Comments on: Gender-Neutral Pronouns

By: Keith Gaughan

Keith Gaughan — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 12:56:37 +0000

I would suspect that people whose first language is a Romance language all have the same issue in reversing the genders. That's the thing: I know Francophones, Italians, Lusophones, Catalunians, though no Romanians, and none of them seem to have the difficulties I mentioned, even if their english isn't all that strong. And while such errors might be understandable in cases where the posessive is used, it's not really understandable where subject pronouns are concerned. Leaving apart the fact that subject pronouns are still optional in Castillian, that still doesn't explain the phenomenon. Many of those spaniards I mentioned have expressed the same kind of puzzlement as me as to why they do it.

By: Lis Riba

Lis Riba — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 06:19:46 +0000

If it’s good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for me That’s hardly a fair comparison. The English language underwent massive changes during the Elizabethan and Jacobean era. Scholarly books point to Shakespeare and the King James Bible as evidence of the move from “he” to “it” as a neuter pronoun. Shakespeare also uses thee and thou, and I don’t see much call for bringing those back… Of all the different gender-neutral pronoun schemes, my favorite is sie (pronounced “see” for he/she) and hir (pronounced “hear” for his/her) because they’re so close in pronunciation and spelling to the current gendered standards. Unfortunately, these have fallen somewhat out of favor due to confusion with the German sie.

By: wolfangel

wolfangel — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 21:30:18 +0000

I would suspect that people whose first language is a Romance language all have the same issue in reversing the genders. In English, the possessive is the gender of the possessor. I borrowed it from John, his book vs. I borrowed it from Mary, her book. In French the possessive is the gender of the possessed. I borrowed it from Mary, his book[m]vs I borrowed it from John, her table[f]. My francophone friends usually get this wrong in English when the possessed is alive—about his friend Maxim and her sister, or his friend Charlotte and his father. I get this wrong half the time because I use the English system and half because I can’t remember which is the right gender.

By: eszter

eszter — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 05:37:57 +0000

Judith Lorber posted the following on a mailing list, I reproduce it here with permission: Also see http://www.pronounschmonoun.org And the epigraph of my paper, “Dismantling Noah’s Ark,” in Lorber and Farrell, The Social Construction of Gender, (orig pub in Sex Roles in 1986)—“Did she have a boy or a girl?” I asked. “Why do you want to know?” said my 13-year-old (in 1982). Also—A society does not have to be organized around gender. Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí points out that the feminist assumption that gender’s salience is universal replicates biological reasoning. Citing Yorùbá’s non-gendered language, she argues that pre-colonial Yorùbá society was not ordered by gender, but by relative age, which determined relationships and hierarchies. She says: “Unlike European languages, Yorùbá does not ‘do gender;’ it ‘does seniority’ instead. Thus social categories �C familial and nonfamilial �C do not call attention to the body as English personal names, first-person pronouns, and kinship terms do (the English terms being both gender-specific-body-specific). Seniority is highly relational and situational in that no one is permanently in a senior or junior position; it all depends on who is present in any given situation. Seniority, unlike gender, is only comprehensible as part of relationships. Thus, it is neither rigidly fixated on the body nor dichotomized.” Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí, “De-confounding Gender: Feminist Theorizing and Western Culture, a Comment on Hawkesworth’s ‘Confounding Gender.’” Signs 23 (1998): 1049-62. Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women, p. 42. Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)

By: eszter

eszter — Sun, 22 Aug 2004 20:59:15 +0000

Tamar, that series sounds really neat! Well, I’m glad you shared what you were able to.:)

By: Keith Gaughan

Keith Gaughan — Sun, 22 Aug 2004 18:24:50 +0000

One interesting thing I’ve noticed after over a year of having Hispanophones as flatmates is that they, despite the fact that the language distinguishes between masculine and feminine, have a tendancy to get the equivalent pronouns mixed up when referring to people.

By: Mika Luoma-aho

Mika Luoma-aho — Sat, 21 Aug 2004 20:58:08 +0000

Indeed, Finnish is one of the languages that has only one philological gender: `hän’. Having lived in Britain for a few years I had some trouble making a distinction between `he’ and `she’, especially when I did not have time to think what was it that I had to say—which was relatively often, to be honest. (Being male and in a hurry, I opted for the masculine, of course.)

By: Gar Lipow

Gar Lipow — Sat, 21 Aug 2004 18:23:30 +0000

I think the “they” and “their” solution is often a good one. But there are places where it reads or sounds a bit akward, and you do run into authority figures who may veto on it. As a backup, may I suggest the solution Shaw used in the “Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism”, where he used “she” and “her” as neutral pronouns referring to both genders. No awkward singular plural confusion. And certainly someone who sees no gender bias in using “he” to refer to both men and woman has no grounds to object to the use of “she” for the same purpose.

By: Jeffrey Kramer

Jeffrey Kramer — Sat, 21 Aug 2004 13:55:17 +0000

Thai is another language with gender-neutral third-person pronouns. It also uses terms for “sibling” which indicate whether the person is older (“Pee”) or younger (“Nang”) than the speaker, but not whether it’s a brother or a sister.

By: Keith Gaughan

Keith Gaughan — Sat, 21 Aug 2004 05:23:37 +0000

Me? Appeal to experts? Not on this, that’s for sure. I was appealing to descriptivism: ‘they’ is used as singular and plural in the vernacular, therefore it is both singular and plural. It’s used that way in my dialect and in the dialects of many of the writers I’ve read. It’s been in common use since at least early Modern English, and the only reasons for the prohibition against it are presciptivist nonsense from people who think English should be Latin, and those who think it makes English vague, conveniently forgetting that English is vague anyway and that there’s one glaring example of the same ‘vagueness’ in pronouns anyway: you. (A vagueness that doesn’t crop up in my dialect: we use the archaic ‘ye’). Sure, you can avoid its use to prevent people who managed to get prescriptivist worms burrowing through their brain from getting upset for no good reason, but that just because they say something’s so doesn’t make it so. The pronoun has a long and well-documented history as being both singular and plural. That is a fact, so I concur with Kip, Orphelia and Paul on this one. Now, how about a debate on proper punctuation, in particular the comma and semicolon… ;-)

By: nnyhav

nnyhav — Sat, 21 Aug 2004 03:25:46 +0000

How many prescriptivists does it take to change a pronoun?

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Sat, 21 Aug 2004 03:25:43 +0000

And I am, too.

By: Tamar

Tamar — Sat, 21 Aug 2004 03:13:28 +0000

“Tamar, thanks for posting that song, I love it! Do you know of others like it?” Actually, it’s part of a series that I wrote in honor of my father’s retirement. (He was a congregational rabbi for 35 years.) I’m afraid the rest are a bit too “insidery” for public posting. Apropos the Nesbitt: interestingly, some of her characters use “their” as a gender-ambiguous pronoun,whereas others use “it.” For example, in the “No Wings” chapter of Five Chidren and It, the Vicar and his wife say Nisbetty things like: “There’s a dangerous lunatic in the church and you must go immediately and catch it.” But three pages later, Anthea (one of the children), upon being asked whether someone else has played a role in their recent misadventure, replies: “Yes…but it wasn’t their fault.” (Even more interestingly, the “they” whose fault it wasn’t is the Psammead itself—who is, of course, the “It” of the title.) (Nothing turns on this, of course: I include it only to make Ophelia chortle.)

By: Antoni Jaume

Antoni Jaume — Sat, 21 Aug 2004 01:58:48 +0000

Not being an English native speaker my take is to use “it” when refering to functional referents (“The president spoke yesterday, it said that…”), however I never felt “they/them” unfitting. DSW

By: Jamie

Jamie — Sat, 21 Aug 2004 01:12:38 +0000

Here are a couple of nice, old, utterly respectable citations of ‘themselves’ with ‘everyone’ as antecedent. I got them from the OED.

1600 SHAKES. Lucr. 125 Euery one to rest themselues [ed. 1594 himselfe] betake.
1874 G. W. DASENT Half a Life 3 Every one likes to keep it to themselves as long as they can.