6 ms·
"He" is not gender-neutral, no matter how hard the Latin-obsessed grammarians tried [citation: http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1288&co
by roguecoder 14y ago
"He" is not gender-neutral, no matter how hard the Latin-obsessed grammarians tried [citation: http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1288&context=theses http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=12...]
If you want a gender-neutral pronoun, "they" works perfectly well. It doesn't matter what you intend when you type "he", everyone reading it will interpret it as male.
- sliverstorm 14y ago"They" is confusing, as it can be singular or plural.
- drivebyacct2 14y agoMost of the time, context alleviates that confusion pretty quickly. "The developer of AppX [blah blah]. They wrote it in C#". Etc. A lot of closeted or previously closeted homosexuals can tell you that it's not that terribly confusing. I used "they" for years to refer to a singular person. After coming out, I was accused of lying. My response was that I'd never lied about the gender of someone I was seeing or referring to. No one ever asked. Which ironically plays into a whole different set of gender assumptions, but that's a can of worms I don't want to open in an already dangerous thread.
- MBlume 14y agoYeah, it's really confusing. "You" has the same problem, so I try to avoid that too. /s
- sliverstorm 14y agoHuh, I never knew "you" was also plural. Practically never heard it used that way.
- dsrguru 14y agoThe second person plural in my parents' idiolect of English is "you", but in mine there's effectively a familiar/formal dichotomy of "you guys" and "you", with the latter rarely used. In the American South, many people use "you" for singular and "y'all" for plural. I wouldn't be surprised if other dialects are also losing the plural "you".
- strictfp 14y agoWe've had the same pronoun situation here in Sweden. Recently, however, a new pronoun started to become common in everyday speech: 'hen'. It's a mix of 'han' ('he') and 'hon'('her'). It's picked up in popularity fast since it solves the specific problems highlighted by this article.
- mkl 14y agoMany people have tried similar things in English[1], but unfortunately none have caught on yet outside relatively small subcultures. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Invented_pronouns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Invented...
- sliverstorm 14y agoI'm not sure I'd say "unfortunately"- most of those invented words are, in my eyes, terrible! "Co"? "Zhim"?
- greyfade 14y agoAnd some are, unfortunately, hard to pronounce. (I.e., Sie and Zhe.)
- darkestkhan 14y agoInterestingly enough there is such pronoun in Icelandic - "það".
- Tichy 14y agoNon-native here: isn't "they" more like addressing a royal? That's what it sounds to me anyway.
- ben0x539 14y agoNot really. It's perfectly common as addressing a singular person of unspecified gender, and I can't think of a common way to use it to specifically reference royalty offhand.
- tspiteri 14y agoI guess the plural in some languages is used to address royalty. And about the usage of "they", I tend to use it, and the only thing that I find a bit strange is sentences like: "If a user needs something, they have to do something." Note "needs" and "have" for the same subject, where usually they are either needs+has or need+have.
- Tichy 14y agoYes in German the plural is used for royalty. I'll try to adapt to "they" but I have to fight a strong sense of wrongness that I have acquired somehow.
- darkestkhan 14y agoI thought English already had one gender neutral pronoun - "one". One shouldn't reinvent the wheel.
- wccrawford 14y agoThat's for an unspecified person, though. You can't use it to talk about one person specifically.
- lucian1900 14y agoIt's a general pronoun that happens to be gender-neutral. Not the same meaning as 'he'/'she' or even the almost-correct 'they'.