I’m learning Russian and I don’t know what it is for that, but in German I’ve seen “xier”, “sier”, and “dey”. I might use “dey/dem”.
Honestly, it is not working in Spanish. I know some contexts where this is used, but as a gendered language it is quite complicated. While “Elle” is used for “them” in limited contexts like very inclusive universities, it’s not quite expected except maybe in the lgbtq+ community.
Most nouns end with an “a” for the female gender, so the proposed solution is to exchange the “a” for an “e”, but there’s a good amount of not gendered nouns and there exist already lots of exceptions to general rules. “Students” and “person” are two good examples of very important words with problems. “Student” is “eatudiante” is Spanish, which ends commonly with an “e”, so it’s not gendered, you can call someone “el estudiante” (male) or “la estudiante” (female), the proposed “le estudiante” (singular) and “les estudiantes” (plural) sound good enough to me. Now, “person” is “persona” in Spanish, and it sounds gendered because it ends with an “a”, nevertheless, it’s actually neutral for any gender, but it’s always accompanied by the article “la” which is used for female nouns, so, it’s “la persona” regardless of the genre of the person in question. This is also pushed in authorities, which used to be titled as nouns like “presidente” which is “president” and arguably gender neutral, except it is used for males and important women, like the president of Mexico, demand to be called “presidenta”. Most authorities, though, are going for the “persona presidenta” form, regardless of gender, to refer to the people in charge.
So, yeah, it’s been rather unpractical in Spanish.
Jie/Jos = they Male/female Juos/Juos = them as in I see them. Same thing for male and female genders.
In Finnish we don’t have gendered pronouns, everyone is a they. But in spoken Finnish, we usually just refer to everyone as “it”, and I think that’s beautiful.
In Turkish it’s all O. We do not have gendered pronouns, a singular third person is “o”, plural third person is “onlar”.
I’m glad our language isn’t gendered. I can’t imagine the centuries of shitshow would happen.
Year xxx: We need to make our pronouns gendered so that it’s easier to communicate!
Year 1xxx: We need to declare ourselves as non-binary, and especially get mad when called him or her, to fuck with the language!
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Basque language has no gendered pronouns.
every version in polish sounds either artificial, dehumanising, or silesian
Portuguese[1] doesn’t have that. People will use a variety of alternatives, like elu/eli/el@/elx, which frankly sound super dumb. It doesn’t help that almost everything in the language is gendered.
Ele = he; Ela = she; Add an ‘s’ to the end and both become plural while keeping it gendered. Under normal circumstances, “eles” is used for ambiguous gender plural ↩︎
Tagalog: siya. 3rd person singular.
Nandito siya. He is here. She is here. They are here.
“Ő”. Everyone is “ő” in Hungarian, we don’t have gendered pronouns.
English and Swedish are common examples of where gender neutral pronouns have developed that sometimes meet ideological opposition from conservative thinkers but otherwise work largely fine in common parlance. They don’t make a lot of people look up and wonder what was said. They and hon don’t cause a fuzz because they are established to a sufficient degree. Now imagine that wasn’t the case and in English we wanted to land on “shup” as a pronoun. I talked with Billy and shup didn’t want to go fishing. You hear that and you’re almost taken out of the conversation because it doesn’t feel natural-in-the-language. Language being a cultural construct. (Don’t misconstrue me here as saying members of the LGBTQ+ are not natural. Because they are perfectly natural.)
German is not only a three-gender grammatical clusterfuck but also a language where different neo-pronouns (similar to “shup” which I invented just to make this point) exist, none of them feeling as natural-in-the-language when in use, and none of them getting majority support from the relevant LGBTQ+ community. So the general suggestion is to use the name when known or to ask for the pronouns when required. In my very limited experience, German speakers who don’t want to risk mis-pronouning people will sooner adapt their speech to avoid any use of third-person singular pronouns than to use “dey” or “sier.” Which in itself might be an indication of where this road is going. German has a larger gap than English between societal progress and understanding and having that reflected in the language. German has embarked on a journey to get rid of a masculine-as-default mode since the 70s just to include the other majority gender in speech and visibility. And more than 50 years later the conventions around that are still subject to change and adherence to those still piss off conservative thinkers. So that gives you an idea of a timeframe until gender-neutral language can cement itself in the German language.
Another language that may have an easier time with gender-neutral speech is Japanese. People are more used to using the name of the person as a stand-in where an indoeuropean tongue screams for a pronoun. And most nouns that are titles to give to people, such as a professions, are never gender-neutral by default.
Instead of having different words for plural of pronouns, in Chinese we append a character after single pronouns to make them plural.
- 我 (me) -> 我們 (us)
- 你 (you) -> 你們 (you all)
- 他 (him) -> 他們 (them (male))
- 她 (her) -> 她們 (them (female))
You get the idea. We also have pronouns for animals (牠), inanimate objects (它) and God (祂), and you can similarly add 們 to make them plural (except for god, I haven’t seen the character being used in plural). Using they/them as pronoun for a person doesn’t make sense in Chinese.
Chinese used to have no gender pronouns. Everyone is referred to as 他 (Mandarin) or 佢 (Cantonese). It’s in last century when 她 (“she”) is “invented”, and no new gender pronouns in Cantonese. However, in terms of speaking, they are all pronounced the same way (ta1 in Mandarin, keoi5 in Cantonese), so it’s literally impossible to use the wrong pronoun if you’re speaking or typing in Cantonese.
Disclaimer: I’m learning Japanese & I don’t know Chinese.
It looks like the original character for the 3rf person pronoun is now the masculine pronoun & the female pronoun is made by substituting the person component (人, I don’t know how to type the left-component form) with the woman component (女).
他 isn’t the pronoun for masculine third person. It’s third person, period. Neutral gender if one has to ask.
Traditionally the character used to mean “that” is 彼. Apparently it’s also gender-neutral.
That’s exactly how to understand them
Does Chinese only have the one 1st person pronoun?
Swahili has 10 different “genders,” called “noun classes” or “ngeli,” and none of them correlate with sex. Instead, the third-person singular pronouns are:
- he/she and him/her: yeye
- his/her: wake
Swedish isn’t exactly “my language”, but it is the language I know best after English. Plural they is de and singular they is hen (to contrast with hon for she and han for he). It’s been in use for decades, but only got officially added in the 2010s.
And Finnish just uses hän for everyone, which is supreme.
I thought Han supremacy was China not Finland.
You must be thinking of Börne.
they/them user here! in my lwmguage, its they/them (im english.) hope this helps!
What language is the word lwmguage though
UwU language.
not-used-to-this-new-keyboard-yet-ese lol
Talking-with-food-in-mouth-lish
