8 ms·

I think it would be nice if English evolved to only ungendered pronouns. Eliminates accidental offense while also reducing everyone's cognitive load. Also, you

I think it would be nice if English evolved to only ungendered pronouns. Eliminates accidental offense while also reducing everyone's cognitive load. Also, you reminded me of a quote from yesterday: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore."

munificent 5y ago
I don't disagree with you, but I think it's worth pointing out that there is a pragmatic benefit to gendered pronouns. You can think of pronouns as sort of like `$?` in bash or `_` in Python's interactive shell. They give you a short way to refer to a previously mentioned noun. When you have more than one of these "special variables", you can use them more often as long as they conveniently get uniformly distributed across the previously mentioned nouns. So, in English, you can say: "Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. gave Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk Koyaanisquatsiuth Williams a sweater for Christmas. She liked his gift." The second sentence can use two pronouns because they happen to be unambiguous. With only a single pronoun, that sentence ends up like: "Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk liked Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff's gift." (This is obviously an extreme example for comedic effect.) This is also why Romance languages have noun gender for inanimate objects where actual biological gender isn't meaningful. It's not about genitals, it's about scattering a few pronouns uniformly across the noun space. Of course, one might rightly argue that gender is not a good mechanism to use for your pronoun distribution. We could do something like shells do where we assign pronouns based on recency of the mentioned noun. Or some other system. But my point is that gendered pronouns aren't completely bananas. They serve a pragmatic function.
- billforsternz 5y ago
  Interesting rationalisation for gendered inanimate nouns in romance languages, thanks. Also used in many/most other Germanic (and other language families?) right? Is your explanation a personal inspiration or established theory? For it to make sense they would need to (for example) refer to (say) a table as 'he' later in a sentence. Do they do that?
  - uj8efdkjfdshf 5y ago
    IMO grammatical gender in Indo European languages (of which the Germanic and Romance language families are a part of) reflect how nouns and their references (pronouns, adjectives etc) are semantically linked by modifying the word endings of the latter to better reflect those of the original noun - I like to think of it as the equivalent of type suffixes in assembly language.
  - munificent 5y ago
    Definitely not a personal inspiration, but I can't recall where I first heard the idea. > For it to make sense they would need to (for example) refer to (say) a table as 'he' later in a sentence. Do they do that? I don't speak any Romance languages beyond high school Spanish, but I assume that's the case.
- frutiger 5y ago
  > So, in English, you can say: "Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. gave Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk Koyaanisquatsiuth Williams a sweater for Christmas. She liked his gift." Actually in that example, you still don’t need gendered pronouns to resolve ambiguity: “they enjoyed the gift”.
metalliqaz 5y ago
It costs me absolutely zero cognitive load. You don't have to worry about that. Now, trying to parse out if "they" is meant to refer to a group or an individual when used in place of s/he, that does take some work.
loco5niner 5y ago
Politicizing this topic is what causes the cognitive load.
BurningFrog 5y ago
Persian and Chinese have, if I remember correctly, no gendered pronouns. No effects on gender equality seem observable.
- dron57 5y ago
  Chinese has gendered pronouns in written form. The characters for he and she are written differently, but they are both pronounced the same way - tā. I assume that in some older form of Chinese the sounds must have been different, but they converged and people get by fine in spoken language.
  - rhernandez35 5y ago
    It's actually the other way around. The 她 form was introduced in the relatively recent 1920s, partially to make it easier to translate Western texts.

munificent 5y ago

I don't disagree with you, but I think it's worth pointing out that there is a pragmatic benefit to gendered pronouns. You can think of pronouns as sort of like `$?` in bash or `_` in Python's interactive shell. They give you a short way to refer to a previously mentioned noun. When you have more than one of these "special variables", you can use them more often as long as they conveniently get uniformly distributed across the previously mentioned nouns. So, in English, you can say: "Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. gave Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk Koyaanisquatsiuth Williams a sweater for Christmas. She liked his gift." The second sentence can use two pronouns because they happen to be unambiguous. With only a single pronoun, that sentence ends up like: "Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk liked Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff's gift." (This is obviously an extreme example for comedic effect.) This is also why Romance languages have noun gender for inanimate objects where actual biological gender isn't meaningful. It's not about genitals, it's about scattering a few pronouns uniformly across the noun space. Of course, one might rightly argue that gender is not a good mechanism to use for your pronoun distribution. We could do something like shells do where we assign pronouns based on recency of the mentioned noun. Or some other system. But my point is that gendered pronouns aren't completely bananas. They serve a pragmatic function.

billforsternz 5y ago
Interesting rationalisation for gendered inanimate nouns in romance languages, thanks. Also used in many/most other Germanic (and other language families?) right? Is your explanation a personal inspiration or established theory? For it to make sense they would need to (for example) refer to (say) a table as 'he' later in a sentence. Do they do that?
- uj8efdkjfdshf 5y ago
  IMO grammatical gender in Indo European languages (of which the Germanic and Romance language families are a part of) reflect how nouns and their references (pronouns, adjectives etc) are semantically linked by modifying the word endings of the latter to better reflect those of the original noun - I like to think of it as the equivalent of type suffixes in assembly language.
- munificent 5y ago
  Definitely not a personal inspiration, but I can't recall where I first heard the idea. > For it to make sense they would need to (for example) refer to (say) a table as 'he' later in a sentence. Do they do that? I don't speak any Romance languages beyond high school Spanish, but I assume that's the case.
frutiger 5y ago
> So, in English, you can say: "Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. gave Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk Koyaanisquatsiuth Williams a sweater for Christmas. She liked his gift." Actually in that example, you still don’t need gendered pronouns to resolve ambiguity: “they enjoyed the gift”.

metalliqaz 5y ago

It costs me absolutely zero cognitive load. You don't have to worry about that. Now, trying to parse out if "they" is meant to refer to a group or an individual when used in place of s/he, that does take some work.

loco5niner 5y ago

Politicizing this topic is what causes the cognitive load.

BurningFrog 5y ago

Persian and Chinese have, if I remember correctly, no gendered pronouns. No effects on gender equality seem observable.

dron57 5y ago
Chinese has gendered pronouns in written form. The characters for he and she are written differently, but they are both pronounced the same way - tā. I assume that in some older form of Chinese the sounds must have been different, but they converged and people get by fine in spoken language.
- rhernandez35 5y ago
  It's actually the other way around. The 她 form was introduced in the relatively recent 1920s, partially to make it easier to translate Western texts.