Rishon Rishon

Pronoun controversy

Amritas links to this hilarious article:

A great controversy has emerged recently in campus publications over the use of the gender neutral pronoun set ze/hir. This has manifested mainly in the Emerald's obstinate refusal to use ze/hir and the Oregon Commentator's outright hostility toward any sort of variance from a strict ideology of gender binaries. While the Emerald has merely provided a plethora of examples of dreadful journalistic style, the Commentator has -- inadvertently, I'm sure -- demonstrated that ze/hir is a perfectly usable form.

For those who are not familiar with ze/hir, it is used rather than she/her or he/him/his for some people who identify outside of a man/woman dichotomy. Like he and she, ze has several forms that are not particularly easy for the average person to classify grammatically (he, she, ze; his, her, hir; him, her, hir; his, hers, hirs; himself, herself, hirself), but anyone who can use she and he is capable of integrating ze. Listening to individuals who respect self-identification and pronoun preference makes this quite clear, as they form sentences like "ze knows that's hir job," "that book is hirs," and so on. There is a pattern that is consistent and easy to produce.

Life imitates parody. I wonder where the new pronouns come from? Clearly, 'hir' is a combination of 'him' and 'her' - they have the 'h' in common, the 'i' is from 'him' and the 'r' is from 'her'. Whoever coined the word was probably gratified by the fact that for the great majority of English speakers, 'hir' sounds just like 'her' - compare: 'fir', 'sir', 'girl.

But where does 'ze' come from? ....I know! It's from Hebrew. 'Ze' (זה) in Hebrew means 'this', and it is indeed used in colloquial speech as a genderless pronoun (though it is grammatically masculine, the feminine of 'ze' is 'zot' [זאת] or 'zo' [זו]).

Actually pronoun gender is not an issue in Hebrew, probably because gender is not marked solely by pronouns - nouns, adjectives, and verbs all mark gender. In fact, pronouns and verbs mark gender not only in the third person (he, she, they - הוא, היא, הם, הן), as do most Indo-European languages, but in the second person (you - אתה, את, אתם, אתן) as well (to the sorrow of sign painters throughout the country - many signs are commands, which is second-person). Changing this is even more hopeless a cause than convincing a few hundred million English speakers to change their pronouns.

Luckily, there are already many languages which don't have grammatical gender of any sort. Amritas points out Chinese, in which 'ta' means 'he', 'she', and 'it' - Chinese speakers go even farther than ze/hir proponents and eliminate discrimination of inanimate objects! Someone should write to Pira Kelly and let her know of her life-chauvinism - someone has to stand up for inanimate objects, after millions of years persecution by animate beings they have evidently accepted their role as victims.

Unfortunately, the European cultural hegemony has reached China:

Yes, the Mandarin word has different characters depending on gender, but in speech, ta 'he', ta 'she', and ta 'it' (also written this way) are homophonous. The gender-differentiated characters are a modern development due to European influence. In premodern Mandarin, there was only one ta 's/he'.

That explains why the Chinese aren't perfectly egalitarian. Luckily, other nations have resisted European cultural imperialism, and retained their perfectly gender-animate-neutral pronouns, and the consequent egalitarian culture - Turkey is one example.

But wait! Don't you think that the distinction between first, second, and third person reeks of capitalist-imperialism? After all, we are all equally human... er... object... uh... equal! Really, pronouns should distinguish only between singular and plural. But, wouldn't this system discriminate against "people who identify outside of a singular/plural dichotomy"? Clearly, we should do away with pronouns altogether - and of course all remnant distinctions in the verb, such as the -s in the second-person-singular. Actually, as I understand it, there is at least one language which has already done this: Japanese. If I am not mistaken (maybe Amritas can verify it), Japanese doesn't require use of pronouns, and its verbs don't indicate the pronouns in any way. That's why Japan is the most perfectly egalitarian place on Earth!

PS: Seriously, the notion that the grammatical categories of the language you speak influences the way you think is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. So far, it has resisted all attempts at proof.

UPDATE: From the Wikipedia link above:

Examples

Actual

• E-Prime—avoids the verb "to be" in terms of general semantics
• non-sexist language—often promoted on the grounds that sexist attitudes are aided by sexist language
• gender-neutral pronouns such as spivak pronouns and sie and hir
• Lojban—a language designed in part to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis by placing radically different constraints on speakers
• Toki Pona — a constructed language inspired by Taoist philosophy and intended to shape the thought processes of its speakers

Fictional

• The Dispossessed—novel by Ursula K. Le Guin describes a fictional anarchist culture where use of the possessive case is taboo
• The Languages of Pao—science fiction novel by Jack Vance depicting a social engineer who designs new languages for societies that wish to change their lot
• Babel-17—science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany that supposes that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is strongly true, depicting a fictional language, Babel-17, which causes anyone who learns it to become a traitor to their political organisation
• Newspeak—fictional language described in Nineteen Eighty-Four, designed to constrict thought to support the totalitarian regime of that book
• Anthem—Ayn Rand's short novel where the word "I" is prohibited by a collectivist state
• Nuspeak —a language found in Robert Heinlein's short story "Gulf", which is designed to increase the speed of thinking by expressing concepts more compactly
• Iain M. Banks' fictional anarcho-socialist civilisation, The Culture, has developed a language called Marain "with the specific intention of providing a means of expression which would be a culturally inclusive and as encompassingly comprehensive in its technical and representational possibilities as practically achievable"