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One solution people have come up with for the perceived unfairness of male pronouns doing double-duty as neuter pronouns in English is to sometimes use female o

One solution people have come up with for the perceived unfairness of male pronouns doing double-duty as neuter pronouns in English is to sometimes use female ones instead. The down side of this is that it leaves us with three possible neuter pronoun sets, at least two of which are just about guaranteed to bother someone. Using exclusively male pronouns will obviously bother some people, now, else this wouldn't be an issue in the first place. Using female ones will bother some people (either for ideological reasons or, for those who grew up on "male is what you use for the general case", by tripping them up as they try to figure out who in particular is being referred to). "They" and such are safer but you still get the occasional (incorrect) pedant complaining about that usage.

andreygrehov 5y ago
Thanks for the explanation. I'm not a gender pronouns pedant in any way, my question was asked purely from an educational perspective. My native language is Russian, which is generally a gendered (masculine/feminine/neuter) language. Nouns have gender. It mostly follows the spelling of the words - i.e. if a word ends with a certain vowel. Sometimes it doesn't work that way, mostly with loanwords. In other cases the historical form of the word did match a pattern, and was assigned a gender accordingly - and then changed (e.g. by re-loaning it in a more accurate spelling), and no longer fits. When that happens, people will use the more "appropriate" rather than the "right" gender in colloquial speech, and eventually it becomes the new standard, collecting the mismatch. A good example of this is the Russian word "coffee". When it was first loaned back in 18th century, it was "kofiy" - and in Russian, that is definitely masculine. Eventually it got re-loaned as "kofe", which would normally be neuter; but the masculine gender assignment stayed from past spelling. In the dictionaries, that is - in practice treating the word as neuter became one of the common incorrect colloquialisms, just because it doesn't "look" masculine. Language purists fought this for several decades, and eventually lost: it's still nominally masculine, but neuter is considered an "accepted variant" in modern dictionaries. So to a Russian speaker, say, New York and Texas are masculine, while California and Florida are feminine. So, when I read "she" in @antirez's article, I was immediately confused, like, did I miss a character introduced in the previous paragraph or ...who is _she_? In my writings, instead of saying "he", "she", "they", I try to call people by the exact meaning of what I'm writing about, eg engineer, manager, programmer, etc. No idea why it's not THE way to end all the pronouns dilemmas in English.

andreygrehov 5y ago

Thanks for the explanation. I'm not a gender pronouns pedant in any way, my question was asked purely from an educational perspective. My native language is Russian, which is generally a gendered (masculine/feminine/neuter) language. Nouns have gender. It mostly follows the spelling of the words - i.e. if a word ends with a certain vowel. Sometimes it doesn't work that way, mostly with loanwords. In other cases the historical form of the word did match a pattern, and was assigned a gender accordingly - and then changed (e.g. by re-loaning it in a more accurate spelling), and no longer fits. When that happens, people will use the more "appropriate" rather than the "right" gender in colloquial speech, and eventually it becomes the new standard, collecting the mismatch. A good example of this is the Russian word "coffee". When it was first loaned back in 18th century, it was "kofiy" - and in Russian, that is definitely masculine. Eventually it got re-loaned as "kofe", which would normally be neuter; but the masculine gender assignment stayed from past spelling. In the dictionaries, that is - in practice treating the word as neuter became one of the common incorrect colloquialisms, just because it doesn't "look" masculine. Language purists fought this for several decades, and eventually lost: it's still nominally masculine, but neuter is considered an "accepted variant" in modern dictionaries. So to a Russian speaker, say, New York and Texas are masculine, while California and Florida are feminine. So, when I read "she" in @antirez's article, I was immediately confused, like, did I miss a character introduced in the previous paragraph or ...who is _she_? In my writings, instead of saying "he", "she", "they", I try to call people by the exact meaning of what I'm writing about, eg engineer, manager, programmer, etc. No idea why it's not THE way to end all the pronouns dilemmas in English.