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not sure if I understood this right, but "themself" is definitely still in pretty widespread use
as in: "grab your kid before they hurt themself" for example"Correct" language is prescriptivism, and has no place here. Language is defined by the people who speak it.
not where I live mate, round here it's "themself" if it's referring to a single person of unknown gender
mostly used referring to suicides, sadlyThe gender neutral singular is currently considered not correct grammatically
incorrect, you are basing this entirely on google search results and a north american viewpoint
it was taught in school when i attended
frankly, your arrogant condescension on this is starting to rub me the wrong way
google probably returns results for both on both searches, tbh. tenses and suffixes that are close together are frequently returned as the same thing. you used to be able to force it not to do this but they took those features out 10+ years ago. so this is a bad way to prove this point.
I think 373k is actually a lot, especially if you consider that "killed themselves" could refer to both "they (singular) killed themselves" and "they (multiple people, e.g. a cult) killed themselves". I think it's more common in British English already, so like you I hope it spreads and becomes more accepted in American English as well.
If english sucks then i dont wanna know what ronance langauges do
the equivalent of they was a singular and plural pronoun in anglo saxon tho
and honestly fuck the legal nerds i dont care about them they can figure shit out. ive already degendered my speech because im brain damaged and cant remember anyones pronouns except close friends
three grammatical genders - male, female, and neuter. This is a common trait of many Indo-European languages that has disappeared in the Romance languages but stuck in German, Russian, etc.
Linguists usually say masculine, feminine, and neuter. Latin had all three as well.
In Old English, he, heo, and hit (our he, she, and it) all stood for “it”, because all nouns had gender. Therefore if English had kept this gender distinction, there wouldn’t be a dehumanizing effect to “it”, because there would be just as many inanimate objects that are “he/she” as there are objects that are “it”. The queer community in Russia, as far as I know, uses “оно” as the preferred option. However, this option, I believe, falls to the wayside because of how the usage of “it” has changed. If I’m incorrect about this, please point that out.
I don't know anything about the Russian queer community, only speak Russian. The use of the neuter gender for people makes sense; it sounds a little strange, but, since genderqueerness is a revolutionary concept anyway, some adaptation would be necessary either way. There're a number of neuter words that refer to people (or, specific to Russian grammar, animated beings), e.g. лицо (literally "face", but used to mean "person", especially in legal contexts) or дитя ("child"). But because they're relatively rare, and most neuter words refer to inanimate objects, calling a person by the neuter pronoun would normally be considered an insult.
the academia-advocated usage of “latinx”
Speaking of "Latinx" as a gendered-language speaker - I hope that idea goes the way of miasma and phrenology. It's like an English-language AI trying to modify the living tapestry of a language by imposing an [<begin_string>insert-any-ending-here</end_string>] into a word. It's so dead and soulless. You can make gendered-languages less sexist, but not by treating them like (grammatical) gender doesn't exist. That said, Russian and German used to have different masculine and feminine plural endings, but they collapsed into one over time. So there's no reason why Latinos/Latinas can't become something like Latines in the future.
P.S. Thanks so much for the post! Language is a fascinating subject and looking at its history we learn how nothing is really set in stone, opening ourselves to more possibilities in the future.
I appreciate this post but I'm excited for the time when we can transcend the speech-act and later even communication itself as we merge minds into a singular multitudinous consciousness where all misunderstanding is erased.
Agreed, but speaking from the perspective of a native speaker of a Romance language, English actually has it easy. All you folks need to worry about is the pronouns and some "actress" or "policeman" nouns here and there, whereas we have a much bigger problem in declension. Take for example these two sentences:
He is a good employee. / She is a good employee.
In my native Portuguese, these would be translated as:
Ele é um bom funcionário. / Ela é uma boa funcionária.
Here we can see in "um/a", "bom/a" and "funcionário/a" that not only do we change ("ele/a") pronouns when referring to masculine/feminine grammatical genders (we don't have neuter), but we also need some sort of declension in every gendered article, adjective and noun. Generally, masculine forms have back vowels like "o" or "u" in actual speech, and feminine forms tend to have an "a" or an "e" somewhere. Sometimes it's in a suffix, such as in "uma" (although I've never really read anything that explains "uma" as being derived from "um" by suffixation rather than "um" derived from "uma" by subtraction, but I digress), but it's often by modification.
So that's why discussing gendered language in Portuguese is a huge can of worms, because how do you fully de-genderize the sentence "ele é um bom funcionário"? I've seen people proposing using "u" as the suffix, something like "elu" instead of "ele", but that doesn't quite work, since "funcionáriu" would be pronounced exactly the same as "funcionário", thus abolishing gender in language... by making everything sound masculine.
Then there's the idea of just changing these gender markers to x, "elx" instead of "ele". Well, that's a huge problem because it doesn't make any sense at all, considering Portuguese phonotactics, and, besides, it makes language less inclusive due to the fact that it would be impossible to be read by text-to-speech software, so you remove gender but you also remove accessibility. Also, how would you deal with "bom", which is modified to "boa"? "Box"? Not only does that also go against phonotactics by ending in a cluster which includes a plosive without being followed by a vowel, there's also the problem that "box" is very often used as a loanword.
And then there's the translation issue. How would you translate "[genderless pronoun] is a good employee" into Portuguese, or into pretty much any other Romance language, for that matter? I can think of maybe using "essa pessoa" (this person), but although "pessoa" refers to a person, not necessarily a man or a woman, it is a grammatically feminine noun, so the whole phrase needs to have feminine noun markers, just like in my feminine translation with "ela", as seen above. What do we do about that? I feel like most of the discussion around gendered pronouns is extremely anglocentric. How are other languages supposed to deal with your linguistic decisions? Is it "you're gonna have to learn English, deal with it"? Because I feel fucking colonized enough as a non-native English speaker who makes an effort to sound natural to you, native speakers, in both spoken and written English.
Sorry, got a bit rant-y over there. Almost turned this into a post of its own, but I don't want to spawn another struggle session. Especially not one that potentially adds linguistic imperialism on top of the whole gender debate.
So yeah, even reading style manuals that show us how to make language less gendered, we still can't really fully dodge the restrictions imposed by our language. I don't see any consensus but, to be fair, I haven't done that much reading on the topic, so what I try to do is to avoid gender markers whenever possible by circumlocution, when that's an issue. Even though we're dodging fucking laser beams with Romance languages and their obsession with gender and declension, that's no excuse to be a fucking TERF.
I think each language is gonna have to figure out a good way to do it and not take its cues from English, that's true. I can say that in German (which lies between English and Romance languages on the gendered spectrum) there's a lot of work being done and it's not really equivalent to what's done in English. E.g. addressing a group of students gender-neutrally - Studenten (m) and Studentinnen (f) - is typically Student_innen (m + f + the underscore for non-binary) in Austria, or Studierenden ('the studying ones') in Germany. Adding adjectives and new pronouns is ofc more difficult. As is pronouncing it!
Moreover, as gender neutral alternatives started being promoted in the 80s by feminists, the existing gender neutral versions oriented themselves towards 'including women', and who knows, maybe it's better to scrap the old ideas and build different ones to include non-binary people from the start. I.e. in the 80s the idea was to use StudentIn and StudentInnen (yes, with a capital i in the middle of the word, called Binnen I) to include women, and then the non-binary-"gap" Student_in was added later with the acceptance of queer theory. I'm not actually sure what non-binary German speakers would prefer - I'm guessing like with English speakers, there's no real consensus on what's best yet.
I also speak Russian and there the situation is more like in Romance languages, being extremely difficult to avoid gendering. I follow exactly one non-binary Russian speaker on Twitter lol, so I can only say that they use a "combined" pronoun of он 'he' + она 'she', written as он_а . I've also seen Russian feminists use a gender neutral Он_а пошл_а в магазин 'they went to the store'. For me it seems like they're taking their cues from German here, completely independent of what English speakers do, but maybe they're taking their cue from no one.
All of this stuff looks a little clunky when written out like that, but imo it's completely a matter of getting used to it. In Austria the StudentIn (if not the non-binary gap version) has become increasingly common over the last decade. It went from being something I only saw in queer + radical left circles as a teenager to finding it in job ads or street signs (keine RadfahrerInnen = no bicyclists). Actually, being in Germany, where it hasn't gained such a wide acceptance, is weirder now. The Russian version still looks weird to me (though I personally like it haha, I'm doing a PhD in linguistics focusing on internet communication, so I just LOVE people playing with their language in general), but give it a decade and I'm sure my feelings will change. Or maybe Russian speakers will invent something else completely! Sorry, all this was a very long post to say that I agree we shouldn't take our cues from English speakers, I feel very strongly about the awfulness of English language imperialism too, but we should totally take our cues from non-binary people and feminists in our own languages.
Btw I think direct translation is kind of a separate issue. There's also issues of translating, say, Japanese into English because in Japanese you can use gender-neutral third-person pronouns. This is ofc a problem when it's a mysterious new character in an anime that the fansubbers have to either call 'this one' or decide for themselves (often wrongly) what pronoun the others mean :P
Neat! I've always liked "thon" because it sounds like a dope and old timey. Its got a fun sound to say to, THON.
I will never understand linguistics but I will respect the fuck out of people's pronouns. o7
I am curious if this is a non-issue in languages like Mandarin where there is one non-gendered third person pronoun. I admittedly know next to nothing about the Chinese trans/NB community, so if anybody has any knowledge about that I'd love to hear it.
I think it's important to note that grammatical gender and actual gender roles are not as connected semantically as you might think, grammatical "gender" only exists as such because of historical accident. There is no reason a mouse has to be feminine in French, except for the noun classes we call gender. Linguistically, animacy distinctions can also be considered "gender" for the purposes of grammar. In romance languages it tends to be pretty stark, but in German for instance an unmarried woman is neuter and a married woman is feminine. I would never be one to tell someone they can't use a pronoun other than they/them if they would prefer, but it makes me wonder if these kind of struggles arise in languages like Turkish where there is no grammatical gender whatsoever. I would guess that it doesn't arise, because "o" is universal. I would also suggest that "they" could become universal, if we used it as such. If you are a descriptivist, then saying 'they doesnt work for everyone' is fine, but saying 'if we all used they it would work for everyone' is equally true.
