I can speak for myself in this issue. I am a native speaker of English (which has a very small number of gendered pronouns) and Bengali (which has zero). Bengali is the first language I learned but English is my native tongue.
I feel more comfortable in English, I think in English, and my vocabulary, fluency, and faculty in English is far far higher than Bengali. I am highly literate in English and effectively illiterate in Bengali. And that’s all even though I use some Bengali nearly every day.
And my own view about the current discussion of gendered pronouns is; “This is an issue we don’t need to have. It is an issue that bring us no benefit. Let’s just be done with it and eliminate gendered pronouns altogether.”
My experience with Bengali, the fact that I am comfortable thinking in terms of non-gendered Bengali pronouns, makes me feel like we are wasting our time, effort, breath, and intellect on giving this matter even a quantum of thought. Just jettison the whole matter.
Thai lacks grammatical gender, khao means both he/him and she/her, you just have to go on context. But men and women use different first-person pronouns – phom for men, dichan or often just chan for women. There are also sentence-final polite particles – khrap or khap for men, kha for women. Untranslatable, it’s just something you stick on the end of just about every … single … sentence. It would be like if in English you’d go on like, “I’m going to the store, khrap. Anyone need anything, khrap? I shouldn’t be too long, khrap.” No thanks, kha. I’m going later myself, kha. Oh, are you passing by the library, kha?
Finnish does not have gendered pronouns but it still has gendered terms like ‘fireman’, palomies, instead of something gender neutral like like firefighter.
Interestingly, using the 3rd person pronoun ‘hän’ (he/she) in everyday speech may sound somewhat formal. Many will often instead use the word ‘se’ which translates to ‘it’ in English, although even this may vary depending on the contexts.
In other things, it’s impossible to accurately translate the English word ‘uncle’ into Finnish without knowing if they are either the father’s or the mother’s brother. For example uncle Scrooge McDuck or uncle Donald Duck were both translated as setä which in some later stories is incorrect since setä is a brother of someone’s father where as eno would be the brother of someone’s mother. This does not apply to translating ‘aunt’, which is always täti .
I disagree with the premise that users of languages with grammatical gender or noun classes are merely wasting mental processing power, or that it is even an effort for them. It just seems like one of many possible grammatical features. However, if there is evidence that, in some quantifiable way, it is usually a bad feature, I would love to learn about it. Even if that were the case, what do you suggest we do? I feel it is not my business to suggest to many peoples and cultures that their language sucks. Obviously Tagore is cool, but also Szymborska.
The evidence is that people have created social tension over it. That is the effort I’m talking about. The social effort, not the intellectual effort of memorizing grammar.
“These are my pronouns. Please use them or you as I have demanded or you are mistreaking me.” “What is this person’s pronoun? I can’t choose a pronoun unless I’m informed.” etc.
That is what makes it a bad feature. Grammatical gender in society has proven itself to be a negative force. And we have ready examples of languages that do without it. One of them is right here in my head. That is what makes this issue so frustrating for me.
Such a simple act of language shouldn’t be tied up in such complex and destructive social consequences.
And, frankly (in my opinion), you shouldn’t have to ask someone a preference just to have a conversation that references em, especially something as basic and demonstrably simple as a pronoun.
Language changes all the time. In English, we no longer distinguish among yea/yes, nay/no, thee/thou/ye/you. We have almost completely lost our case system. Our verb conjugations are a lot simpler than they used to be. We already have almost no grammatical gender.
Just push along one more change: eliminate he/him/his/himself/she/her/hers/herself. Some people on this board know that I have started using E/em/es/ers/emself. I have now offered it as an optional “non-gendered pronoun” set on my business E-mail signature.*
Suggesting small changes isn’t “telling someone your language sucks.” It’s part of linguistic and social development. The same way we don’t accept the use of certain words now that have historically been related to oppressing and demeaning members of certain groups. The fact that you can recognize them if I just write n— f— c— b— r— proves the point.
The vast majority of English shows that we don’t need to gender nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., in order to have a vibrant and useful English. Can you tell me that preserving a tiny number of gendered pronouns—representing a fraction of our pronouns—is somehow too difficult or demanding?
*My fear is that there will likely be the ironical result that people will think that “These are Acsenray’s preferred pronouns.” They’re not. I don’t want to have preferred pronouns. I don’t want anyone to have preferred pronouns. I want to escape the whole issue.
I usually hate when people whine about privilege, but man this whole post smacks of some serious privilege. “Sure you’ve been fighting to be recognized as a man/woman your whole life but this issue is of no benefit to me so let’s just get rid of it all together.”
Recognising that gender exists among people in various ways does not require us to create pronoun problems. It’s a separate matter that needs be related only if you decide and insist that it has to be related. Pronouns are not inherent to the issue. Again, the existence of languages without gendered pronouns—and indeed English pronouns like I, we, and you—are proof of such. If gendered pronouns are so important to the matter of recognizing the social and legal status of genders then why aren’t we gendering more things in English?
Third-person singular pronoun gender is the vermiform appendix of English grammar. Vestigial. It has no other gendered words to match with, leaving it without any grammatical function at all.
An aside about languages with more detailed terms for familiar relationships than English: Does any language have a term for the cousins of one’s cousins, on the other side (such that there’s no blood relationship between you and them)? I ask because my extended family has, among ourselves, adopted such a word (“Turkey cousins”), and it does seem useful.
One practical benefit of gendered pronouns in the past is that it allowed us to use them when discussing multiple people as long as they were different genders. For example, if I say “Jack and Jill went to fetch a pail of water. He carried the pail and she carried the ladle.”, the listener can assume that Jack carried the pail and Jill carried the ladle. But now with personal preference pronouns, that’s no longer the case. The listener can’t assume that “he” refers to “Jack” since Jack may prefer to be referred to as “she”, and likewise Jill may prefer “he”. So the listener doesn’t know who carried what unless they are familiar with Jack and Jill’s preferred pronouns as well as being aware if the person talking also knows their preferred pronouns and is using them. That makes for a big, confusing mess. In a case like that, it would be better to not use pronouns at all, similar to when talking about a single-gendered group. For example, “Jack and John went to fetch a pail of water. Jack carried the pail and John carried the ladle.”. That way there’s no pronoun confusion at all. Sidestep the whole issue of gendered or preferred pronouns all together.
We already have other pronouns in place: “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. The former carried the pail and the latter carried the ladle.”
In English, “they” (referring to more than one person) has no gender, and “I” and “you” have no gender, so it wouldn’t actually be a huge shift to the pronoun paradigm to change the third person singular from “he, she, it” to “they, it,” if we want to preserve that animate / inanimate distinction which we also don’t make in the other persons or number. All it would require is clarity: “Jack went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. They carried the pail. Jill went with them, and carried the ladle.”
Agreed. A couple reasons are that with the multi-national work environment, it’s common to see foreign names that the person has no clue if they are typically male or female. And another reason is that it avoids any confusion about who the pronoun refers to. If there are multiple people who could be “he”, it’s better to use their name so that no one has to assume which “he” is the right “he”.
In Hawaii we have calabash relatives who aren’t related by blood, but were close family friends.The term refers to sharing and eating out of the same calabash (bowl). It confused me when I was young as I had uncles, aunties and cousins that I was closer to than some of my blood relatives.
It’s also common to refer to elders as Uncle or Auntie and those your same age or younger as Cousin, Cuz, Braddah or Sista. This can get confusing because of our history of multi-ethnic marriages, it’s sometimes unclear whether the relationship is blood or just calabash. .
There’s also hanai, which means an informal adoption of someone as your own family.
There’s a saying in English that you can’t choose your family. But with an ancient and enduring Hawaiian tradition called hānai, sometimes you can.
Hānai is, loosely speaking, the Hawaiian word for adoption, but its meaning is less rigid than its western equivalent. For one thing, hānai children know their biological families and usually keep close ties to them. In fact, in most cases, babies are placed in homes with blood relatives.
In pre-contact Hawai‘i, paternal grandparents had an indisputable claim on the first-born boy, maternal grandparents on the first-born girl. This was a practical arrangement, since hānai was an efficient way for a preliterate society to pass knowledge and culture down the generations.
