Gender neutral pronouns
Mar. 26th, 2008 07:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI'm sure you all know the history of Gender neutral pronouns. And most think the question is mostly settled, although not agree in favour of what :)
However, it occurs to me some reluctance might come from the fact that although I have a little voice in my head saying "Women and men are the same. Gender neutral is good" I have a great big klaxon blaring "ALL INFORMATION IS GOOD! LEARN THINGS! BE INFORMED! COMMUNICATE FULLY! INF. ORM. ATION. GOOD." :)
That is, apart from not being aesthetically fond of most of the choices of gender-neutral pronouns, I'm not fond that that word choice is deliberately less informative. If you're talking about a genuinely neutral (eg. hypothetical) or ambiguous person, or you don't know, there's no information lost, but I still only use the pronouns where I have good reason.
But today a friend made another reference to the concept of "Geek as gender" and something occurred to me so obvious I couldn't believe it hadn't before.
What if we had two or more pronouns that drew *different* demarcations? We already have special pronouns for royalty and gods. ("Her Royal Highness's" etc and "His" etc).
You could adopt the archaic second-person model and have "te" (pronounced with a long e), "tis" and "ter" and "ve", "vis" and "ver" for intimate acquaintances and others. Or for social acquiantances and work acquaintances.
Or have different pronouns for different groups people can adopt as whatever they feel like identifying as in a certain concept. (Of course, you shouldn't identify solely as one thing, but most people are happy to identify as one thing but others as well.) Perhaps two sets would be most common ("he" and "she" or some other division), but that someone would borrow the Sindarin or Quenya pronouns from Tolkien and use them when affectionately referring to people from the Tolkien society.
Of course, now we near the Chinese problem of having too many, and having to decide when meeting someone whether to use the very formal or the extremely formal version of their pronoun.
But on the other hand, it seems more positive, as choosing to use such a pronoun doesn't sound like "my gender isn't important to me" but "this other aspect of our acquaintance is more important". And if you have a good reason to use other pronouns, it's not so jarring when someone does.
I'm afraid I haven't thought this out in detail, but I thought it was a lovely idea.
However, it occurs to me some reluctance might come from the fact that although I have a little voice in my head saying "Women and men are the same. Gender neutral is good" I have a great big klaxon blaring "ALL INFORMATION IS GOOD! LEARN THINGS! BE INFORMED! COMMUNICATE FULLY! INF. ORM. ATION. GOOD." :)
That is, apart from not being aesthetically fond of most of the choices of gender-neutral pronouns, I'm not fond that that word choice is deliberately less informative. If you're talking about a genuinely neutral (eg. hypothetical) or ambiguous person, or you don't know, there's no information lost, but I still only use the pronouns where I have good reason.
But today a friend made another reference to the concept of "Geek as gender" and something occurred to me so obvious I couldn't believe it hadn't before.
What if we had two or more pronouns that drew *different* demarcations? We already have special pronouns for royalty and gods. ("Her Royal Highness's" etc and "His" etc).
You could adopt the archaic second-person model and have "te" (pronounced with a long e), "tis" and "ter" and "ve", "vis" and "ver" for intimate acquaintances and others. Or for social acquiantances and work acquaintances.
Or have different pronouns for different groups people can adopt as whatever they feel like identifying as in a certain concept. (Of course, you shouldn't identify solely as one thing, but most people are happy to identify as one thing but others as well.) Perhaps two sets would be most common ("he" and "she" or some other division), but that someone would borrow the Sindarin or Quenya pronouns from Tolkien and use them when affectionately referring to people from the Tolkien society.
Of course, now we near the Chinese problem of having too many, and having to decide when meeting someone whether to use the very formal or the extremely formal version of their pronoun.
But on the other hand, it seems more positive, as choosing to use such a pronoun doesn't sound like "my gender isn't important to me" but "this other aspect of our acquaintance is more important". And if you have a good reason to use other pronouns, it's not so jarring when someone does.
I'm afraid I haven't thought this out in detail, but I thought it was a lovely idea.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-29 12:30 pm (UTC)And orthagonal sets: Think venn diagrams. It looks like you were going to post people into various potentially overlapping groups, but any one pronoun would only refer to a single group. I was hoping that there would be a way to specify multiple overlapping groups in one pronoun, so 'female-geek' and 'gender-neutral-non-geek' and so on. My way is less extendable, but the pronoun carries more information by itself. I don't think it would cope with more than 2 orthagonal sets, since that's at least 9 options (I'm assuming that any new set has a neutral member, since it seems so desired for gender).