing on a buildings front, looked around and said: "Kussa on mun hopotiti?" "Where is my horse?" Firstly, "kussa" would translate to us as "missä", though it could be understood as a bit old fashioned word, much like he had asked "Where art..." in english. Secondly, "hopotiti" is not a word in finnish, we use "hevonen" instead, though the pronaunciation makes it sound comedic, let alone when said in all seriousness by a person like Eastwood xD
Anyway, the biggest similarity between our languages is the pronounciation. Other the that, we only have a few words that we understand, and I have no idea about the grammar.
Sami is it's own language as well, though as I understand it the Lapp diealect is a strong mixture of both sami and finnish. But that's pretty much it.
And yes, hungarian is another cousin language that we apparenytly also share words with, though the meanings seem to be way off. for example paska in finnish means "shit" but in hungarian I think it was a form of greeting or something along those lines. :o The part about turkish was news to me, but I've noticed the similarity in pronaunciation in japanese, though I can't tell if we share any other linguistic similarities.
I think I should also mention that there are a number of other finnic-languages, which means that they are closely related to us, but still theit own languages. The Ingrian, Karelian, Ludic, Veps, and Votic are all related to our langauge, and there's one called Mäenkieli in northern Sweden and and Kven in Norway that are finnic and have been recogniced as indpendent languages. Google them for more information ;)
The word "puhua" is te original finnish word, while "prata" is loaned from swedish, was my point in my previous post ;) and there are many more words that we have borrowed from swedish, but also from German and English, the latter being the most recent source of loan words. For example word like "seivata" (to "save" for example in a computer game, or a soccer goalkeeper cathing the ball sucessfully from an especially close call), and a number of other small words are creeping their way into the everyday use, especially with the younger generations (though personally I "seivaan" quite often ;) ).
Aye, finnish is a bit of a hard anguage to learn or get into because of the insane grammar and the fact that rarely anyone speaks the "book language". :-\
But to cheer you up:
Yksi - Ein - One
Kaksi - Zwei - Two
Kolme - Drei - Three
Neljä - Vier - Four
Viisi - Fünf - Five
Kuusi - Sechs - Six
Seitseman - Sieben - Seven
Kahdeksan - Acht - Eight
Yhdeksän - Neun - Nine
Kymmenen - Zehn - Ten
;)
In some transgender communities, sie(zie in American) and hir are used as gender neutral personal pronouns. You can get accustomed to them pretty quickly, but it hasn't spread.
The more recent thread on this topic seems to be unavailable, so. . .
"2015 Word of the Year is singular 'they'" |
American Dialect Society (http://www.americandialect.org/2015-word-of-the-year-is-singular-they)
QuoteIn its 26th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted for they used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun as the Word of the Year for 2015. They was recognized by the society for its emerging use as a pronoun to refer to a known person, often as a conscious choice by a person rejecting the traditional gender binary of he and she.
Presiding at the Jan. 8 voting session were ADS Executive Secretary Allan Metcalf of MacMurray College and Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. Zimmer is also executive editor of Vocabulary.com and language columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
The use of singular they builds on centuries of usage, appearing in the work of writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen. In 2015, singular they was embraced by the Washington Post style guide. Bill Walsh, copy editor for the Post, described it as "the only sensible solution to English's lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun."
[Continues . . . (http://www.americandialect.org/2015-word-of-the-year-is-singular-they)]
The list of candidates for the 2015 "Word of the Year": Nominations (PDF) (http://www.americandialect.org/wp-content/uploads/2015-WOTY-nominations.pdf)
Quote from: Recusant on January 13, 2016, 12:24:26 AM
.....
........
The list of candidates for the 2015 "Word of the Year": Nominations (PDF) (http://www.americandialect.org/wp-content/uploads/2015-WOTY-nominations.pdf)
^^^
:snicker:
MOST UNNECESSARY:
dadbod: flabby physique of a typical dad
LEAST LIKELY TO SUCCEED:
Berniementum: momentum behind the candidacy of Bernie Sanders
MOST CREATIVE:
ammosexual: someone who loves firearms in a fetishistic manner.
Quote from: OldGit on December 17, 2011, 10:39:11 AM
2. Don't point out that ships are called she. It's not the same phenomenon and makes us linguistic historians reach for a heavy object to throw. ;D
Some people call their cars "she" as well. The Asmo's Dietrich the Opel, however, is a he. Mostly in protest.
So far, so technical, but when I used to say to my mum,
'The nurse is due and he/she will expect you to be in the bathroom,'
the gender of the nurse was not a politcal issue, merely the correct label. I do use 'they' but it's not entirely satisfactory. If you don't say she/he or they, and just lazily use 'she' you get accused of gender stereotyping.
For me this topic is quite an interesting one. I've got a friend, who is queer and uses both a female and male name and pronouns. Since it'd be really weird to change the pronoun we use to refer to them from time to time, everyone uses the female one and thus indirectly categorize them. Now, in English there's 'they, them, their, themselves', which can be used as a neutral pronoun but as far as I know there's no equivalent to this in German. So, I guess this must be a bit upsitting for my friend and other gender-nonconforming people.
Another really interesting thing is the German indefinite pronoun 'man' (strongly similar to the noun 'Mann'). Some feminists started to use 'frau' ('woman') or 'mensch' ('human'). So, there's kind of a pronoun battle going on. In fact, sometimes I read through my texts asking myself whether or not they're discriminating someone.
It's important to be aware of this matter but sometimes I get the feeling the whole thing ends up in a linguistic battle. So, while some people start complicating everything by applying 'equality-rules' a normal mortal has no ideas of, I think we should simplicate the story and thus get the whole mess sorted again - even if it's just declaring certain words/endings officially neutral.
And students should be made aware of the socio-cultural impact of language early.
Talking about Finnish btw when we complained during German classes in lower secondary school, once a teacher told us to just stop it and be happy that we wouldn't have to learn Finnish and it's 16 cases. :P Would find it kind of interesting, though.