Gretchen McCulloch has previously explained exactly how the Benedict Cumberbatch name generator works, why dogespeak is so doge, and what old-school British accents sounded like.
If you’ve ever seen people complain about singular “they” or so-called generic “he” (for the record, I am 100% for singular they and 100% against “he” as a default pronoun), or if you’re just really not so keen on gender binaries, you may have wondered what life and language would be like without gender pronouns. If you haven’t, well, you’re about to find out anyway. So put your linguist slippers on and get comfy, because we’re about to take an epic voyage across time and space.
Why do we have pronouns?
Let’s start with the most basic question. A pronoun, if you had that new-fangled type of education where you don’t learn grammar (the horror!), is a word that stands for a noun (or noun phrase.) So you have first-person pronouns like “I” and “me,” which stand for your trusty linguist who’s writing this article, second-person pronouns like “you,” which stands for the brilliant commentariat (flattery gets you everywhere), and third-person pronouns like “she” and “he” and “they,” which stand for other people who aren’t participating in the conversation, like Bendandsnap Calldispatch (alas.)
And the point of pronouns is that they let you keep talking about stuff without repeating names or descriptions every single time, because that gets tedious.
Let’s compare:
Gretchen: Hey Nicole, does Nicole think that Benadryl Cucumber has seen that article Gretchen wrote about Bandersnatch Cumberbund?
Nicole: Nicole doubts that this happy but also terrifying event is likely to have occurred.
vs.
Gretchen: Hey, do you think Bandicoot Cragglerock has seen that article I wrote about him?
Nicole: I doubt it.
See? Much shorter.
What do we even mean by gender?
This is probably the part where I should point out that there are two meanings for gender: there’s grammatical gender, which is sometimes also called noun class, and refers to a system of categorizing the nouns of a language (sometimes feminine/masculine, sometimes animate/inanimate, sometimes even more options) and then there’s natural gender, which is a system of categorizing people and sometimes unfortunately ballpoint pens. The grammatical sense of the word is actually older (from the 14th century: it’s related to genre and genus, i.e. type, kind, origin) and the meaning was extended in the 15th century to the human phenomenon. For a while, this extension led to gender being used as a euphemism for “sex,” where both words could refer to social or biological differences, but starting in the 1960s, feminist writers began using gender to refer to the social distinction and sex to refer to the biological one, presumably to make it easier to talk about these two phenomena separately.
Incidentally, the conflation of the grammatical and natural meanings of gender is responsible for the confusion of English speakers learning a foreign language with a “gender system.” “What,” the learner inevitably remarks to themself, “is so darn male or female about plates and bowls anyway?” The answer is nothing. You might as well call the noun classes “fizz” and “buzz” and remember that the fizz class contains women and also pie, and the buzz class contains men and also cake. The terms “feminine” and “masculine” are basically a convenient ancient mnemonic for a few members of each category, but they might as well be unfortunate homonyms for what good they do. (For example, in German, as is often pointed out, the word for “girl” is neuter, and in Irish, as is less often pointed out, the word for “girl” is masculine.) It happens that in English natural gender and grammatical gender often go hand-in-hand though, and we’ll get to why in a little bit.
But before that, I want to point out that the English third-singular pronoun system is a little more complex than it’s sometimes given credit for. There’s she/her for female people, he/him for male people, it for non-people (both s/he and it are used for babies and animals, depending largely on whether you consider them people or not), singular they/them for gender-nonspecific people, and depending on your speech community, xe/xem, ey/em, ze/hir, and a host of others for gender-nonspecific and/or nonbinary people. (By comparison, languages with robust grammatical gender systems, like French and Spanish, have feminine for (most) female people plus an arbitrary set of other nouns, masculine for (most) male people plus a different arbitrary set of other nouns, and as far as I’m aware, no gender-nonspecific or nonbinary options, although if anyone has heard of some do tell us in the comments.)
And it’s not just English: although a few languages (such as Arabic) also have gender distinctions in the second person, by and large, languages tend to make gender distinctions in the third person (okay, sometimes including the third person plural.) There’s most Indo-European languages with feminine, masculine, and sometimes neuter (although a few, like Danish, have neuter and common), Afro-Asiatic languages with just feminine and masculine, Dravidian languages with some combination of feminine, masculine, animate, and inanimate, Basque and Algonquian languages with animate and inanimate, Niger-Congo languages with 7-10 genders (people sometimes say these languages have up to 20 genders, but that’s if you count singular and plural separately, which we don’t do for any other language family.)
In fact, of the 257 languages surveyed in the World Atlas of Syntactic Structures, 112 of them have some system of grammatical gender. That’s 43%. (You should probably take a digression and go click around the fascinating graphs at WALS for a bit. I’ll wait.)
Of course, there are some 6000 languages in total, so this definitely isn’t all of them, and this percentage isn’t necessarily even a balanced one, but such a large and diverse number of people languaging reasonably independently of each other must have some reason for their actions. And, it turns out, they do.
Why is gender ever a thing?
What gives? We manage perfectly well in the first person, second person, and even the third person plural with a single, non-gender-specific pronoun, so why do we suddenly have a thousand blooming flowers of gender in the third singular?
Unlike with first and second person pronouns, the odds that you’re going to be talking about more than one third person are pretty high. Let’s look at what a sentence looks like if we don’t have several different words:
They told them that they liked their parents.
Does that mean that…?
a) 1 told 2 that 3 liked 4’s parents.
b) 1 told 2 that 3 liked 2’s parents.
c) 1 told 2 that 3 liked 1’s parents.
d) 1 told 2 that 1 liked 2’s parents.
e) 1 told 2 that 1 liked 1’s parents.
With gender, you can at least reduce the number of possible interpretations:
She told him that she liked her parents.
She told him that she liked his parents.
…and so on.
Not perfect, but at least a little better. And you can find lots of people on the internet having writing problems when they don’t have the option of using gendered pronouns to disambiguate between people.
Is feminine/masculine the only possible split you could have here? Nope: we’ve seen that other languages have animate/inanimate or various other gender systems. But if you’re looking for ways to divide humans into two equal-sized groups with a good probability of being represented in a wide variety of contexts, gender of the natural/social kind is a fairly effective means of doing so (although it’s definitely not perfect: more on this later.) It’s at least better than, say, tall people vs short people, or children vs adults, or if you’re Douglas Hofstadter writing satire, white people vs black people.
Algonquian languages actually have a particularly effective solution to this problem which doesn’t involve gender. Instead, they have two gender-nonspecific third-singular markers: one for whichever person is more central to the conversation, and the other for additional people that don’t matter as much, a system known as obviation. It’s probably unfeasible to adopt this system into other languages, but some days I really want to.
Why is gender a thing in English?
Okay, so we have some discourse-structure-y reasons for gender in general. Now for the timey-wimey part of our voyage: how did we end up with the system as it exists in English?
Let’s go way, way back to about as early as we can fathom English’s lineage, back to Proto-Indo-European, aka PIE, the painstakingly reconstructed ancestor of all the Indo-European languages from about 5000 years ago, long before written records. (People who tell you they’ve figured out what Proto-World used to look like are, alas, almost certainly selling snake oil.)
Historical linguists are pretty certain that Proto-Indo-European originally had two genders: animate and inanimate, and then shortly after Hittite branched off, later PIE split animate into the still highly prevalent feminine and masculine, whereupon we conventionally rename “inanimate” into “neuter.” (There remains a smallish camp who thinks that Hittite subsequently merged feminine and masculine into animate, which means that PIE would always have had three genders.)
Lots of Indo-European languages retain the 3-way distinction (hence why it was proposed in the first place), including German, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and most Slavic languages, although some merged them into two again: the Romance, Celtic, and Hindustani languages divvied up the neuter nouns between feminine and masculine in various ways, whereas Danish and Swedish re-merged feminine and masculine into what’s now called “common,” although one could also say it’s Proto-Indo-European animate popping back up again. Several, including Persian, Armenian, and Bengali, lost grammatical gender entirely.
But all of these languages and plenty of non-Indo-European ones have grammatical gender in the fizz-buzz, pies-and-cakes sort of way, the kind where every noun in the language belongs to a more-or-less arbitrary class. It’s not that not having grammatical gender is completely weird: after all, lots of non-Indo-European languages also do just fine without reflecting gender anywhere other than in actual meanings of nouns. (I’m not aware of any languages that lack words for woman, man, etc. although I don’t speak all the languages.) But it is quite weird cross-linguistically to lack a grammatical gender system and yet still encode natural gender on one tiny set of grammaticalized words, aka your pronouns.
So what the hell, English?
Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on the comparative method here, because this does fall within the realm of recorded history. We even have an important date. *cue Simon Schama voice* 1066. The Norman Conquest.
Before 1066, English, aka Old English, aka Anglo-Saxon, aka Ye Olde Tea Shoppe, is pretty much your garden-variety Germanic language. We’ve got three genders (real, grammatical genders like modern German or Icelandic), a nice handful of cases, and names like Aethelred and Cyneburga (and also, incidentally, Clayton and Ainsley, so y’know, maybe I’m just really on trend.) There are some words borrowed from Danish and Latin, but simple borrowing is fairly minor as far as language change goes. The best-known example here is Beowulf.
Then in 1066, Willy B and the laden French swallows come along speaking Old Norman French, which is pretty similar to Old French, and has two grammatical genders, two cases, and names like Williame and Mathilde. And after a few generations of linguistic mixing we end up with Middle English, which has a pretty modern system of natural-gender pronouns and no more grammatical gender (or case) on the nouns. An example of Middle English is the Canterbury Tales (and here’s History of the English language with more dates and excerpts):
Wait, how do you add a language with three genders plus a language with two genders and get a language with zero genders?
Vewwy, vewwy carefully. Well, actually, not carefully at all, but rather through a highly sophisticated process of efficiency-maximization, which one could also call “random variation” and “laziness.” (It’s really hard for me to take seriously any claims about The Decline of English Among Kids These Days when you consider that if kids didn’t talk a bit differently each generation we’d still be speaking Pre-Proto-Indo-European.)
So what you really have is an extended period of several centuries in which many people were more-or-less proficient in both Norman French and Anglo Saxon, which in actual fact meant speaking the highly intermingled versions known as Anglo-Norman and Middle English. But words that belong to one gender in one language don’t necessarily belong to the same gender in the other. To use a modern example, the word for “bridge” in French, pont, is masculine, but the word for “bridge” in German, Brücke, is feminine. If you couple this with the fact that people had begun to stop pronouncing altogether the endings that indicate a word’s gender and case, you can see how these features became irrelevant for the language in general. Some people say there was also creolization, which would help explain a few things and overcomplicate some others, so I’ll leave that to these links.
You keep talking about this “case” thing
Yeah! Case is great, and I don’t have space to go into the details here, but basically it means changing the form of a word depending on whether it’s the subject, or the object, or the possessor, or sometimes other things. English doesn’t really do case anymore (except for possession: you could say that –’s is a case marker), except *drumroll please* on the pronouns! So we’ve got I/me/my, we/us/our, you/your, they/them/their, and yes, she/her, he/him/his and it/its. Sometimes we’re pretty confused about when to use which, but by and large we’ve managed to retain both case and gender on pronouns, despite having lost it on our nouns and the adjectives that agreed with them.
We don’t have gender on non-third-singular pronouns because we never had it there in the first place (and neither does, say, German: French does, but the really core bits of English grammar are Germanic, not Romance). But you can kind of see how the switch in what the singular, gendered pronouns referred to happened. At the point where you’re not making the distinction every time you use a noun, you or your grandchildren start to forget which arbitrary grammatical class they belong to, and it becomes easier to just use the inanimate it for any that don’t come with an obvious semantic clue, and restrict she and he to the really easy-to-remember feminine and masculine entities. (Perhaps if the categories had been called fizz and buzz, things would have happened differently, but that’s what we’ve got.) Relics of an older, more abstract system of grammatical genders still shine through occasionally, such as the use of she to refer to ships, countries, and abstract nouns like Liberty, which are often but not always feminine in related languages with robust grammatical gender, but for the most part, yeah, we’re at semantic pronouns.
The much-maligned but totally fine case of singular they
But pretty much as soon as people started using semantic cues rather than grammatical cues to pick which pronoun to use, they started being faced with the problem that semantics isn’t always a foolproof guide and yet sometimes you need a pronoun anyway. A solution which popped up, from as early as the 1300s, was to extend the uses of the third person plural pronoun they. Note that we’re still in Middle English, which was when we lost grammatical gender in the first place: these changes go pretty much hand-in-hand. Here’s some more Olde Tyme Writers:
And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame,
They wol come up . . .
—Chaucer, The Pardoner’s Prologue (c. 1395), quoted by Jespersen and thence in Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage.
Eche of theym sholde … make theymselfe redy.
— Caxton, Sonnes of Aymon (c. 1489)
There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend
— Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors (1594)
Using the plural pronoun for a singular meaning is actually very common in English: the originally-plural you got extended to mean a formal, singular you and ultimately completely annihilated thou, and even we can be used as singular if you’re pretending to be the Queen or Helen Mirren.
But then, in the late 18th century, grammarians started recommending that people use he as a gender nonspecific pronoun because they was ostensibly plural, as part of the grand tradition of awkwardly shoehorning English grammar into Latin which has caused many of your present grammatical insecurities, and which I’m totally sure had nothing whatsoever to do with the patriarchy. Many excellent writers proceeded to ignore them and kept using singular they, just as English-speakers had been doing for some four hundred years by that point, although the more easily intimidated types (er, axe to grind, who, me?) and a whole bunch of style manuals did end up adopting generic he. That is, until they started facing pushback in the 1970s from people like the incredibly badass Kate Swift and Casey Miller, who you should go read about right now.
Recognizing that it’s useful to have a gender-neutral (aka epicene) pronoun but that many people are uneasy with both generic he and singular they, various creative people in both language reformer and nonbinary activist camps from the 1850s to the modern day have developed and advocated for an assortment of options. While some invented epicene pronouns never made it past 1850s obscurity (heesh) and others are deliberately more fanciful (bun, bunself), a few made it to relative popularity particularly in certain communities, including ey, eir, em (the Spivak pronouns) and xe, xir, xem, both with a variety of spellings. It’s pretty hard to change the most common words in a language though, so at the moment the only one that has really wide use is our old friend singular they.
Despite this occasional lingering sense of unease around it, these days reputable usage guides endorse singular they for a whole host of reasons and institutions from Facebook to the Canadian Government are increasingly accepting of it, so maybe in another couple hundred years we’ll have finally forgotten about this foolish vendetta.
So, why gendered pronouns in English? And why all the controversy about sometimes not gendering them?
A series of historical accidents, largely, reinforced by the practical consideration that it’s often useful to be able to distinguish between multiple third-singular persons, although it’s deuced frustrating to be forced to mark them for gender all the time.
Tags: feminism, Gretchen McCulloch, HISTORY LESSON TIME, language, linguistics, magic, politics, pronouns
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But then, in the late 18th century, grammarians started recommending that people use he as a gender nonspecific pronoun because they was ostensibly plural, as part of the grand tradition of awkwardly shoehorning English grammar into Latin which has caused many of your present grammatical insecurities, and which I’m totally sure had nothing whatsoever to do with the patriarchy.
This is my favorite thing to have read, ever, in anything. It hits all my buttons: linguistic nerdery, history nerdery, patriarchy smashery, long-sentence lovery.
Yes! Also I really liked the linked article on “me and”. *shakes fist at late 18th century grammarians*
Misguided historical grammarians who ruined things for future generations are at the top of the list of people I’d go back in time and kill if I had a time machine, let’s be honest here.
I would so go back in time to eliminate the concept of the split infinitive. JUST CAUSE IT’S ALL ONE WORD IN LATIN, OMG SHUT UP
If you like this, you might also enjoy me on “she” as a default pronoun in Sci Fi http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/05…
Ancillary Justice was so good! And also showed how hard it is to separate gender from pronoun – I pictured every character as female even after reading sentences that literally said “She was a male.”
I also loved the conversation about how hard it was to talk about a client state receiving citizenship when the word for “person” and the word for “citizen” are the same in your language.
yeah, I really am enjoying Ancillary Justice winning all of the things in science fiction awards this year. Really looking forward to Ancillary Sword.
The part about when and how to use informal you, versus the formal you really strikes home as someone who learned Spanish as an adult in a few different countries.
Hopefully she wins the Hugo too! She’ll probably get buried by rabid Wheel of Time fans, however. Boooo.
Yes, yes, yes!
Singular They 4 LYFE
Yesssss! I <3 the Singular They.
It is the best!
I have completely lapped my self on singular they. I used it like most any native speaker throughout childhood, and chafed at the teachers of grammar who tried to drill it out of me. Then I failed 9th grade english and had to re-take it by correspondence, which essentially consisted of a grammar textbook a bit older than I was (one sample paragraph described a computer small enough to be the size of suitcase, what a marvel!) and dozens of exercises. It was the first time I had to memorize the rules and by golly did I become a stickler for them.
Then I grew up further and entered the real world and quickly ran back to singular they, because SO HELPFUL and uselessly archaic GRAMMAR RULES CAN SUCK IT 4 LYFE
Yep. People get all wound up when they find out I’m an English teacher who endorses singular “they”. Sorry, wannabe grammar police, but if it’s good enough for Chaucer and Shakespeare it’s good enough for me.
(I do explain to my students, of course, that they might encounter judgy pedants if they use it in formal writing.)
This is fascinating. I lived in Israel for awhile, and Hebrew is defined by gender rules. I really wonder what people do there who want to be referred to by gender-neutral pronouns. Anybody know?
a) this is AWESOME
b) singular they ftw
c) I’m just gonna use this opportunity to link to the incredibly catchy and delightfully weird video for I My Me Mine, by the Polysics. (There’s some strobing/flashing in the video if that bothers you, fyi!)
I get Polysics stuck in my head every time discussions of ‘me’, ‘I’, ‘my’ etc. come up – glad I’m not the only one!
I’m so glad someone besides me and my dad has heard of this song!
Delightful article! History of language is fascinating.
I spent a semester in Thailand — Thai makes you gender yourself (with various suffixes) but there is no way to gender others (basically there is only xe, no he or she). It blew my mind a bit!
I get what you mean–that there’s almost no direct equivalent to ‘he’ or ‘she’ so you can’t gender people in Thai in that way–but that’s also because Thai often just eliminates subject pronouns altogether, replacing it with the person’s name or nickname (both of which are often gendered). But yeah, it’s like Thai trusts each participant in the conversation to maintain their gender for themselves.
There is หล่อน for ‘she’, though; its use is, in everyday spoken conversation, a slightly sassy way to refer to a woman, particularly one younger/lower than you in kinship or social status.
For anyone else reading this: in addition to the suffixes, there are also the gendered particles, ครับ (masculine) and ค่ะ (feminine). These are the P’s and Q’s of Thai. In addition to their expected use for het- and cisnormative people, Thai people who are femme will use ค่ะ (gay men who are femme; anyone on the spectrum of kathoey; femme or ‘lady’/’dee’ lesbians) and anyone who’s butch will use ครับ (‘tom’/’tom boy’ – butch lesbians). Gender and language is so delicious.
SORRY FOR THE WORDVOMIT it’s like my eyes light up: ‘THAI? THAI??? YES, YES I AM THAI, LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT IT, BLA BLA BLA’
I for one found your comment super interesting, so thanks for sharing!
Me too!
This is fascinating! Languages are awesome!
this is me about this comment:
please no need to apologize for being SUPER INTERESTING
Ahhh, thanks so much for pointing out that neutral-he was pushed forward to bring English in line with Latin grammar rules. I didn’t know that, although I knew about the funky latin-and-greek-ified spellings and sudden banning of split infinitives and the like TO SOUND MORE SMARTER.
If anyone cares, my favorite pronoun is “Peh” as used in Dicebox (http://www.comic.dicebox.net/comic/wander-pre-ramble/). It’s the default pronoun, used unless/until you know what a person prefers to be referred to as.
Dicebox! It’s so great! And I love the way “peh” is used — to my ear it just flows really easily into where in English we would use another pronoun.
AAAAAH I love these linguistics posts so much. <3
What a nice love letter to “they”, my preferred pronoun <3
I love this so much that I cannot even. You make me wish I’d continued my sociolinguistics studies.
Will you please also do a related post on how and why pronouns are so resistant to change? As an avid fan of singular they and as a queer lady supportive of trans and gender-variant folks, I often feel a push-pull between my politics/values of respecting pronoun choice and my student-of-linguistics understanding of pronouns.
I will aggressively defend singular they forever.
Excellent summary of a delightfully byzantine topic. My alley, this topic is up it.
I wasn’t expecting to be able to contribute much in the comments (beyond on the above goofery) but then you asked for info about gender neutrality in decidedly non-neutral Romance languages and I thought “OOOH I can help there!”
In Spanish, most nouns that relate to people tend to end in either o or a. There are many many exceptions to this, but those nouns are still gendered with the masc particle “el” (sing) or “los” (pl) or the fem particle “la” or “las”. This presents two different problems of gendering. The first is neutral noun endings, which have been proposed with varying degrees of success and pronouncability. I’m going to use the word for friend as an example.
Amigo or amiga can be changed to amigx, amige, or amig@. Some people just go with amigo/a but that’s about as wieldy as s/he. The pronunciation of amigx and amig@ are definitely up for debate, precisely because they aren’t immediately apparent (some pronunciations wouldn’t be easy to distinguish in conversation from -o endings). Amige is much more straight forward because the ending sound is already common in other invariable nouns (like jefe for example). You see the @ used a lot in online discourse, especially in LGBTQI+ communities, but if it’s pronounced, the -e feels most natural (to me at least) and definitely wins out.
This still leaves us with the particle issue. El amigo or la amiga. What particle would be attached to the new form amige? I see a lot of people just leaving particles off, which works fine as they definitely aren’t needed all the time. But for the new form to be truly functional, a definite particle is needed to suit the structure of the language. I think le/les is the only option I’ve heard. It follows the pronunciation of the ending form and is a common vowel sound in the language so it doesn’t feel too weird in the mouth or a cause for stumbling when speaking.
Los muchachos/las muchachas/les muchaches.
El amigo/la amiga/le amige.
Not perfect. But pretty good.
Oh I nearly forgot! He or she is ello or ella. The proposed neutral would be elle (pronounced ay-ye). They (plural) in Spanish is ellos or ellas. Because of patriarchy, if there are men in the group (yes even 1 dude in a group of 100 women) the plural would be masculine (ellos). Which is stupid. So this solution gives us a happy neutral plural: elles (ay-yes).
I hope I explained that all clearly enough. I’m not fluent in Spanish (I grew up speaking primarily English and a bit of Spanglish around a mix of English and Spanish speakers) so would love to hear from others with any experiences in their communities and gender neutral Spanish. 🙂
This was so interesting! I was wondering about Spanish specifically since that’s the only language besides English I know at all (and I don’t know it that well anymore) and then I scrolled down to find this!
Actually, he is “él”, at least in the Mexican Spanish I learned growing up. Pronoun usage varies a lot across Spanish-speaking countries, especially in the use of second person pronouns, where Spain and a number of other regions use vosotros/vosotras as in informal second person plural pronoun, with associated changes in verb endings, while in Mexico and most other Latin American countries you use ustedes, the formal plural, at any time that you’re referring to more than one person in the second person.
Now, apparently according to some quick googling, ello is sometimes used as a neuter pronoun in place of él or ella, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard it used like that (or it’s used in the place of “eso” which would best translate best as “that”). But using ello as a neuter pronoun sounds male, even if it technically isn’t, because of how words are normally gendered.
Yes! Of course! Él! I was pluralizing things so much that I had a lapse there. lol Thanks for correcting me and the further pronoun clarification. 🙂
Yeah I have heard that ello is a neuter but it seems sort of outdated (I’ve never heard it used). And agreed; it sounds masculine anyways (obvs because I made the mistake above without even trying!) and because pluralized ello would be ellos. Makes sense. The Spanish I grew up around was the Mexican dialect as well, as I’m from California, but I wasn’t sure if there were any neutral variants throughout Latin America. Trying to recall vosotros/as conjugations is the bane of my existence. Californian Spanglish doesn’t really go in for that. lol XD
AH this is really cool!
At least here in Colombia, and previously in Chile, I see ‘x’ more often than ‘@’ in written language (as in, “freedom for presxs politicxs!” (political prisoners)), but in spoken language (and it bears noting that I don’t spend much time in queer communities, which are increasingly visible and active, and I think on this issue of language use that’s where we should be taking our lead from) people tend to default back to his and hers (as in, “Good evening and a very warm welcome to todos y todas…” (“all” or “everyone” rendered both masculine and feminine)). To me, ‘x’ seems preferable to ‘@’ because it more clearly communicates, or leaves open the space for, multiple genders. I like the idea of pronouncing the -e at the end of words though, second the idea that it sounds more natural.
But! One fun thing about Spanish is that, although it’s for the most part an aggressively gendered language, there are third person singular and plural reflexive and object pronouns that are naturally non-gendered, namely “se” (reflexive, S/P), and “le” (S), and “les” (P) (object), as in “Dile que nos demoramos” (“Tell them (sing.) that we’re running late”) or “Se dice que va a llegar tarde” (“They (sing.) say they’re going to be late”).
Ah yes! Interesting point about singular they en español!
I do agree that @ sticks out in glaring way that x doesn’t and fills much the same purpose, but in Mexican Spanish, you see things like xicana written out (chicana, x being phonemically equivalent to ch) so xicanx might be confusing considering it’s doing double duty there. Though obvs you’d look at that and figure it’s not pronounced chicanch or something…but I guess it depends on context. @ to me at least looks like a vowel so it works as a visual cue but does feel very…computer-based. Different dialects of Spanish use the letter x in varying degrees so I’m curious if the preference fluctuates depending on what dialect/region is using the term. Thanks for the input for Colombia y Chile! Interesante!
Orrgghhh, okay, I KNOW that singular ‘they’ has a long and storied history and is by far the best option for widespread use. In cases where the person in question is unspecified (as in “Somebody left their wallet. I hope they come back for it!”), ‘they’ sounds totally right! But it’s being attributed to a particular person — “Alex left their wallet; tell them to come back!” — it just rings a little bit off, for me. It feels like the concrete “Alex” is bumping up against the blurry and inexact “they”.
Now that I’ve sat down and typed this all out, though, I’m thinking that the more I use it (and see/hear it used that way), that association might wear off… I hope so! It makes me feel guilty not to be jumping on the singular ‘they’ train!
Calling Alex “they” is a way of acknowledging the fluidity of gender and allowing Alex to choose how they wish to be called. Alex may be genderqueer but read male, and so always gets called “he,” and each “he” is a tiny needle to Alex, or Alex may be like, “oh hey, I’m a dude, you can call me he.” I love “they” because I think it returns agency to people in a teeny, tiny way.
Yuuup.
The more you practice the more natural it sounds, and the more you’ll sometimes use “they” as a singular pronoun even when referring to people who identify with she/he pronouns. I was surprised how easily it slipped into my everyday usage.
I didn’t get into it in the article because it was already super long, but singular they is more common in English when it refers to a nonspecific person rather than a specific one, which I think is the distinction you’re getting at. For example, “If you see someone, tell them….” is much less remarkable than “If you see Alex, tell them….” even if we know multiple Alexes of various genders. (Conversely, “If you see an Alex, tell them….” is unremarkable again, under the same assumptions, because then it’s not a specific Alex.)
So individual people who prefer the pronoun “they” are doing something slightly different than has historically been the case in English, but it’s an issue of specificity, not of singular vs plural. I’m still all for using people’s preferred pronouns, but that’s why it takes a little while to get used to, even if you’re a robust user of nonspecific singular they.
I loved this. I used to be opposed to singular they when I was a young whippersnapper being taught prescriptivist ways in school, but then I took linguistics in college and learned to stop worrying and be a descriptivist. And “they” is so much neater and easier than “he or she”, for real.
Also, any other Cabin Pressure fans read this and start thinking of “fizz, buzz, have a banaaaana?”
I was opposed to singular they because I was taught to be too! But it’s so much cleaner than “he or she” or any of the other ways that standard English provides, and better than using he as a default, so I use it now with wild abandon.
Also as a MASSIVE Cabin Pressure fan, I did not start thinking of that, but that is only because fizz buzz makes me think of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fizz_buzz which is sometimes asked in technical interviews to filter out people who cannot really program.
I live and go to school in a liberal and queer-friendly enclave, so mostly people are a-ok with the singular they and students and faculty feel comfortable using it. It’s very strange, I must say, encountering someone who does not like using “they” as a singular pronoun, but when I do run across said detractors, they always couch the subject in a “oh, these kids and their ignoring of the gender binary! This too shall pass,” kind of way and it makes me unreasonably angry in the same way that casual misogyny makes me angry.
I love this article, and I love the fact that this is possibly the first article on disputed grammar norms I have ever read whose comment section isn’t full of armchair prescriptivists blathering on about their pet grammar peeves.
YES THIS THANK YOU TOAST COMMENTARIAT.
This reminds me of the best time I was accused of being racist against English for saying hymns in my church could easily be altered to make the language gender neutral. (white English speaker from birth here)
Also, Latin can suck it as I flagrantly end my sentences with prepositions.
“racist against English”
At one point growing up, my church bought new hymnals that completely replaced any reference to God with a gender-neutral reference. Essentially this meant always saying “God” since “he” and “Lord” were off the table. Personally I find it makes it nicer to sing but of course there’s always some people looking to pick a fight, and we still use both hymnals.
See, it wasn’t even the references to God/Deity I was objecting to–if I had it would have been a far more drastic overhaul of just about every single hymn. It was solely when the hymns used gendered language when talking about humans, which was still plenty. Like singing about taking care of your brother (but not your sister), songs about the faith of our fathers (but nothing about our mothers) and lots of references to man or mankind.
in the era of y2k hysteria, I attended an Episcopal church that consistently referred to God in the feminine, “Her will be done” etc. I found it to be a great wake-up in my understanding of a supreme being; the old guard found it blasphemous:)
Yes! Also, my syntax teacher's favorite example, "hella" as an intensifier.
I love your articles! Your writing is so engaging and interesting 🙂
I, too, was once a self-righteous high school grammar prescriptivist; I’ve since seen the error of my ways, and have come around from using ‘s/he’ to using ‘they’ as a default and preferred pronoun, which flows easily and I like a lot. But, I am still hung up a little bit on what the possessive singular “they” pronoun should be — themself, or themselves? The former sounds and looks silly, but the latter is clearly plural and confusing… what say you all?
This is a valid concern and I struggle with it as well, although if you look at the history of “you” (which also used to be strictly plural), we have no problem with “yourself” vs. “yourselves”. So I usually go with “themself”. It looks silly because we’re not used to it, but if it gains traction, in a couple of decades it will be unremarkable.
I have similar issues with the possessive of plural “you”, especially when I am speaking to someone but want to make it clear that I am talking about a group of people that includes that person, rather than just that one individual person, which is sometimes an important distinction. “Your guys”‘? “You guys’s”? “All of your”? A circuitous and cumbersome re-wording like “the thing that belongs to all of you”? There is no graceful way to do this.
This is why I’m in favor of “y’all” becoming more widely accepted in English. As far as I know, it’s the only second-person plural pronoun we have, aside from awkward assemblies like the ones you listed. If it ended up as a widely used word, rather than being limited to a specific dialect, talking to groups would be a lot easier.
(Brilliant article, by the way! Thanks to the author for going into the history of our current pronoun deficiency. I’m definitely going to bring up Chaucer and Shakespeare the next time someone tells me that singular “they” is new and incorrect.)
I think “yous” is another one found in certain dialects, but I’m not sure for either of those what the possessive form would be. Yall’s? Youses? I don’t really have a problem with the nominative case, because I can say “you all” if I need to clarify. It’s the possessive that I get tangled up in.
I grew up with not y’all, but “you all” — yay for border states? In which case the plural possessive that sounds natural to me is just “your,” but with contextual clarification if need, e.g. “Hey, you all, is this your stuff?” “You all’s” is possible, I guess, but it sounds forced to my ear, and “yours all” just doesn’t sound right at all.
Alternately, you can swap over to “you guys,” in which case it’d be “your guys’s” to me, and that sounds entirely natural and colloquial to my ear. But I know that “guys” is one of those words that some people take as gender-neutral and some don’t. To me, “you guys” is completely gender-neutral and I use it all the time for groups not containing any men, but I think to some trans or non-binary people it can be one of those tiny needle words (so I’d try not to use it if I were around anyone I knew felt that way.)
I usually go with y’all’s.
Western PA has ‘yunz’ and ‘yinz’, contractions of ‘you ones’. Not sure what the possessive forms would be.
I say things like “Everyone likes themself” or “Each student took a picture of themself” all the time – it sounds perfectly natural to me, and not silly at all (though Chrome did just underline it in red).
Vaguely related but something that’s on my mind, inclusivity. We, is that you and me, or me and my friends but not you? Are you included in the we? Same (a bit) with you, is it including everyone, or just a few, or only one? It’s a language feature more languages need. 🙂
I am genderqueer, and go by gender-neutral pronouns, as do several of my friends. I'm fine with either singular "they" or with any of the more recent coinages like "ze," though I personally find "they" much easier to use. In my experience, people vary a lot in their ability to incorporate new pronouns into their vocabulary- when I tell people about my preferred pronouns, some people are able to switch right away, some take a while but eventually get it, and some have been trying for years and still haven't got the hang of it.
“What,” the learner inevitably remarks to themself, “is so darn male or female about plates and bowls anyway?” The answer is nothing.
So, can someone help me: I was humming the cheesetastic “Il Giorni dei Giorni” when I was in Sicily a few years ago and got to this bit
“Femmina come la terra
Femmina come la guerra
Femmina come la pace
Femmina come la croce
Femmina come la voce”
Female like the earth,
Female like war,
Female like peace,
Female like the cross
Female like the voice.
And I had this moment of shock as I realised he wasn’t just decreeing all these things were “female” because he was a male lyricist and was in a “women are kind of like wars” mood today… they’re all feminine nouns. He seems to be explicitly associating natural and grammatical gender. So, would it have sounded weird to say “Femmina come il sole” (“female like the [masculine] sun.”? If so, are ideas of natural and grammatical gender really that distinct in the language? (Especially as some of the things are abstractions that are typically coded or personified female, especially Earth.)
Are the bowls and plates DEFINITELY not boys and girls, is what I guess I’m asking?
I remember another moment of shock in a language class when my bootlace got caught on a chair. The teacher tried to disentangle me, and then pointed at the chair and said “Il problemo e lei.” — “The problem is *her*.” I could just about get my head around the chair being feminine when the noun was in play but that it could be a HER as a pronoun just kind of scrambled my mind.
There’s some evidence that speakers of languages with grammatical gender do tend to split their metaphors along more gendered lines. Lera Boroditsky has done studies where, for example, you ask French and German speakers to describe a bridge, which is masculine in French and feminine in German, and you get a trend of “heavy, solid” from French speakers and “light, dainty” from German speakers. (Am summarizing from memory, but that’s the approximate gist.) So I do think that especially because we call these grammatical categories feminine and masculine there’s some crossover, but is it a cause or an effect? Would it still happen if the categories were called something different? I don’t know.
But like, Italian doesn’t have any third-singular pronouns that AREN’T gendered. There’s just no way to say “it” when referring to a chair or table that doesn’t have gender, which is difficult for English speakers to wrap our heads around. Anecdotally, I’ve also heard that speakers of languages like this that the gendered connotations are less apparent than in English where inanimate objects don’t get gendered pronouns: if “lei” can refer to a chair or a woman, then it doesn’t feel as “robustly” female as English “her”.
I’d also say that poets tend to take advantage of whatever figurative ability their language has, and that’s not necessarily a reflection of what people do in more prosaic contexts. Plus there are metaphors. Just because I say that my love is a river or call someone sugar or honey doesn’t mean that this is a profound statement about the minds of English speakers.
Thanks!
I feel like the frequency with which we use “tastes good” metaphors for affection and love DOES say something about the human mind in general, though — that is, I think an intelligent alien who didn’t experience taste in the same way as humans but did have a comparable experience of affection (or vice versa) could probably deduce quite a lot about the unfamiliar subject, and even a certain amount about human history, e.g sweet foods are calorie rich but relatively rare in nature, therefore precious, etc.
I agree with Gretchen—as a native Italian speaker—that having such a strong grammatical gender distinction in our language means inadvertently assigning (stereotypically) masculine or feminine characteristics to genderless things and also that our pronouns are less “markedly” feminine and masculine than English “he” and “she”.
Italian did use to have a much more complex third person pronouns system with four singular “nominative” pronouns (marked for both animacy and gender”) and two plural “nominative” pronouns (marked only for gender) that have now been in practice completely superseded by the two singular “accusative” pronouns (marked for gender only) and a single one plural “accusative” pronoun (curiously enough the enclitic plural pronouns are still marked for gender).
I think, however, that Ligabue here was being very poetic and trying to use the fact that all these nouns are feminine as “evidence” that we associate a great number of very important aspects and events of life with women (whether you think these words pertain to either gender because we associate them with it or whether you subscribe to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is another matter entirely). He was trying to say something along the lines of “girls are so important in our lives that we automatically associate the most important things with femininity”. To answer your question: yes, it would have been very weird if he had said “femmina come il sole”, we perceive the sun as a masculine figure, I would go as far as saying even virile, and in any case it would not have fit in the scheme. So yeah, “pentole e piatti” (pans and plates) are in fact kind of “boys and girls”.
Can someone help me here. Is it right that, in French, if you have a group of 99 women and one man, the correct pronoun to apply is “Ils”? It is a long time since I studied French, and I have no reason to use it in my daily life, but that is what I recall from the grammar. I am just wondering whether such a rule could possibly have survived the gender wars, if indeed it has.
As far as I know (and I speak at least a little French every day) that’s still correct. Or rather, I’ve heard nothing to the contrary.
As above, it is that way in Spanish too.
I was always taught that rule in French class, but when I lived in France I found that it’s not uniformly practiced, especially among younger French people. I think a group of 100 people is still most likely to be referred to as “ils” unless you know for certain that there are no men. But if there are 100 people there of which one is male and all you see are women, then people would probably say “elles”. A group of friends which consisted of 8 women and 2 men could sometimes be referred to as “elles”, especially if the female portion was seen as more central to the group. I also frequently heard all-woman groups referred to as “ils”, both by women and men, which I think suggests that “ils” could be sort of de-gendered over time….? Then again I’m no linguist 😉
I don’t know how common it’s used in speech, but French does has a gender neutral 3p sing. pronoun, “on”, which is used for people. Though, it seems to be used in a more generic sense (though I’m an L2 speaker of French; native speakers, feel free to correct me), used sort of, but not quite, like we would use “one”. (One must sometimes go to great lengths to avoid generic “he”.) I’ve neverseen it used to refer back to a specific person; “il” or “elle” would always be used. But again, I have a mostly academic understanding of French, so there may be some subtleties I’m missing here.
That is correct, and probably more commonly used than “one” is in everyday English speech. But in Quebec French “on” is also sometimes informally used as a 1p plural pronoun (occasional substitute for “nous” especially when it’s more of a general than a specific “we”).
I think that’s in French as a whole; I’m not a native speaker but have lived in Paris, Tahiti and New Caledonia for various lengths of time and I’m pretty sure that “on” = “we” was common in all.
And “on” = “one” is definitely much more used than in everyday English, though this may vary geographically. It’s pretty hard to get away with it in English at all in New Zealand, anyway, except in a jocular sense preferably with a mock-posh voice.
on is very broad in meaning – everyone, someone and quite commonly us. A teacher would say “on y va!” to mean “we’re going now” to her class. It always takes a 3rd person singular verb, but can have masculine or feminine, singular or plural adjectives including possessives associated with it. On a perdu nos sieges, for example, we lost our seats
I love this! I’m totally gung-ho about singular they, which sometimes freaks my freshman writing students out, but not nearly as much as it freaks my dad out. I’m not sure how such a diehard prescriptivist ended up raising little linguist me, but it happened.
When I was pregnant, we chose not to find out the sex of our baby ahead of time, and so I tended to refer to the baby growing in my belly as “The Munchkin”, but saying “The Munchkin” over and over and over got really tedious, so I defaulted to “they”. That *really* freaked my dad out. It freaked lots of people out, actually – and I can kind of see why, because after all, I could’ve been carrying twins, but I wasn’t, so why was I using a seemingly plural pronoun?? (Because “it” felt really icky to me as a pronoun to refer to my child, that’s why!)
But it literally didn’t strike me as weird in the slightest. Felt absolutely natural coming out of my mouth (or out of my fingers, when I wrote), never had a hint of “oh, it sounds like I’m talking about twins” to my own ear. Here’s the weirdest thing, though: My daughter’s 2.5 now. So, obviously, I now know she was a girl that whole time. And now when I look back at text I wrote while I was pregnant, referring to what “they” (the fetus) were doing in my belly, it seems really WEIRD to me. Having the knowledge that my child is a girl somehow makes what felt like the most natural utterances in the world seem “off” somehow – like I’m talking about multiple babies. Even though I know I wasn’t. And I am pro-singular-they!
And then of course, we tended to dress our daughter in whatever clothes were cute, and usually not super “girly” clothes, and random people (e.g. at the grocery store or whatever) would get downright enraged that they didn’t know what pronoun to use when talking about her. I never cared if people guessed wrong! But boy, people were so mad that I didn’t dress her in a way that properly signaled her gender so that they could appropriately select a pronoun without risk of getting it wrong.
In short, babies + pronouns = weirdness.
I was really OK with a singular they, and then I learnt German, and in German, they like their grammar, and I like to Do The Right Thing. So I threw aside the singular they, and found that when people used it, it made me shudder (I have a visceral reaction to things like that. Bad spelling really affects me, no joke).
But I have a good friend who identifies as genderqueer, and I really want to Do The Right Thing by my friend. So I’m turning around on the singular they, and it’s very gratifying to hear that there is some historical basis to this 🙂 Thanks so much for such an enlightening post!
This was wonderful and illuminating, thank you!
« So we’ve got I/me/my, we/us/our, you/your, they/them/their, and yes, she/her, he/him/his and it/its. »
So wait, does the inclusion of possessives in these case paradigms means you’re adopting an analysis where they’re considered genitive forms of the pronouns ?
Because I’d have thought they were determiners, much like their counterparts in French or German. This is interesting.
As far as I know, it always was included in the paradigm. I have no degree in linguistics though, only a BA, so someone more knowledgable might be able to give more info. 🙂
I disagree with the inclusion of Shakespeare’s usage of the singular they as proof of its propriety. Shakespeare likely intends his “their” to play games in our ears with the “There’s” at the beginning of the line. If he selected “their” more for its homonymous effects than its grammatical suitability, I consider this instance to be weak evidence of standardized use of the singular they in 16th Century England.
Really excellent and thought-provoking article! I’ve spent a long time wavering back and forth in my emotions about singular-they, and it’s interesting to know the history and reasoning behind it. Good article to whip out the next time my thesis adviser tries to call me out on it! While in engineering writing we generally avoid any kind of pronoun other than the occasional “one”, once in a while it’s absolutely necessary to say something like “If a driver is inattentive at an intersection, they are more likely to be involved in a collision”. I prefer to use they, but my adviser is of the interesting era where he thinks the gender-inclusive thing to do is alternating “he” and “she”. But I find that both unwieldy and scientifically incorrect, since many accident trends correlate strongly with gender. A weird and nit-picky thing to notice, but it does bother me.
I actually popped into the comments section to give some quick thoughts about my new pet language, (Mandarin) Chinese. I’ve been living in Taiwan and studying intensively for the last year and I find it completely fascinating, because, as a native English speaker, it is both the hardest and the easiest language ever. To address only the pronouns, Chinese has wo/women (I/us), ni/nimen (you/you plural), ta/tamen (third person singlar/plural with no gender distinctions). In speech, it’s impossible to tell if “ta” is he, she or it. Spoken Chinese generally seems to make no distinction based on gender, other than literally saying “that woman/man/thing over there”. While this occasionally produces confusion in the third person, it’s generally minor and avoided either through the use of hand gestures to visually refer to different groups, or through repeated names or brief descriptions.
Interestingly, though, *written* Chinese does have distinctions between he/she/it: 他, 她, 它. They are the same base character, but one has the radical for “man”, the other for “woman” and… some other radical I don’t recognize haha. In texting, my friends are pretty lax about whether they make the distinction; for example, if I and the person I’m texting with both know we are talking about a female friend Amy, we will frequently refer to Amy as “他” even though that’s technically “he”, because that version pops up first when you type in “ta”. But if we were talking about Amy and her boyfriend, then we would make the distinction.
I asked my tutor why written Chinese has this distinction when spoken Chinese does not. According to her, written Chinese did not originally distinguish at all and had only one character. However, when China opened to the west and began translating western literature, our frequent use of pronouns and dislike for repeating names or descriptions made the translations incomprehensible if there was no way to differentiate he/she/it. So they created new variations on the character.
Anyway, fascinating stuff!!
I’ve always wondered about the written/spoken distinction in Mandarin- that clears it up nicely! (And oh, man, Chinese pronouns are *so* simple to learn, it almost makes up for all the complicated tonal stuff 🙂
Interesting that you explain gender as a way to resolve ambiguity in sentences with lots of third person pronouns. I’m assuming you simplify? I’ve always assumed it arose as a kind of, hmm, assimilation, I guess – so that words tied closely with nouns (adjectives, determiners – in Russian I think verbs too) would take on the noun’s ending. And as pronouns often develop from determiners, well, there you go. Which would explain why first and second person pronouns aren’t often gendered.
I can see how it might arise more directly: say if English had only one pronoun “it” but needed to distinguish, you might borrow the vowel from the noun – eg “ot” for “dog” and “at” for cat. Or something. But this seems a much more cerebral wordplay that might develop playfully in social media lolcat- and doge-style more than naturally in a ‘real life’ community that doesn’t rely so directly on linguistic innovativeness to develop and maintain social cohesion.
Anyway though what I wanted to say was that Latin solved the ambiguity issue nicely by having three forms of “his”: “suus” (his/her own); eius (the other person in the sentence); illus (that *other* person). So for “John gave Bill [his] ball”:
suus = John’s ball
eius = Bill’s ball
illus = Ted’s ball
Or something. I’m not a native Latin speaker, I just go on occasional binges of trying to teach myself.
(This is kind of reminiscent of the here/there/yonder, this/that-in-your-hand/that-over-there distinction that Spanish, for one, still makes. And if anyone’s struggled with that, it could be worse: Malagasy makes that a seven-way distinction. But at this point we digress from gender.)
The Penan tribe of Borneo measure wealth not by the extent of their possessions but by the strength of their relationships. They have no words for ‘he, she, or it’ but six words for ‘we’… (quoted from Philip Shephard’s book, New Self, New World)
This reminded me of Greg Egan’s hard-sf novels _Distress_ and _Diaspora_. These novels use ve/ver/vis, which were apparently coined by writer Keri Hulme. In the former (a near-future thriller of sorts), they’re used for for the occasional asex character in a society where there are five recognized genders: umale (an idealized conception of male, usually accompanied with all kinds of hormones and body modifications), enmale (natural males who identify as male but also don’t make a big deal about it), asex, enfem, and ufem. In the latter novel (a far-future episodic ideas novel), it’s more interesting, as almost all the characters of any import are sentient software, and the majority simply don’t identify as male or female. It doesn’t have much to do with the story (or stories) in _Diaspora_, but you do get lots and lots of stuff like:
Yatima gazed at the three of them, bemused – oblivious to the ceremonial words, trying to understand what had changed inside verself. Ve saw vis friends, and the stars, and the crowd, and sensed vis own icon … but even as these ordinary thoughts and perceptions flowed on unimpeded, a new kind of question seemed to spin through the black space behind them all.
This is a valid concern and I struggle with it as well, although if you look at the history of "you" (which also used to be strictly plural), we have no problem with "yourself" vs. "yourselves". So I usually go with "themself". It looks silly because we're not used to it, but if it gains traction, in a couple of decades it will be unremarkable.
I have similar issues with the possessive of plural "you", especially when I am speaking to someone but want to make it clear that I am talking about a group of people that includes that person, rather than just that one individual person, which is sometimes an important distinction. "Your guys"'? "You guys's"? "All of your"? A circuitous and cumbersome re-wording like "the thing that belongs to all of you"? There is no graceful way to do this.
"…and as far as I’m aware, no gender-nonspecific or nonbinary options, although if anyone has heard of some do tell us in the comments.)" Would the Spanish "mar" (sea) meet the case? See the dictionary of the Real Academia Española which lists gender as "amb.": http://lema.rae.es/drae/?val=mar
One could remember that one has the option to use a third person gender neutral singular pronoun without having to resort to freshly created politically correct pronouns. If one wishes to.
How would one say this?
“Someone took my milk from the fridge. I don’t know if it was Amanda or Brian, but they must have known it wasn’t theirs, and I hope they’re ashamed of themselves.”
I believe James Thurber disposed of this with his recommendation that those who come up with sentences like “One’s friends will support one, or at least one hopes they will” simply take up the trombone.
Interesting in this context is the Basque system (why is it always the Basques doing the interesting things??). There is no gender distinction in the third person, either regarding pronouns or the plurivalent verb forms. In fact, most of the language is refreshingly gender neutral. Oddly enough, gender crops into the *second* person.
So there are two registers to begin with, formal (zutanoa) and informal (hitanoa). The formal functions pretty much as you’d expect of a gender neutral polysynthetic language. But they can up the ante but introducing an extra argument to mark the gender of the addressee. So in the formal language you might say “Gizona da” (it is a man) but when switching to hitanoa, this becomes “Gizona duk” (it is a man, speaking to a man) or “Gizona dun” (it is a man, speaking to a woman).
Called the allocutive and it’s pretty rare.
Gretchen:
A couple things. First, not all Hindustani (I assume this refers to North Indian) languages got rid of neuter nouns. Gujarati still has them, for example.
Secondly, another linguist points out a problem with the article (and the absence of Bantu languages) here: https://twitter.com/RoseLemberg. It’s definitely worth scrolling through her feed, both tweets and replies to tweets.
In fact 1066, when English lost its diphthongs because the Normans couldn’t pronounce them, would have been the perfect opportunity to dispense with the gender difference between the third-person nominative pronouns ‘heo’ (feminine) and ‘he’ (masculine), both of which would have been pronounced ‘he’ (similar to modern English ‘hay’ but without the terminating pseudo-consonant /y/) after loss of the diphthong. Instead – and AFAIK this still is something of a mystery – someone felt the need to invent ‘she’. Compare bangla, whose third-person nominative pronoun ‘se’ (similar to modern English ‘shay’ but again without the /y/) is ungendered.
Great article. It took me a while read about the Latin-grammar-ification of the 1850s, and then to just use the singular “they”. I like the “Each student themself” above, too.
But she-ships aside, I’m bummed you didn’t mention the only gendered adjective left!
Marilyn Monroe was blonde; Daniel Craig is blond!
This is a really interesting article!
<img src="http://rb.revolvermaps.com/w/3/s/a/0/14/1/ffffff/ffffff/ffffff/1jw0k1kvcev.png" width="1" height="1">
And there’s also fiance/fiancee.
This is not only a great article but the most wonderfully nerdy comments I have seen anywhere. Kudos (which is singular) to all of you!
And there's also fiance/fiancee.
This is not only a great article but the most wonderfully nerdy comments I have seen anywhere. Kudos (which is singular) to all of you!
This article reminds me of a sexist Spanish joke, sometimes used to illustrate humorously to students those masculine words that shockingly end in -ma. Los problemas son masculinos pero las soluciones son femeninas! (Problems are masculine but the solutions are feminine!)
Estonian has no gendered pronouns – the third person singular is either ta or tema, and ta is just an abbreviated form of tema. They seem to get on fine…
Estonian has no gendered pronouns – the third person singular is either ta or tema, and ta is just an abbreviated form of tema. They seem to get on fine…
I think "yous" is another one found in certain dialects, but I'm not sure for either of those what the possessive form would be. Yall's? Youses? I don't really have a problem with the nominative case, because I can say "you all" if I need to clarify. It's the possessive that I get tangled up in.
Learn Hungarian, they have no gender for nouns and adjectives or pronouns. To designate gender you can add “nő” onto the end of the profession to make it clearer. This is why Hungarians often switch the gender of pronouns in a conversation — which can be a bit bizarre for English speakers.
Learn Hungarian, they have no gender for nouns and adjectives or pronouns. To designate gender you can add "nő" onto the end of the profession to make it clearer. This is why Hungarians often switch the gender of pronouns in a conversation — which can be a bit bizarre for English speakers.
I use singular they and have no problem with it because all the substitute words (xe, er, whatever) sound incredibly ridiculous to me! I have trouble not rolling my eyes when I see them used, especially in print.
Indonesian has no gendered pronouns, though the society itself is pretty patriarchal.
Most of its distinctions seem to be in levels of formality; I think it even borrows pronouns from other languages just for that purpose, and uses honorifics in place of pronouns to show respect.
Then there’s inclusion/exclusion. The two first-person plurals include (“kita”) or exclude (“kami”) the person being addressed.
just discovered your lovely home on the web here – and tickle me Irish (is that a thing?), but I’m glad to have discovered it.
In particular, I appreciate the comparison between less familiar languages such as Algonquin.
I will enjoy perusing the rest. many thanks…
Wow! Your post obviously very informative. Thanks for sharing your idea. I will back again soon.When I was pregnant, we chose not to find out the sex of our baby ahead of time, and so I tended to refer to the baby growing in my belly as “The Munchkin”, but saying “The Munchkin” over and over and over got really tedious, so I defaulted to “they”. That *really* freaked my dad out. It freaked lots of people out, actually – and I can kind of see why, because after all, I could’ve been carrying twins, but I wasn’t, so why was I using a seemingly plural pronoun?? (Because “it” felt really icky to me as a pronoun to refer to my child, that’s why!)
This is not only a great article but the most wonderfully nerdy comments I have seen anywhere. Kudos (which is singular) to all of you!
just discovered your lovely home on the web here – and tickle me Irish (is that a thing?), but I’m glad to have discovered it.