nonbinary gender pronouns

doyouthinktheysaurus

I didn't see nothin

sorry i came in with guns blazing shakey, i've just heard the "aagh my precious grammar" argument (which is not what you were saying but you can understand how i made the mistake) from a lot of secret bigots

no apology necessary c'mon now

My preference would be to use singular they/them for everyone

but yeah while some people choose neologistic pronouns (for reasons I am essentially uninformed about) they/them is accessible to every native speaker and really only sounds weird if you are thinking about it harder than you would in an ordinary circumstance

maybe a non-English speaker can answer this - is there a push against the gendered nouns of other languages (thinking French here with it's la/le/les)?

that kind of thing always struck me as a step beyond the gendered pronouns/possessive pronounes in English, in terms of embedding gender binaries into the language.

In Chinese 'he' 'she' and 'it' sound exactly the same, though they do use different characters.

you will see people write lxs or l@s en castellano for that purpose from time to time

How does this work in gendered languages?

xp. which is fine orthographically but doesn't change the spoken language. like i like latinx fine too but how do you say it? LAH-TEEN-ECCIES?

it would be impossible to unpick. adjectives have to agree. and what are you gonna do, get rid of the feminine forms? that seems like a bad move!

it's pronounced latine-ecks

this is in common usage at my kids' school (which is like 80% latinx)

xp

I'm not a native Spanish speaker and not clued into this discourse in el mundo hispanohablante but like…the grammatical gender of improper nouns doesn't remotely register as pertinent to this issue to me. "La noche" and "el día" have different grammatical genders but it's not like they're sexually dimorphic, the night isn't subject to gender-based oppression.

yeah. I say it that way too. Same with Mx. xpost

as a dumb nerd I'm always gonna regret that latinx took over latin@

against using english x for cultural nationalist reasons personally as a latinx individual. i guess i can deal with it

"La noche" and "el día" have different grammatical genders but it's not like they're sexually dimorphic

really? Even though the presumed reason that they're gendered goes back to classical gender stereotypes that are millenia old (moon/women/menstruation/darkness/artemis and men/the sun/light/apollo for example)?

xp

i like the @ sign in place of o, used to see it used a lot by chilean and spanish left a few years back.

xp ok well like what about "la silla" and "el cuchillo", the genders of common nouns aren't metaphors they're just particles usually determined by the word-ending

I remember tripping out on the gendered noun thing after being introduced to it in high school French - some of the designations were clearly meant to reinforce gender stereotypes (granted, others seemed really random, like the word for "chair" being gendered at all for ex.)

xp

In Chinese 'he' 'she' and 'it' sound exactly the same, though they do use different characters.

It's not that they sound the same (i.e. they're homophones), but they literally are the same word. However, written Chinese can indicate gender, but I *think* that's a relatively new development (possibly with the simplification movement?), but at this point it marks the feminine form and recasts the traditional form as masculine (not too different from "man" standing in for "human" in English).

Ok, good to know, have noticed people seem a little confused when writing 'ta', that may explain why.

does traditional chinese not have three different 'ta'?

the grammatical gender of improper nouns

some radical types do care about this — i remember once i had a german teacher, a while before the contemporary cultural moment, who said someone in the department had caused trouble because they insisted on degendering all nouns' articles, for feminist reasons, but this conflicted with the department's responsibility to do language instruction for the german 101 kids or whatever.

Ah ha:

Following the iconoclastic May Fourth Movement in 1919, and to accommodate the translation of Western literature, written vernacular Chinese developed separate pronouns for gender-differentiated speech, and to address animals, deities, and inanimate objects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_pronouns

The same thing holds for second-person pronouns as well.

yous and y'all are good, why not theys

Good piece

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/sep/13/pronouns-gender-he-she-they-natalie-wynn-contrapoints

never use pronouns, imo

whats wrong with ye

nothing; mookieproof is fine

obviously each person gets to choose their preferred pronouns but i'm puzzled when people complain about the grammar of "they/them" which feels like a longstanding uncontroversial usage in spoken English including for cis people unless i'm missing something

The longstanding usage is only for when "they" is used for unknown persons, right? "If anyone needs a receipt, they need to come to the front desk" is pretty standard usage. "If Dave needs a receipt, they need to go to the front desk" is far less so. I'm fine with calling people "they" if it's what they prefer but I do think it requires a grammatical shift.

"If Dave needs a receipt, the **** needs to go to the front desk". There you go, problem solved.

All the examples in the OED entry are of the first sort. xp Tom D. OTM

we want hon fap

ye want yon fap

ye want yon fap, hen

my first ever evening in Glasgow was spent at a gig where a local spent the entire show bellowing "Y'ARIGHT HEN?" at my pal, an expression of perturbation for her mental well-being prompted her trying to listen to & look at the band instead of answering his other enquiries

HEN FAQ

*prompted BY her, bah

"maybe i'm really dense but i have no clue what it is about twins that makes this extra difficult" . because saying "they" might refer to both twins or just one of them. that's all he's saying.

My wife has found this difficult to adapt to as well as an english major although there are obviously times when people naturally say this to refer to only one person. It's just extending that usage.

gendering of articles and stuff in languages is right, not sexually dimorphic. the last paper I wrote for college was on the disappearance of gendered articles in English (they were there at some point).

but this would apply to two siblings who aren't twins.... right? am i crazy?

the twins thing is such a forced problem im struggling to see the problem meself tbh

hi my twins saw a creepy clown and they were scared

they the two of them or they the one thats using they

huh what a weird reaction didnt u hear me theres a creepy clown out there scaring kids

is the clown only targetting twins or kids using they

what, no listen i think youre getting bogged down here

i just need clarity on who exactly was scared here

can i request another 911 operator please

another message board i'm on (and maybe this one too but i've so far managed to avoid that thread) is having a heated pronoun argument on the topic of sam smith

anyone who is so committed to gendered pronouns that you will have an argument over sam smith involving them has problems i am not equipped to deal with

at this point any THEORETICAL discussion about pronouns is not a discussion i am interested in having

I haven’t read this whole thread

But it might be fun to note that I have two identical twin gender neutral siblings; they both announced their gender on the same day two and a half years ago

I love them both very much they are amazing intelligent academic types

a tangential issue: as a closeted gay kid I found myself instinctively using nonbinary pronouns (they/their/them) to hide my own identity.

not proud of that in retrospect

people have a hard time letting go of what they always imagined was a simple and obvious set of categories. the first step to resolving this is their realizing that that imaginary simplicity was a misleading illusion. expecting them to jump straight to pronoun switching before their grasping how inadequate their old narrow categories were skips a necessary step, and until it is accomplished they'll fight to retain their accustomed ways, because learning new stuff is hard.

though "y'all" can be singular

this is offensive