Forum

devilcake wrote:

do you just reffer to people by name what

Claire wrote:
We really having this conversation. Y’all I’m embarrassed. Brand new account makes an obvious bait post and y’all eat it up. There shouldn’t be a single serious response in here. 

Claire wrote:
We really having this conversation. Y’all I’m embarrassed. Brand new account makes an obvious bait post and y’all eat it up. There shouldn’t be a single serious response in here. 

disintegration wrote:

there is a difference between linguistic innovation and to have to learn a whole set of new words for each person.
I'm german, we don't have a neutral pronoun so it would be reasonable to make up one or two universally known alternatives to she and he but why is that alternative that already exists in english not enough? I don't get it.

Claire wrote:
We really having this conversation. Y’all I’m embarrassed. Brand new account makes an obvious bait post and y’all eat it up. There shouldn’t be a single serious response in here.

devilcake wrote:
Well we didn't have a neutral one in swedish for the longest time either until we loaned one from Finnish and it's slowly getting integrated. I personally do not like it very much when referring to myself and would rather loan english they/them as a direct translation, which is considered grammatical incorrect and lands it in neo-pronoun territory, and 'made up'. So then it's like... Should i just force myself to use this set of pronouns that do not represent me because i was too late to influence what is now considered the standard?

but specifically in regards to english, I'd say for one, as much as i think singular 'they' is and has always has been/ been a part of english for a very long time, the use of it specifically as a non-binary pronoun is technically newer. Like in the past it has been used as, "either or", or an "i dont know"/"unspecific" type of pronoun. Which is very much how i learnt it when i learnt english.  And there has been many attempts and suggestions as to how to tackle and expand english pronouns (not jus sing they but others as well) dating back to like 1700/1800s .
So what im saying is that while the actual use of they them in singular is a grammatical function of english and one of the simplest solutions to the problem, it's not as clear cut as 'they was always the enby pronoun' it's more like it always had the potential to be used that way i guess? at least that's how i view it 

I've also seen older trans/enby people talk about how other pronouns like xe/xir was often the preferred (but like don't quote me on this it's just what ive seen people talk about, so pretty anecdotal but still) option a couple of decades ago and consider singular they as a newer thing. Personally that's not something i'm not very keen on dismissing. If you look at things like the spivak pronouns and whatnot they're actually a good 40/50  years old, which might not be as old as sing they as a grammatical function, but not at all as new as people like to make neo-pronouns out to be.

idk i just think there's a lot more nuance to it than saying "there is already one so making something else up is selfish" And it's not like you're actually learning a new set of words for every pronoun you meet, it's unfair to frame it that way, it's a minority and it's most likely going to keep being a minority. And even if more people used them i personally don't think it's much different from just learning a name you didnt know before, yeah maybe it's a bit of a struggle to remember it but you're not gonna not try and call it annoying idk.

Vodyanoy wrote:
i wish all 7.7b people could pull pronouns out of their asses and make the english language completely unusable thus forcing the usage of a singular, gender-neutral pronoun so we wouldn't have to have these conversations ever again

thank god in finnish we can refer to everyone just as an 'it' 
i should start doing that in english 2 

bones wrote:
Bait...? 😕