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I once saw someone who goes by “it” explain that it liked “it” because it has a sort of ungendered quality to it, whereas “they” is instead gender-neutral. It e

I once saw someone who goes by “it” explain that it liked “it” because it has a sort of ungendered quality to it, whereas “they” is instead gender-neutral. It explained that we use “they” to refer to humans because we assume humans are gendered, and the implied gender is the quality that makes “they” (or for that matter “he” or “she”) implicitly refer to a human. But it rejects the notion humans must be gendered, or that humans without gender are not human. I'm not sure I agree with that argument, but it got me to think. It blends the linguistic and the philosophical.

dragonwriter 4y ago
Grammatically, “they” and “it” are the same gender, they differ in number. Semantically, the difference in their singular use (prior to very recent evolutions) is that they was rarely used for specific known humams, and it was never uses for humans (but frequently for living things with sex and to whom grammatical gender corresponding to sex could also be used, in cases where the sex was unknown or unimportant, similar to the use of “they” for humans.) So, while I find the idea of “they” as gender neutral but “it” as emphatically ungendered conceptuallt interesting, I don't really think it reflects historical usage differences. OTOH, I suppose there could be debate about different presumptions of social gender vs grammatical gender here, too.
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
  > Grammatically, “they” and “it” are the same gender, they differ in number. English doesn't have grammatical gender so this statement seems questionable to me, but that's a nitpick.
- wl 4y ago
  "They" is animate common. "It" is inanimate. To the extent that English has grammatical gender, they're different.
unsupp0rted 4y ago
This is exhausting. I wish we could simplify English so that all beings use a single pronoun, and be done with it. This one’s that gender, this one’s neutral gender, this one’s genderless… who cares. If gender or plurality is key to the sentence we can add a word. I like how in Indonesian to make a word plural you double it: pencil pencil = multiple pencils Can we come up with a pronoun that literally means “the being or beings in question” without commenting on gender or plurality?
- Avicebron 4y ago
  Should we overhaul all languages that use gendered language? I speak French and often think in French (le/la, etc), obviously I speak English, but a lot of modern English comes with heritage from cultures, languages, hell even concepts of thought (yes thinking in differently languages gives unique perspectives of the world).
  - unsupp0rted 4y ago
    Yes, we should indeed. Of all the most useful projects to humanity (diverting asteroids, developing free energy, curing cancers, solving childhood poverty, etc) in any top-3 list I'd put "having a single common language that is super-simple to learn and master and which everybody is taught from childhood". Let's not change English or French then, but leave them as "classical" languages, but teach kids the new easy/expressive/explicit one. No gendered nouns, no phrasal verbs, no reported speech markers, etc. Completing this initiative makes all the other ones easier to complete. And it's not like it's much more complicated than the other complicated things we donate to and try to push forward every year.

dragonwriter 4y ago

Grammatically, “they” and “it” are the same gender, they differ in number. Semantically, the difference in their singular use (prior to very recent evolutions) is that they was rarely used for specific known humams, and it was never uses for humans (but frequently for living things with sex and to whom grammatical gender corresponding to sex could also be used, in cases where the sex was unknown or unimportant, similar to the use of “they” for humans.) So, while I find the idea of “they” as gender neutral but “it” as emphatically ungendered conceptuallt interesting, I don't really think it reflects historical usage differences. OTOH, I suppose there could be debate about different presumptions of social gender vs grammatical gender here, too.

TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
> Grammatically, “they” and “it” are the same gender, they differ in number. English doesn't have grammatical gender so this statement seems questionable to me, but that's a nitpick.
wl 4y ago
"They" is animate common. "It" is inanimate. To the extent that English has grammatical gender, they're different.

unsupp0rted 4y ago

This is exhausting. I wish we could simplify English so that all beings use a single pronoun, and be done with it. This one’s that gender, this one’s neutral gender, this one’s genderless… who cares. If gender or plurality is key to the sentence we can add a word. I like how in Indonesian to make a word plural you double it: pencil pencil = multiple pencils Can we come up with a pronoun that literally means “the being or beings in question” without commenting on gender or plurality?

Avicebron 4y ago
Should we overhaul all languages that use gendered language? I speak French and often think in French (le/la, etc), obviously I speak English, but a lot of modern English comes with heritage from cultures, languages, hell even concepts of thought (yes thinking in differently languages gives unique perspectives of the world).
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  Yes, we should indeed. Of all the most useful projects to humanity (diverting asteroids, developing free energy, curing cancers, solving childhood poverty, etc) in any top-3 list I'd put "having a single common language that is super-simple to learn and master and which everybody is taught from childhood". Let's not change English or French then, but leave them as "classical" languages, but teach kids the new easy/expressive/explicit one. No gendered nouns, no phrasal verbs, no reported speech markers, etc. Completing this initiative makes all the other ones easier to complete. And it's not like it's much more complicated than the other complicated things we donate to and try to push forward every year.