Anybody have (a link to) the Finnish subtitles of this scene?
I’d love to see how they’d translate this to Finnish. Since there is no “him/her” pronoun distinction in Finnish. Although there is an “it” (which is actually often used for persons in everyday speech, so “To us, that’s rude” would be interesting to translate as well).
Ese and company are demonstrative pronouns, not nominative ones; that doesn’t mean they can’t be used as nominative pronouns but it’s not the “standard”, basic use. They’re equivalent to English “this” and “that” (1).
The third person singular has él (m), ella (f) and ello (n); ello is rarely used, but it officially exists.
The accusative pronoun is, in the standard form, le (m), la (f), lo (n). The dative is, again in the standard, the gender-invariant le or se, depending on its position within the sentence.
(1) They even share the dual-use of adjective (with a name) or pronoun (without):
Hablamos de esto, eso y aquello. We talked about this and that.
¿Qué jersey quieres? Ése. What sweater is the one you want? That one.
Ese jersey me gusta más que éste. I like that sweater better than this one.
(2) The current Ortografía indicates that these pronouns don’t need the graphic accent. I’m old fashioned.
Various neutral pronouns have been proposed for French, but to my knowledge none have been widely adopted yet. “Iel” (also spelled “yel”), which replaces “il ou elle”, masculine or feminine, seems to be the most popular. Here’s a French blog post describing some options.
A pronoun meaning “il ou elle” (he or she) would still not be of neuter gender (it), which does not exist in modern French. Though maybe it would solve the problem of how to refer to androgynes.
Something similar has been happening in Spanish, although it is more of a “hieroglyphic” thing…
When trying to be “inclusive”, instead of writing both the masculine and the feminine endings (“o” and “a”, respectively) for words that mark gender only in those endings, what some people do in writing is to use the “at sign” (“@”) to sort of “amalgamate” them. Examples:
“amigos” (male friends) and “amigas” (female friends). Instead of writing “amigos y amigas” or “amigos/as”, some people have taken to write “amig@s”.
“niños” (male children) and “niñas” (female children): Here, they write “niñ@s”.
And so on, and so forth. I think it looks positively hideous and clumsy, but as apparently I am a representative example of the oppressing heteropatriarcate, what do I know?
It was a trend for a while, but it’s gone down a lot. Most people are back to the way it was before we learned to draw the arroba: niño/a, amigos/as, Muy señor(a) mío/a…
The parenthesis means “this part is used in some cases, not in others”: señor(a) stands for señor o señora. Part of the reason for the trend getting lost somewhat is that in these cases there isn’t a place where the arroba would fit.
The slash means “substitute appropriately”: niño/a stands for niño o niña.