| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4] | Is it time we agreed on a gender-neutral singular pronoun?
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| | Phil Hand 
China
Local time: 18:33
Chinese to English
| Funny orthography in Chinese | Apr 9, 2015 |
The same need exists in Chinese, and is prompting some innovation, but doesn't seem to create the same amount of heartache.
The word for he/she in Chinese is "ta", but it is written in two different ways: 他 is he, with the person radical on the left; 她 is she, with the female radical on the left. Both pronounced identically. You can't use the "they" workaround, so some websites have taken to using English letters TA to represent the ambiguous pronunciation. Some avoid it with ci... See more The same need exists in Chinese, and is prompting some innovation, but doesn't seem to create the same amount of heartache.
The word for he/she in Chinese is "ta", but it is written in two different ways: 他 is he, with the person radical on the left; 她 is she, with the female radical on the left. Both pronounced identically. You can't use the "they" workaround, so some websites have taken to using English letters TA to represent the ambiguous pronunciation. Some avoid it with circumlocutions of varying degrees of politeness. I haven't seen 他/她.
It's definitely not just an English thing.
Edit: Here's Language Log on the phenomenon, from a couple of years ago http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10210
[Edited at 2015-04-09 02:04 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Balasubramaniam L.
India
Local time: 16:03
Member (2006)
English to Hindi
+ ...
SITE LOCALIZER | Some thoughts | Apr 9, 2015 |
Giles Watson wrote: Balasubramaniam L. wrote:
I wonder, how a language that is used so extensively developed such a major lacuna. Is it because such a need was not felt in earlier times? What new developments have taken place recently that this issue has suddenly become so evident in the English language?
The more languages are used, the more they develop, which is why English has changed faster than most other languages over the past few hundred years. The need for a sex-neutral singular English pronoun is a fairly recent phenomenon and one that has become widely perceived in the course of my own lifetime as part of a shift towards non-discriminatory default assumptions in public discourse. This has been reflected in the rhetoric of public language, of course, but while it is easy to substitute one noun or verb with a synonym that is perceived as being less discriminatory, pronouns require a little more time to establish themselves. The current leading sex-neutral candidates "it" and "they" have drawbacks when applied to individuals - "it" implies inanimateness; "they" has a lingering aftertaste of plurality - and while an entirely new non-sex-specific singular neuter pronoun might be desirable, there aren't really any serious contenders. I quite like "he or she or it", though, particularly if it is abbreviated to "h'orsh'it"
My own reading is that the basic pillars of languages were constructed very early in our evolution when the demands on languages were not so taxing, and the subsequent edifice of language was built over these pillars. A key pillar is pronouns. Early men (or humans to be gender neutral!) encountered mainly three situations while using languages - talking to himself (themselves/itself - pick your option for gender neutrality); talking to another person; and talking to a group. So language had three sets of pronouns - first person, second person and third person.
Regarding gender he found three situations - male, female and neither, for which coined he, she and it.
Now modern usage has added a third situation - an individual talking to a group individually. In this situation "they" proves to be inadequate, as it is a kind of one to one conversation, while also being a one to many conversation. This is why language has no pronoun for this situation and this is a grey area.
And this is why the only solution is to treat grammatical genders as different from human genders.
Coining a new pronoun is a near impossibility because as mentioned earlier, pronouns constitute the basic pillars of language over which a huge edifice has already been constructed. Changing the pillars would mean modification to the edifice above the pillars which is a near impossibility.
To take an analogy, roads, pavements, traffic islands, bus stands and a host of other road travel infrastructure are built under the basis assumption that traffic keeps to the right side of the road (except in the US where it keeps to the left). Now, if we change this basic assumption, we will have to redo our roads and affiliated infrastructure, which practically cannot be done. The simple solution is to live with traffic keeping to the right side of the road.
Same with the singular gender-neutral pronoun. We should learn to live with he being both a singular male pronoun as well as a singular gender-neutral pronoun in English. This can easily be done if we expand the meaning of "he" to include reference to singular, gender-neutral objects. Modifying the meaning of words and grammatical terms is much easier than introducing new terms, especially in the underbelly of languages into their basic units like pronouns, prepositions, articles and the like. Once you meddle with these, the character of languages itself changes and English would become a new language altogether.
Words routinely change their meaning in all languages and add and expand their meaning. So this is not an unknown phenomenon, and it would be much more practical to expand the meaning of "he" to include gender-neutral singular subjects.
This is the approach that languages like Hindi have taken. Here grammatical masculine forms are the default forms when the gender is unknown.
If for our own amusement, we would like to explore the option of coining a gender neutral singular pronoun, I would take off from Giles and suggest a simpler term than the one he has suggested -
shit!
In this, s is there for the women, h for the men, and it is there is full body.
The declensions would be
sher/shis (sher, incidentally in Hindi means lion, which might disqualify it in the eyes of die-hard feminists)
sherself/shiself (sherself has the above mentioned disadvantage; shiself is more compact and easier on the tongue)
This might be a solution for English, but what about other languages? I wonder if such neat solutions would even be possible there. At least in Hindi this won't work for reasons explained earlier.
So I have a professional axe to grind in this issue not being resolved in English by the coining of a new singular gender-neutral pronoun, and rather, English falls in line with other languages and makes the distinction between grammatical genders and human genders by expanding the meaning of "he". In much of the translation work, English functions as the intermediary language into which texts are first translated or written, and from there they are translated into other languages. So if English implements a solution that cannot be similarly implemented in other languages, that would create difficult translation situations for me, and I would rather KISS.
[Edited at 2015-04-09 10:49 GMT]
| | | | Andy Watkinson
Spain
Local time: 12:33
Member
Catalan to English
+ ...
| Seriously confused | Apr 9, 2015 |
A key pillar is pronouns. Early men (...) encountered mainly three situations while using languages -
talking to himself (...);
talking to another person;
and talking to a group.
So language had three sets of pronouns - firist person, second person and third person.
"Talking to yourself" is not the first person.
"Talking to a another person or group" is second. Where you get third person from is beyond me.
Unless of course, when you say "to" you actually mean "about". That would make sense.
Now modern usage has added a third situation - an individual talking a group individually. In this situation "they" proves to be inadequate, as it is a kind of one to one conversation, while also being a one to many conversation. This is why language has no pronoun for this situation and this is a grey area.
If an individual is taking to a group, in any form or fashion, this is indisputably second person.
Still confused.
Or maybe I'm enveloped in a " grey area".
To take an analogy, roads, (...) are built under the basis assumption that traffic keeps to the right side of the road (except in the US where it keeps to the left).
I feel compelled to request where exactly you get your information about the US from.
We should learn to live with he being both a singular male pronoun as well as a singular gender-neutral pronoun in English. This can easily be done if we expand the meaning of "he" to include reference to singular, gender-neutral objects.
You can't be serious, surely?
Q. Hi Andy, where's the car?
A. He's just round the corner.
And why should we "learn" to live with some contrived absurdity?
"They" has served us well for a few centuries....
[Edited at 2015-04-09 04:04 GMT]
| | | | | incidentally ... | Apr 9, 2015 |
English does have a gender-neutral personal pronoun: "one".
It's just a pain to use and rarely sounds right.
Other than that, I agree with everything Balasubramaniam says (particularly his views on which side of the road I drive on ... the other stuff was too profound for my puny mind), so I'm done posting here.
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Phil Hand wrote: The same need exists in Chinese, and is prompting some innovation, but doesn't seem to create the same amount of heartache. The word for he/she in Chinese is "ta", but it is written in two different ways: 他 is he, with the person radical on the left; 她 is she, with the female radical on the left. Both pronounced identically. You can't use the "they" workaround, so some websites have taken to using English letters TA to represent the ambiguous pronunciation. Some avoid it with circumlocutions of varying degrees of politeness. I haven't seen 他/她. It's definitely not just an English thing. Edit: Here's Language Log on the phenomenon, from a couple of years ago http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10210[Edited at 2015-04-09 02:04 GMT]
That story is heartbreaking.
| | | | Balasubramaniam L.
India
Local time: 16:03
Member (2006)
English to Hindi
+ ...
SITE LOCALIZER
Andy Watkinson wrote:
And why should we "learn" to live with some contrived absurdity?
"They" has served us well for a few centuries....
Because English has grown and spread so much around the globe that it is no longer the exclusive concern of English speakers.
It functions more as a link between other languages. Idiosyncrasies of English can affect these inter-lingual interactions to the detriment of world communication. It is therefore imperative that wayward development of the English language are curbed and its variations kept at manageable levels. This might even mean that English speakers will have to put up with some apparent quirkiness of the English language and align it with how other languages function.
[Edited at 2015-04-09 16:08 GMT]
| | | | Ty Kendall
United Kingdom
Local time: 11:33
Hebrew to English
| Good luck, you'll need it | Apr 9, 2015 |
Balasubramaniam L. wrote:
that wayward development of the English language are[?] curbed and its variations kept at manageable levels
Good luck with that.
Even languages which have dedicated academies whose purpose is to "curb wayward development" and "keep variations at manageable levels" fail miserably in this regard.
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