Pfffft. Anybody who devoted several hundred million years and about one-quarter of the entire animal kingdom to creating over 380,000 different species of beetle has no room to criticize us for being preoccupied with comparatively trivial distinctions.
I’m still holding out for Mark Twain’s reforms. Bloopity really had bloopity’s shit together. (“Bloopity” is my own candidate for the new gender-neutral pronoun.)
We also need to fix ‘you’. Consider this retort:
“You leave my beetles out of this!! You waste all this energy on trivial matters, beetles don’t! They build empires…speaking of which, you know when you play Age of Empires and the horrible voice acting takes you right out of that? I hate that.”
In the above ‘you’ means:
Kimtsu (“You leave”)
Mankind (“You waste”)
“one” (“When you play”…you’re really saying “when one plays”)
Edit: And I don’t even know what “You know” is. i guess “Bear with me a second” or “focus here, I’m relating a shared experience”
Dude.
We have a gender neutral pronoun. It’s they. The controversy is over. There’s nothing more to discuss.
But I’ve got my own plans for spelling reform.
Here are the parameters: We will only use ASCII characters. No diacritics. We’re just going to change what letters represent what sounds, because what we have is a goddam mess.
Vowels are a fucking mess. We standardize vowels so that one vowel or vowel pair represents one and only one sound. I don’t give a fuck what, but let’s do it, and no more silent “e”. Long vowels are represented by doubled vowels, short vowels by single vowels. Yeah, get used to aa and ii pairs.
Consonants.
“G” is only hard G. Soft G is a J.
“C” is useless. Hard C is replaced by K, soft C is replaced by S. That leaves C open to be used to represent the SH sound.
Bullshit like GH and PH is replaced by F.
“X” is useless. It is replaced by KS. That leaves X open to go back to represent the CH sound.
“Y” is useless. We use regular vowels, not Y, which leaves Y open to be used to represent both TH sounds. Yeah, we’re gonna have it do double duty to represent both hard and soft TH, but we’re working on an ASCII limit, so no Thorn and Edh, which would be my first choice.
“Q” is useless. Replace current uses with KW. That leaves it open to represent some other half-assed sounds that we barely realize exit, like the Zuuujj sound in “pleasure”.
Simple, effective, universal. You’re welcome.
Spoiler alert: They will go nowhere, just like all the previous plans for English-language spelling reform. Can’t blame a guy for trying, though.
I see that bloopity has put some thought into this…
Can we fix possessive pronouns while we’re at it?
We say “my opinion”, “my socks”, "my violin (that’s been in the closet for ten years and I wouldn’t notice if it disappeared), “my violin (which specific not-replaceable instrument is an essential part of both my work and my personal life)”, “my cat”, “my spouse”, “my country”, “my home”, “my God.”
These are not all the same relationship by a long shot. And confusing the “my” in “my socks” with the “my” in “my spouse” causes a whole lot of problems. (No, I don’t actually think it’s the pronoun causing the problem. But the mindset between having only one possessive and considering relationships in general to be possessive in the sense of “my socks” may be related.)
I want a mutual possessive: one that only applies if both parties agree to it. And one for cases in which “owning” the thing doesn’t, or shouldn’t, include the right to damage or destroy it. And one for cases in which it’s more that whatever’s claimed owns you (as in “my God”), or you’re a part of it (as in “my country”). – I don’t know even what word I want to use for any of these; so this is clearly not a fully fledged out proposal.
– all those spelling reform theories run up against the difficulty that even within the USA people pronounce things differently; and said pronunciations change from time to time. We wound up in this spelling mess in large part through such pronunciation changes.
Some spelling changes will happen on their own over time, just as other language changes do. While it still bothers me to see “lite” for “light”, I recognize that this particular botheration makes no sense, and I expect the dictionaries and style books will eventually recognize it. It’s been a really long time since anybody much actually pronounced that “gh” sound in the middle of words in English.
The three dictionaries I have on my phone have it now:
American Heritage:
*Oxford Dictionary of English:
*
Merriam Webster:
Would it fix things if we just started calling them “genitive” instead of “possessive”?
Thudlow Boink, I suppose it might sufficiently confuse the character who keeps going on that “it’s my dog/land/child and I’ve got a right to do what I want with it!” that they’d instead be sidetracked into snarling because they thought you’d said something about their genitals.
All this talk of adding more complexity to English has me declenching my fists.
And yet English stubbornly continued to insist that it needs singular and plural first-person pronouns, unless the person speaking happens to be a monarch.
Come to think of it, English already has a non-gendered third-person singular pronoun, it has simply fallen into disuse.
One.
As in “someone.”
As in, “I will know one when I see one.”
I seem to remember that in the 1970s “one” was sometimes employed to replace “man” or “woman” in some contexts, but it seems to have fallen out of fashion.
I will put it up for discussion here. Would the words “one/one’s” be a useful replacement for he, she, him, her, his, hers, his’n, her’n, etc.? I could embrace it.
I’ve tried using ‘one’, but one problem with it is that it has no distinct subjective and objective forms, which seems to me to make some sentences awkward. “I gave it to one” just doesn’t sound right to me, somehow.
Which is not of course an overwhelming reason against. “You” has the same form in both those cases; it’s probably just that I’m used to “I gave it to you” as well as to “You gave it to me,” whereas IME one rarely hears/sees “one” in the objective.
[quote=“thorny_locust, post:133, topic:836456”]
I’ve tried using ‘one’, but one problem with it is that it has no distinct subjective and objective forms, which seems to me to make some sentences awkward. “I gave it to one” just doesn’t sound right to me, somehow./QUOTE]
Plus, everybody is all like “Who is Juan?”
Only other Juans are familiar with Juan.
Because it takes Juan to know Juan.
Several modern Science Fiction books that I’ve read recently, have adopted genderless language. It’s interesting in that I’ve seen science fiction ahead of the curve, as far as social progressiveness, for as long as I’ve been reading it (starting back in the 1960s, but also in the classic SF I read that dates from the 1940s and on up). There’s always resistance to change. But the thing about SF writers and readers is that they know this better than anyone and tend to not only adapt better to it, but also are often the heralds of it (as in this case).
I’m not sure that this change will take hold (at least, as it is). But it is happening right now in small ways, and how it will evolve is something to watch. Keep in mind that some things that seem sensible take forever to happen (such as the US switching to the metric system). And other things start out slow, but then take huge leaps when the time is right. But there is nearly ALWAYS a backlash.
Why don’t we just stop going out of our way to find ways to be offended about everything, and instead accept words in the context and manner in which they are intended?
You’re being silly. We’re not talking about standardizing a mistake, we’re talking about a conscientious movement toward new expressions for a specific purpose. People say “less cars” because they don’t know any better. But they say “Dave brought their laptop” because they are aware that Dave is non-binary.
That’s hilarious.
Think about all the words men and white people can no longer get away with calling women and minorities.
Think about the extinction of the formal address of a woman as “Mrs.” plus her husband’s name.
And I would posit that a person telling you they prefer to be called by a particular pronoun immediately changes the way you think about them, even if it’s in a negative way.
Words have meaning. That’s the whole point.
I’ve dabbled a bit with German, French, Italian, and Spanish, and I love those languages except for the gender issue. If gender is annoying in English, it’s far worse in those languages, which require memorization of nonsensical, arbitrary gendering of nouns.
I love learning case, person, number: etc., but gender? Ugh. So annoying.