doing a friendly chat with hillary clinton, a war criminal who is directly responsible for countless deaths abroad and at home, while making a career as an edgy radical left video essayist is incredibly hilarious pic.twitter.com/a9Y2nh4ePe— ☀️👀 (@zei_squirrel) September 19, 2022
他 isn't neutral anymore, but it was until the 20th century. I don't think that's the reactionary part of your post though, so much as insisting that the entire writing system is full of "nastiness, sexism and transphobia" without further clarification.
她 is "she". The 女 part of the character means "woman". It is a pictograph of a woman holding a child. As if all women can have children. It's sexist and transphobic. I could go on, but suffice it to say that the entire hanzi system of characters has this shit baked into it and none of it will ever go away without outside action. Mao tried but couldn't get it done.
You're confusing 她 with 好, which is where the whole "woman holding a child" etymology comes from. 也 isn't a child. In modern Chinese, it means "also" while in classical Chinese, it's used as an emphatic final particle like modern Japanese よ. The radical for child is 子, as you can see in the oracle bone script which looks like a pictogram of a child raising their arms.
Both versions of 他 and 她 are phono-semantic characters like the vast majority of Chinese characters, where one radical denotes phonetic meaning while another radical denotes semantic meaning. In this case, 也 is the phonetic radical. It doesn't make sense in Mandarin (you're comparing ta1 vs ye3), but in old Chinese, 他 and 也 were a lot similar in pronunciation.
女 doesn't have anything related to children going by the oracle bone script either. Neither does 母, which means mother in modern Chinese.
Mao tried but couldn’t get it done.
Because it was an absolutely terrible idea that almost no one else other than weirdos who stan the Gang of 4 too hard during the Cultural Revolution would agree with. And it's quite convenient that "reactionary" hanzi has to be discarded for the "progressive" script used by imperialists that sacked the Old Summer Palace during the Century of Humiliation.
You literally just need to replace the problematic characters with new characters. Like, you don't have to ditch the entire system. What kind of ultra nonsense is that?
And the English word "woman" comes from the social role of "wife". Should we discard that as sexist as well? How many people actually look at 女 and think "that's a mother, and cannot refer to trans women."?
The (lamentable) fact that Mao's writing system reform failed is probably evidence enough that hanzi is unlikely to be abandoned in our lifetimes.
For digital communication at least, you can convert hanzi to pinyin and back very easily, that's what I do when I don't just need ASAP machine translation...
Just use a non European language, no conlang required
Chinese "ta"s keep winning.
Removed by mod
Lmao yes we must abolish the Chinese languages.
Mao tried to abolish characters. It didn't take, unfortunately.
Mod removed my post explaining that the Chinese "ta" isn't neutral whatsoever.
"The writing system must be reformed; we must move in the direction of a globally unified phonetic spelling system."
-- People's Daily, 20th of December, 1977
他 isn't neutral anymore, but it was until the 20th century. I don't think that's the reactionary part of your post though, so much as insisting that the entire writing system is full of "nastiness, sexism and transphobia" without further clarification.
她 is "she". The 女 part of the character means "woman". It is a pictograph of a woman holding a child. As if all women can have children. It's sexist and transphobic. I could go on, but suffice it to say that the entire hanzi system of characters has this shit baked into it and none of it will ever go away without outside action. Mao tried but couldn't get it done.
You're confusing 她 with 好, which is where the whole "woman holding a child" etymology comes from. 也 isn't a child. In modern Chinese, it means "also" while in classical Chinese, it's used as an emphatic final particle like modern Japanese よ. The radical for child is 子, as you can see in the oracle bone script which looks like a pictogram of a child raising their arms.
Both versions of 他 and 她 are phono-semantic characters like the vast majority of Chinese characters, where one radical denotes phonetic meaning while another radical denotes semantic meaning. In this case, 也 is the phonetic radical. It doesn't make sense in Mandarin (you're comparing ta1 vs ye3), but in old Chinese, 他 and 也 were a lot similar in pronunciation.
女 doesn't have anything related to children going by the oracle bone script either. Neither does 母, which means mother in modern Chinese.
Because it was an absolutely terrible idea that almost no one else other than weirdos who stan the Gang of 4 too hard during the Cultural Revolution would agree with. And it's quite convenient that "reactionary" hanzi has to be discarded for the "progressive" script used by imperialists that sacked the Old Summer Palace during the Century of Humiliation.
You literally just need to replace the problematic characters with new characters. Like, you don't have to ditch the entire system. What kind of ultra nonsense is that?
And the English word "woman" comes from the social role of "wife". Should we discard that as sexist as well? How many people actually look at 女 and think "that's a mother, and cannot refer to trans women."?
The (lamentable) fact that Mao's writing system reform failed is probably evidence enough that hanzi is unlikely to be abandoned in our lifetimes.
For digital communication at least, you can convert hanzi to pinyin and back very easily, that's what I do when I don't just need ASAP machine translation...