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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 g
by 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 agoShould 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 agoYes, 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.