Pronouns in non-English Languages
Pronouns in non-English Languages
I've been helping my 72 year old bilingual (Spanish) mother come to terms with one of her nieces having transitioned.
She's been remarkably progressive about it, but she did bring up some good questions that I didn't have answers for.
(I have my own set of annoyances for pronouns in English. Using a third person plural for single individuals has been leading to confusion, especially amongst my English L2 friends and family. But pronouns are some of the most conservative parts of speech in any language so I'm not going to tilt at that particular windmill. )
As a question for my LGBTQ+ kith, what have you been seeing/using as pronouns in different languages? Romantic languages are generally still heavily gendered, as are some Germanic. Does that interfere with non-binary language patterns? What about Turkish, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, etc?
Have there been any instances of novel pronouns created?
And, not to pry open old wounds, but has anybody noticed new slurs or other intentionally hurtful epithets?
The first question is an effort to answer questions that I hadn't even thought to ask. I'm actually pretty proud of the older generation making an effort to live in the modern world.
The rest is pure personal curiosity and possible conversation material.
Huge thank you to everybody taking time out of their day to answer.
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In french people have started using "iel" which is as close of an equivalent to "they" that we can get in our gender-filled language. Its a mix between the male and female pronouns "il" and "elle".
Maybe its just that im not as used to it as using they in the singular form, but its not as great. It is a step in the right direction though, its just that everything around the pronoun in the language is gendered.The issue with French is that, even if you use a kinda not gendered pronoun, the entire language is still heavily gendered.
If you use "iel" then what does follow? Masculine, feminine, or the kinda neutral inclusive writing using a dot? For me that's where the biggest friction is, because the solution is harder to find than inventing new pronouns.
For non French speakers, the sentence "he is nice" would be translated as "il est gentil" and the sentence "she is nice" would be translated as "Elle est gentille"
Now, how do we write "they are nice"
- iel est gentil (masculine)
- iel est gentille (feminine)
- iel est gentil.le (neutral inclusive)
So yeah, that's really complicated because the language is clearly not created with that in mind.
« La rédaction épicène » is the strategy of writing French while avoiding gender specific forms, but it’s a delicate art and a constant struggle. One of my colleagues tried to get ChatGPT to write in this way to no avail.
This is something that's been driving me nuts. I've found lots of material on the concepts of "iel" and la rédaction épicène, but I can't find many long-form examples for understanding how to actually use them. Any thoughts on where I could find articles or essays written without gender?
Taking it more seriously and being reasonably knowledgeable about it is on my to-do list. It doesn’t help that there’s some differing views on the subject. I’ve spotted these resources so far:
La vitrine linguistique has a number of articles about it, but they’ve so far rejected neologisms like "iel" and opt to be as neutral as possible within the existing grammar.
The UQÀM has a guide about inclusive writing as well.
Thanks for these! The GoC has something similar, and it actually acknowledges the existence of iel, which surprised me. I hadn't seen the ones you linked, so it'll be good to compare. It's so confusing!
Thats exactly right.
You can try to avoid gendered language, but you sentences get even longer and its basically a minefield