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No-- most people understand how pronouns work now (and the rest are rapidly coming up to speed). It's only people who are deliberately insistent on misundersta
by mlyle 4y ago
No-- most people understand how pronouns work now (and the rest are rapidly coming up to speed). It's only people who are deliberately insistent on misunderstanding that are mislead.
Just like the people mislead by 'decimate'.
- lmm 4y agoNo, absent other context everyone will understand female to mean having typical female characteristics, almost by definition. Calling someone who is unlike a female in most ways "she" is deceptive even if you consider it "correct", in the same way as making a tomato dish and calling it a fruit salad.
- mlyle 4y ago> No, absent other context everyone will understand female to mean having typical female characteristics, almost by definition. As we've talked about a whole bunch in this thread, language can-- and does-- evolve. The pronoun thing isn't fixed within extant human cultures. Our language can evolve as mores do. And, yes, people are occasionally confused by various kinds of new usage, but overall people keep up.
- lmm 4y agoThere's no "keeping up" with an unnatural category. It's like the "international except Taiwan" example I gave earlier - the language is forced and artificial and always will be, because it doesn't reflect the underlying reality that these people would be in the other group if you put the boundary in the natural place.
- mlyle 4y ago> It's like the "international except Taiwan" example I gave earlier - the language is forced and artificial and always will be, because it doesn't reflect the underlying reality that these people would be in the other group if you put the boundary in the natural place. If this were true, then we wouldn't have all the examples of languages and cultures that don't put it in that "natural place".
- lmm 4y ago> If this were true, then we wouldn't have all the examples of languages and cultures that don't put it in that "natural place". What languages and cultures would those be? (The example usually given is "two spirit", but (as has been more widely reported recently) that was largely a fabrication)
- mlyle 4y agoLots of languages have complete gender neutrality in pronouns. They often include arbitrarily or self-assigned signifiers or honorifics, which isn't too far from the direction we seem to be evolving towards. E.g. Kurdish, the Turkic languages, Tagalog (although Spanish influences have caused some appearance of -a and -o suffixes), Armenian, Estonian, etc. Some languages assign gender to everything grammatically. English is a rare case of a language without very little grammatical gender except personal pronouns. The only other language that I know of with this characteristic is Persian. Singular "they" dates back to middle English.
- lmm 4y agoSure, it's possible to not make a distinction at all. But no natural language has a male/female distinction that makes the kind of exceptions that trans people want for themselves.
- mlyle 4y agoPlenty of languages have very arbitrary and complex rules for pronouns or other signifiers. You wanting these to be, in English, very closely tied to specific characteristics of expressed gender similar to traditional usage doesn't make it have to be so. Plenty of humans live in a language where you can't figure out what's in people's pants or whether they're likely to wear a skirt without someone explicitly telling you. Maybe it's time to shrug, and realize that language of English is morphing enough that you're going to experience this same difficulty. Your only choice is whether you passive-aggressively refer to people in ways that they don't like or not. What's with showing up every day or two to poke at this with a two sentence reply, when you're active elsewhere on hacker news much more often? Just trollin'?