# When You Need a Neuter Pronoun in Romance Languages. **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 11, 2017, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219 "2017-12-11T18:14:21Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Jim\_B](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jim_b/32/4338_2.png) [@Jim\_B](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jim_B)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/1 "2017-12-11T18:14:21Z")
I don’t speak more than one language. But I still like learning about other languages though. It’s a fascinating topic. Did you know, for example, Romance languages don’t have a neuter gender? Certainly none of the ones I am familiar with do. Latin had a neuter gender. But when it morphed into Romance languages, it simply became the masculine. That brings up an interesting question. What if you need a neuter pronoun to make your point? Mind you, I am not saying you can’t express the concept of neuter in Romance languages. I am sure you can do that in almost any language. But sometimes you just need a neuter pronoun to express what you want to say. And you just don’t have that in most Romance languages. I’ll give you just one example (but believe me, there are many). Consider a scene from _The Outcast_, from Star Trek: the Next Generation [here](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Outcast). Riker is in a shuttle with one of the androgynous J’nai. He says for the past several days, he has been trying to construct sentences without personal pronouns. So what is he supposed to refer to them as? “It”? To us that’s rude, Commander Riker says. How on earth do you translate it to French? There is no It in French. Just Il and Elle. I trust you can see my confusion. But as I said, there surely are many more examples, if not on TV, in life too. I humbly await your replies. 🙂 🙂 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/2 "2017-12-11T18:40:59Z")
The [French dictionary](http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/androgyne) says: “androgyne” is “le plus souvent masc.; qqf. fém.” Hope that helps. 🙂 Beyond that, we just had a thread on grammatical gender in which it was noted that it does not necessarily have anything to do with sex, and that in French you can say “il y a…”, “tout ce qu’il faut”, “une personne”, etc., and nobody will find it rude. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/3 "2017-12-11T18:56:18Z")
Spanish does have a neuter, but it rarely comes up in nominative pronouns since those tend to get ellided anyway; it mostly comes up in other types of pronouns. Neuter pronouns would never be used to refer to a person except as an insult - just as in English, only even more (I’ve heard people refer to a baby of unknown sex as “it”; in Spanish the term _bebé_ behaves as masculine but is neuter). And like French and unlike English, we have grammatical forms which are exclusively impersonal, including one with an impersonal pronoun (_on_ in French, _se_ in Spanish). ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/4 "2017-12-11T19:35:03Z")
> [@Jim\_B](#): > > Riker is in a shuttle with one of the androgynous J’nai. He says for the past several days, he has been trying to construct sentences without personal pronouns. So what is he supposed to refer to them as? “It”? To us that’s rude, Commander Riker says. A similar problem would occur when translating from French to English if the French text were making some distinction based on the difference between _tu_ and _vous_. Would you say “sometimes you just need a formal you to make your point, and you just don’t have that in English”? Is it therefore impossible to say what you want to say in English? ---
**Author:** ![OldGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/3bc359/32.png) [@OldGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OldGuy)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/5 "2017-12-11T20:23:09Z")
> [@markn\_1](#): > > Would you say “sometimes you just need a formal you to make your point, and you just don’t have that in English”? Is it therefore impossible to say what you want to say in English? Nitpick English does have a formal “you” it’s “you”. It’s the informal we mostly lack. “Thou” was the informal version that is almost never used anymore. ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 8:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/6 "2017-12-11T20:34:08Z")
Nitpick back: I would say that regardless of the words’ histories (which is unknown to 99.9% of English speakers), modern English has neither a formal you nor an informal you. It lacks the T-V distinction entirely, so in modern English, “you” is neither formal nor informal. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/7 "2017-12-11T20:57:04Z")
If it is nits that you like to pick, the real difference between “thou” and “you” is that the first one is singular, and the second one is (grammatically) plural. Formality is a side-effect. So, to spoil an answer to **markn+**'s exercise in post #4, to express in contemporary English a difference in formality, we need not restrict ourselves to playing games with second-person pronouns (since we are restricted to “you” if “thou” is out), and can construct something along the lines of “would my lord prefer tea or Scotch?” Which is not to belittle the difficulty of translating subtle wordplay and nuances, especially between unrelated languages (like the space-alien languages alluded to in the OP). ---
**Author:** ![Ignotus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/ecc23a/32.png) [@Ignotus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ignotus)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/8 "2017-12-11T21:05:51Z")
Yeah, it’s an interesting topic. Proto-Indoeuropean seems to have distinguished three genders: male, female and neuter. But, oddly, the oldest Indoeuropean language we have written evidence of, Hittite, only makes the distinction common/neuter, somewhat like modern Swedish or Danish. The Uralic and Altaic languages completely lack gender, while some African languages have a dozen or more. In French, one male plus a hundred female objects would still be\* ils \*(male plural). In Icelandic, they would be _þau_ (neuter plural). ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/9 "2017-12-11T21:17:50Z")
@DPRK, although it wasn’t clear to me on first reading, I believe the OP is not asking about translating to or from a space alien language. He’s asking how the dialog in the Star Trek TV episode would be translated from modern English to modern French. I remember in one of James Clavell’s books, Shogun I think, two characters would converse in Latin, and it was a plot point that they would sometimes switch between _vos_ and _tu_. Clavell translated _vos_ as “thou” and _tu_ as “you”, after some exposition about the difference, but I still didn’t think it worked very well since “thou” doesn’t indicate informality to modern readers; more often it sounds archaic or Biblical. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/10 "2017-12-11T21:48:41Z")
> [@markn\_1](#): > > @DPRK, although it wasn’t clear to me on first reading, I believe the OP is not asking about translating to or from a space alien language. He’s asking how the dialog in the Star Trek TV episode would be translated from modern English to modern French. The lines in question are: > [@](#): > > SOREN: He? Commander, there are no he’s or she’s in a species without gender. > RIKER: Okay. For two days I’ve been trying to construct sentences without personal pronouns. Now I give up. What should I use? It? To us, that’s rude. The first random subtitles I clicked on turns this into > [@](#): > > ‘‘Il’’ ? Il n’y a pas de ‘‘il’’ ou ‘‘elle’’ chez les androgynes. > > Ça fait deux jours que j’évite les pronoms personnels. J’abandonne. Que dois-je utiliser ? Thus avoiding the problem. That was the obvious solution I first considered (simply omit the “it” since it does not work in French, but then you have to delete the following sentence), but I suppose we could still have a look at the official subtitles to see if they were more clever. > [@](#): > > I remember in one of James Clavell’s books, Shogun I think, two characters would converse in Latin, and it was a plot point that they would sometimes switch between _vos_ and _tu_. Clavell translated _vos_ as “thou” and _tu_ as “you”, after some exposition about the difference, but I still didn’t think it worked very well since “thou” doesn’t indicate informality to modern readers; more often it sounds archaic or Biblical. That’s ironic since, in classical Latin, the difference between _tu_ and _vos_ is how many people one is addressing, nothing to do with formality. ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 11:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/11 "2017-12-11T23:50:42Z")
**Earth: Final Conflict** dealt with this problem by having the androgynous Taelons (who were all played by women) adopt masculine pronouns purely for the sake of convenience in English. ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/12 "2017-12-12T02:42:32Z")
It is easy to be misled. To some extent, it is not the object that has gender, but just he classification of the word into declensions. In Latin, the words for farmer and sailor are feminine. I’m not sure, but the term “gender” may have been arbitrarily used to describe the way different classes of nouns are declined, after having observed that some languages divided them in such a way that female and male personages were included in one side or the other. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 2:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/13 "2017-12-12T02:50:00Z")
It’s the opposite, **jtur88**. The word “gender” (or rather, its predecessors) meant “type of object” (which includes “type of word”) _before_ it got the sociological meaning. ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 3:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/14 "2017-12-12T03:13:14Z")
> [@jtur88](#): > > In Latin, the words for farmer and sailor are feminine. _Agricola_ and _nauta_ are masculine, not feminine, although they are first declension nouns. Most first declension nouns are feminine but a few like these two are masculine. I think I made this same mistake on this board a few months ago. ---
**Author:** ![Terminus\_Est](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terminus_est/32/3087_2.png) [@Terminus\_Est](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terminus_Est)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 11:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/15 "2017-12-12T11:04:55Z")
The cited dialogue from _Star Trek_ betrays some cultural bias, as apparently the writer couldn’t conceive of a language without gendered pronouns. Yet there are languages that exist right now on Earth were everyone, male or female, is referred to by the same pronoun. Riker’s dilemma simply wouldn’t exist. ---
**Author:** ![PlaceboTarget](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/placebotarget/32/1073_2.png) [@PlaceboTarget](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PlaceboTarget)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 11:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/16 "2017-12-12T11:34:04Z")
> [@Jim\_B](#): > > Riker is in a shuttle with one of the androgynous J’nai. He says for the past several days, he has been trying to construct sentences without personal pronouns. So what is he supposed to refer to them as? “It”? To us that’s rude, Commander Riker says. > > How on earth do you translate it to French? There is no It in French. Just Il and Elle. There is no It in Romanian either. Just El and Ea. I’m not an interpreter, but I’ve noticed interpreters are very practical people. They’re supposed to quickly transfer a semantic content from one language into another. Initially it seemed to me that they butchered the original message, but then I realized they only focused on the content with almost no regard for the form. Your concern is one with the form. I’ve noticed someone mentioning the reverse problem when one needs to translate the French ‘vous’ into English. ‘Vous’ can be used to express politeness when addressing someone in a formal context, for example. In Romanian things are even more complicated because we have not only ‘tu’ (=tu) and ‘voi’ (=vous) but also ‘dumneavoastra’. We use ‘tu’ to address a friend, ‘voi’ to address several friends, and ‘dumneavoastra’ to address one or more people in a formal context. How do you translate ‘dumneavoastra’ into English? Let’s take this simple question: “Dumneavoastra dansati?” A simple way would be by adding ‘sir’, or ‘madam’: “Do you dance, sir?” or “Do you dance, madam?” Similarly, you can easily use ‘this’ to translate 'it". Romanians prefer to use ‘this’ (and sometimes ‘that’) to refer to objects or abstract matters, just like you do it in English when you say “This is stupid.” Romanians always say “I don’t like this” when they mean “I don’t like it.” So, I guess an interpreter would easily find a way to translate the paragraph describing Riker’s dilemma. ---
**Author:** ![Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/les_espaces_du_sommeil/32/308_2.png) [@Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Les_Espaces_Du_Sommeil)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 12:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/17 "2017-12-12T12:37:20Z")
> [@Ignotus](#): > > … > In French, one male plus a hundred female objects would still be\* ils \*(male plural)… Actually, this may be about to change. There’s been a lot of talk very recently about _l’écriture inclusive_. The case you mention could be solved by using “ils et elles”. That’s fair but a bit heavy. Similarly, proponents of this reform suggest that all words should be written in such a way that they reflect all possible genders. So, you’ll have : _les candidat·e·s_ instead of _les candidats_ _les chef·fe·s_ instead of _les chefs_ _les ambassadeur·rice·s_ instead of _les ambassadeurs_ Now, this may be fair but it looks absolutely horrendous. And I’m not sure that young children learning to read will be able to make sense of it. There’s one proposal that i find very appealing, however. When you have a list of nouns, a single masculine one determines which form of the adjective should be used. So, _la fille, la femme et l’homme sont **contents** _ (masculine, plural form of the adjective). With the _écriture inclusive_, the last word in the list would determine the form of the adjective. In my example, it wouldn’t change a thing but, shuffling words around, you’d get : _la femme, l’homme et la fille sont **contentes** _ (feminine plural form of the adjective) or _la fille, l’homme et la femme sont **contentes** _ (feminine plural form of the adjective). I like this a lot. It’s unbiaised, logical and it even sounds good. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 1:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/18 "2017-12-12T13:30:12Z")
I have much trouble using constructs missing from my native English, such as the tu/vous distinction. In high school I always said ‘vous’ since I was always addressing the teacher. When I lived in France for a while, people thought it odd I called my girlfriend ‘vous.’ So then I switched to ‘tu’ … for everybody! That didn’t go over well (:eek:), so I started hanging out with Arabs who also seemed to call everybody ‘tu.’ 🙂 (Don’t let’s get started on Thai pronouns — I think Thais have to practice pronouns they’ve never spoken before when they’re going to meet the King.) ---
**Author:** ![minor7flat5](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/minor7flat5/32/258_2.png) [@minor7flat5](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/minor7flat5)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 1:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/19 "2017-12-12T13:31:00Z")
> [@markn\_1](#): > > I remember in one of James Clavell’s books, Shogun I think, two characters would converse in Latin, and it was a plot point that they would sometimes switch between _vos_ and _tu_. Clavell translated _vos_ as “thou” and _tu_ as “you”, after some exposition about the difference, but I still didn’t think it worked very well since “thou” doesn’t indicate informality to modern readers; more often it sounds archaic or Biblical. I have vague memories of that very thick book–great story and I need to read it again soon. It was probably Continental Portuguese, since that is what the European captain and his Japanese translator spoke. (she calls him _senhor_ with the Portuguese spelling). I believe they still have the _tu_/_vos_ forms going strong on on the Continent. Thankfully the Brazilians did away with that some time ago and opt for using _você_, a term for “you” that is conjugated in the third person (similar to Spanish _usted_, this word comes from _vossa mercê_). For a Brazilian, _vos_ is a word that shows up in the Bible, just like _thou_ in English. From the “you didn’t ask” department, they actually have three levels of formality, not just two. _tu_, _você_, and _o senhor_, in increasing levels of formality. Brazilians of older generations, like my wife, call their aunts and uncles “a senhora” and “o senhor” when speaking to them directly: “_A senhora está sentindo bem?_” is like the stilted English “Is madam feeling well today?” Happily, this usage is fading and one can safely use _você_ everywhere. > [@Nava](#): > > Spanish does have a neuter, but it rarely comes up in nominative pronouns since those tend to get ellided anyway; it mostly comes up in other types of pronouns. I never knew such a thing existed (as a non-Spanish speaker that’s no surprise). What would be an example of this neuter pronoun in Spanish? ---
**Author:** ![Aji\_de\_Gallina](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aji_de_gallina/32/260_2.png) [@Aji\_de\_Gallina](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aji_de_Gallina)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219/20 "2017-12-12T13:36:56Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > Spanish does have a neuter, but it rarely comes up in nominative pronouns since those tend to get ellided anyway; it mostly comes up in other types of pronouns. Neuter pronouns would never be used to refer to a person except as an insult - just as in English, only even more (I’ve heard people refer to a baby of unknown sex as “it”; in Spanish the term _bebé_ behaves as masculine but is neuter). And like French and unlike English, we have grammatical forms which are exclusively impersonal, including one with an impersonal pronoun (_on_ in French, _se_ in Spanish). We have no real alternatives to “él”, “ella”, “nosotros”, “nosotras”, “ellos”, “ellas”. Using “ese” and “esa”, “esos”, “esas” is the equivalent of “it” and it sounds terrible and there is not equivalent to the “singular they”. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-you-need-a-neuter-pronoun-in-romance-languages/804219.md?page=2)