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So English has "zhe" and "zir" as PC pronouns (*Not a Standard Feature*) for people who neither want to be called she, he, or it. Any other NatLangs doing this that encode for gender?

2+3 clusivity wrote:So English has "zhe" and "zir" as PC pronouns

those appear to be from different proposals

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun

Kind of boring, but Japanese makes regular use of あの人 ano hito "that person", which functions basically the same as a third person pronoun.

In my dialect of Dutch, you can use "die" (that) as a pronoun to refer to a person of either gender. I don't think it's ever used in writing, not even informal writing, though, and it might be more of a reduction of 'hij' and 'zij' (male and female pronouns) with an epenthetic /d/ (I guess). It certainly wasn't created to accommodate those who fall outside of the linguistic gender binary...

Spanish supposedly has ell@s, and in general the use of @ as a catch-all for -o and -a. I dont know how you pronounce it and I've never even seen in it in writing, but I've read in multiple different places that it exists.

I asked this in the Questions Thread, but received no response: if any natlangs natively, as a Standard Feature, have both sexed and dedicated non-neuter epicene pronouns.

2+3 clusivity wrote:So English has "zhe" and "zir" as PC pronouns (*Not a Standard Feature*) for people who neither want to be called she, he, or it.

No it doesn't.

Swedish normally has han and hon for 'he' and 'she' respectively, but as late as this year there has been a huge debate on the gender neutral hen, which has gained quite some popularity. As far as language planning goes anyway. Of course the traditional pronouns are still massively outnumbering the new coinage (which isn't exactly newly coined, just hasn't been popular until recently), but you can find it in newspapers every now and then, and one pop magazine (Nöjesguiden) did an issue where they replaced all gendered pronouns with hen. I see people use it on Facebook and the like, and even heard my professor using it once, albeit half-jokingly.

Some people want to use it for gender-ambiguous situations and others instead of all han and hon. The protests against it have been huge of course, but I'm quite surprised it's made the impact that it has. Remains to see if it fades away or stays, but seeing as there's been such a massive media coverage on it for months, it's never again going to be an obscure word that nobody understands. That excuse for not using it is void by now.

Nortaneous wrote:

2+3 clusivity wrote:So English has "zhe" and "zir" as PC pronouns (*Not a Standard Feature*) for people who neither want to be called she, he, or it.

No it doesn't.

Yeah, you don't get to say we "have" such pronouns until such time as they are recognized and used by a non-tiny fraction of the English speaking world. But this may eventually come about, who knows - feminism has succeeded in altering our language in other ways.

Soap wrote:Spanish supposedly has ell@s, and in general the use of @ as a catch-all for -o and -a. I dont know how you pronounce it and I've never even seen in it in writing, but I've read in multiple different places that it exists.

That's just for informal writing (i.e. in facebook, "hola chic@s, que os parece quedar el dia ..."), we just make general spoken use of the masculine words and that's it.

Some enthusiasts employ the plural feminine when female nº > male nº in a group; but I generally don't, in fact I and other people can be seen addressing groups of females with 'vosotros'. That's why I don't have much remorse in using 'he' whenever I don't feel like using singular 'they'. I honestly don't understand what all the fuss is about, and I'll go on using masculine predominantly.

I've heard conflicting views about Korean 그사람 (similar to Jap. "ano hito") - most natives I've asked seem to think it's neutral, but at least one thought it was more likely to be a man. Can anyone shed light on that?

cromulant wrote:I asked this in the Questions Thread, but received no response: if any natlangs natively, as a Standard Feature, have both sexed and dedicated non-neuter epicene pronouns.

Japanese (as it has a variety of pronouns, some of them gendered).

There's some controversy over whether or not Japanese pronouns are really pronouns and not just nouns that act funny, though, isn't there?

dhokarena56 wrote:There's some controversy over whether or not Japanese pronouns are really pronouns and not just nouns that act funny, though, isn't there?

Sure, but a pronoun is just a noun that acts funny. [Hell, a verb is a noun that acts REALLY funny]. Depends on exactly how you want to define 'pronoun', and 'funny'.

Radius Solis wrote:

Nortaneous wrote:

2+3 clusivity wrote:So English has "zhe" and "zir" as PC pronouns (*Not a Standard Feature*) for people who neither want to be called she, he, or it.

No it doesn't.

Yeah, you don't get to say we "have" such pronouns until such time as they are recognized and used by a non-tiny fraction of the English speaking world. But this may eventually come about, who knows - feminism has succeeded in altering our language in other ways.

"Some varieties of English have"... I think is more appropriate.

"A person walked into a bar, but they ruined the joke with their PC pronouns."

Could that count?

Yes it's called singular they.

Singular "they" doesn't really work with named individuals, though. So:
"Someone just walked up to me, and they they hit me with a large, purple stick."
But not:
*"Pat just walked up to me, and they hit me with a large, purple stick."

This happens on facebook with people who have not specified their gender.

"John Smith updated their work history."

Vuvuzela wrote:Singular "they" doesn't really work with named individuals, though. So:
"Someone just walked up to me, and they they hit me with a large, purple stick."
But not:
*"Pat just walked up to me, and they hit me with a large, purple stick."

I don't know about you, but I use singular they for named people all the time, especially when on the internet.

"Pat just walked up to me, and they hit me with a large, purple stick." sounds perfectly okay to me.

clawgrip wrote:This happens on facebook with people who have not specified their gender.

"John Smith updated their work history."

I've noticed a few instances where Facebook assumes you're male even if you haven't specified gender. The only one I recall at the moment is (in the French version), when there's a like button on external websites and none of your friends has yet liked the thing (a video, a blog post or whatever), it says "Soyez le premier".

Vuvuzela wrote:Singular "they" doesn't really work with named individuals, though. So:
"Someone just walked up to me, and they they hit me with a large, purple stick."
But not:
*"Pat just walked up to me, and they hit me with a large, purple stick."

I'd agree, but it's far better (and likely to change and actually become neutral) than making up words like hir. Perhaps the worst thing about the made up pronouns is that for some reason they have decided to imitate the fossilized case distinctions; this comes across as linguistically naive and makes them far more awkward to use. Real "new" pronouns like "y'all" act like normal nouns, with no oblique form, and "y'all's" as the possessive.

It does cause me to double take sometimes if people use it with a definite antecedent, though, so it's still got a way to go.

Ulrike Meinhof wrote:

clawgrip wrote:This happens on facebook with people who have not specified their gender.

"John Smith updated their work history."

I've noticed a few instances where Facebook assumes you're male even if you haven't specified gender. The only one I recall at the moment is (in the French version), when there's a like button on external websites and none of your friends has yet liked the thing (a video, a blog post or whatever), it says "Soyez le premier".

Not a few instances, a few languages. Because well, that's how romance works as of today (at least I think French works like Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan and likely Italian and others). It's not really an assumptino that you're male.

finlay wrote:Real "new" pronouns like "y'all" act like normal nouns, with no oblique form, and "y'all's" as the possessive.

Not necessarily. At least in my dialect, the most common possessive of you guys is your guys' (with /z/ not /zɪz/) not you guys's (with /zɪz/), even though that does pop up every once in a while. Note that your guys's (with /zɪz/) also pops up every once in a while, by analogy with both patterns simultaneously.