5 ms·

Destroying the language indeed... Now if only there were some way of measuring that. Perhaps if a neighbouring country with a similar social structure, with a s

Destroying the language indeed... Now if only there were some way of measuring that. Perhaps if a neighbouring country with a similar social structure, with a similar government, with a similar school system, with similar core values, already had a gender-neutral pronoun in their language? Then we could look at that country, measure the language development and gender confusion among school children in that country and actually know if this new word would "destroy" the Swedish language. A country like... Finland perhaps? The debate is ridiculous, a few people feel very strongly either way, but most people don't care at all, don't use the word, but won't get angry if someone else uses it. Whatever. It's a mountain out of a molehill.

skrebbel 15y ago
The great thing is that the word for "he/she" in Finnish is "hän". Pronounced almost the same as the Swedish proposal. (for the ignorant: these two are otherwise wildly different languages)
- rmc 15y ago
  (for the ignorant: these two are otherwise wildly different languages) I believe Finnish is wildly different from just about every other language. Hindi and English are closerly related.
  - white_devil 15y ago
    Finnish and Estonian are really close.
  - jcbrand 15y ago
    Strangely enough, Finnish and Hungarian are related, even though they are relatively isolated geographically.
  - plq 15y ago
    Finnish, (and Estonian), Hungarian, Japanese and Turkish (which includes the dialects spoken in Anatolia, Azerbaidjan (whose people speak almost the same language that the Persian Azeris speak), Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and the Urumqi region of China) are sister languages. To my knowledge, all of them have gender-neutral pronouns. (And actually I'm pretty sure about Anatolian Turkish :))
    - michaelcampbell 15y ago
      > (And actually I'm pretty sure about Anatolian Turkish :)) This is probably a sentence I will hear/see exactly once in my life; at least in a not-contrived manner. Thank you for that.
    - skrebbel 15y ago
      The Altaic languages eh? That's a very controversial theory you got there. Even those still supporting it today mostly exclude the Finno-Ugric languages from the list, btw.
  - olavk 15y ago
    It's in the Finno-Ugric lanugage group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages which also includes Estonian and Hungarian. But yes, since these are not Indoeuropean languages, they are not as closely related to English as Hindi is.
white_devil 15y ago
Finn here. As someone pointed out, we have the gender-neutral pronoun "hän" in our language. I often wish English had an equivalent. It's very convenient sometimes. Hän is fine, but most of the time we use the Finnish word for "it" instead. The word is "se" in Finnish, and it normally behaves exactly like the English equivalent - it's basically meant to be used for animals and objects. Se is used because saying hän is too much work, or it would sound too formal when you're just talking with your friends etc. Basically, we only use hän when we want to take care to sound respectful in some specific situation or when writing something that's not supposed to be casual. At any rate, worrying about a gender-neutral pronoun making people confused about their sexual identities is just silly.

skrebbel 15y ago

The great thing is that the word for "he/she" in Finnish is "hän". Pronounced almost the same as the Swedish proposal. (for the ignorant: these two are otherwise wildly different languages)

rmc 15y ago
(for the ignorant: these two are otherwise wildly different languages) I believe Finnish is wildly different from just about every other language. Hindi and English are closerly related.
- white_devil 15y ago
  Finnish and Estonian are really close.
- jcbrand 15y ago
  Strangely enough, Finnish and Hungarian are related, even though they are relatively isolated geographically.
- plq 15y ago
  Finnish, (and Estonian), Hungarian, Japanese and Turkish (which includes the dialects spoken in Anatolia, Azerbaidjan (whose people speak almost the same language that the Persian Azeris speak), Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and the Urumqi region of China) are sister languages. To my knowledge, all of them have gender-neutral pronouns. (And actually I'm pretty sure about Anatolian Turkish :))
  - michaelcampbell 15y ago
    > (And actually I'm pretty sure about Anatolian Turkish :)) This is probably a sentence I will hear/see exactly once in my life; at least in a not-contrived manner. Thank you for that.
  - skrebbel 15y ago
    The Altaic languages eh? That's a very controversial theory you got there. Even those still supporting it today mostly exclude the Finno-Ugric languages from the list, btw.
- olavk 15y ago
  It's in the Finno-Ugric lanugage group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages which also includes Estonian and Hungarian. But yes, since these are not Indoeuropean languages, they are not as closely related to English as Hindi is.

white_devil 15y ago

Finn here. As someone pointed out, we have the gender-neutral pronoun "hän" in our language. I often wish English had an equivalent. It's very convenient sometimes. Hän is fine, but most of the time we use the Finnish word for "it" instead. The word is "se" in Finnish, and it normally behaves exactly like the English equivalent - it's basically meant to be used for animals and objects. Se is used because saying hän is too much work, or it would sound too formal when you're just talking with your friends etc. Basically, we only use hän when we want to take care to sound respectful in some specific situation or when writing something that's not supposed to be casual. At any rate, worrying about a gender-neutral pronoun making people confused about their sexual identities is just silly.