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Moreover, those personal pronouns are untranslatable. If someone’s wants to be referred as “xir” in English and use of “they” is considered offensive, there is
by drdaeman 7y ago
Moreover, those personal pronouns are untranslatable. If someone’s wants to be referred as “xir” in English and use of “they” is considered offensive, there is no “politically correct” way to refer to such person in at least some non-English languages unless xir defines the pronouns for other languages too.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rasengan0 7y agoMakes total sense https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/xir https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/xir
- Traster 7y agoI'm sorry I don't understand this argument. Let's say we're talking about something on a website, I say I want to be referred to by the pronoun "xir". "No,because I can't translate that into Swahili" seems like an odd response to me. It seems irrelevant to an average conversation I'm going to have. And even if you are planning to translate the conversation into another language you could just.... ask what would be reasonable in the other language?
- drdaeman 7y agoOf course not, it wouldn't be a "no, you can't request this pronoun". It would be "sure, but mind you that I have no clue how to talk about you in non-English languages". And in some languages it's more than just the pronouns - for example, in some languages verbs may be declined according to a grammatical gender (a concept that almost doesn't exist in modern English and not really inferable from just "xir").