"... the formal form of 'you' ('Sie') and the word for 'she' ('sie'). Carolin Müller-Spitzer, a professor of linguistics the Leibniz Institute for the German Language, in Mannheim, said that adapting existing pronouns 'doesn’t work in German, so we need to create something new. And creating a new pronoun is difficult.' Müller-Spitzer added that since the end of the Third Reich, debates about inclusive language in Germany often become a forum for people to express views about gender or race."
The article drops that reference to the Third Reich then goes back to discussing this one writer, Kim de l'Horizon. I would really like some elaboration of the "difficult" problem!
In that context, this quote from de l'Horizon is unsettling: "Life is messy, it’s sweaty, it’s dirty, it’s playful and fun. And that’s what this whole process should be."
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Language is organic and grows from functional needs: objects (nouns), actions (verbs), and the relationships between objects and actions. English has become the global catch-all for abstract jargon and technical topics, as most languages remain rooted in function (e.g., the needs of a few million speakers in a contiguous landmass; most of whom work in non-abstract jobs such as farming, manufacturing, or retail). When needed, smaller languages often borrow from the huge library of English words and concepts collected in the OED.
Sex and gender are supremely functional concepts, as following directly from the single generation do-or-die hardball of reproduction and biology. While all cultures routinely have gay, celibate, and alternative sexual practitioners -- these don't generally exist or reproduce in large numbers.
So, most languages are built around many, many millennia of pure function and reproductive sex (e.g., Spanish male El and female La), versus the "elitist, colonialist" imposition of the academic revolutionary ideology with "Latinx" and new gender pronouns. The true ideological battle: Let cultures and people be organic animals that speak about what is needed for sustainability, or bully and force ideological square pegs into round holes.
Do you want to join the techno-abstract-connected-universalist-global-continuum or remain an organic human animal rooted in the earth and early sex. That's the evolutionary choice of this generation. The global gender revolution crowd must get the sustainable function of neo-genders right, or they'll all be dead before they reproduce.
English does in fact have a gender neutral third person singular pronoun. It's a common word and everyone knows it and uses it everyday.
Oh goodness gracious, they are searching for a problem that doesn't exist.
All nouns in German are gendered--masculine, feminine, and neutral. The word for girl, "Mädchen," is neutral. Go figure.
Sie with a capital s is the formal you. Sie is also they and she. You tell by the verb or the context.
Sie ist da= She is there
Sie sind da=You (formal) are there
Sie sind da= They are there
As someone for whom German is a second language, I'd love it if we got rid of gendered nos and used das for everything. Some dialects do just that. But proper high German (or written German as we say here in Basel, Switzerland) is full of gendered nouns.
Languages evolve. Let it evolve if necessary, but don't force it.
The closed-class nature of pronouns, like the closed-class nature of prepositions (new ones are not discovered), means that nobody found any interest in edge cases. They were just male perverts or female perverts.
Why it's interesting today except as a joke is a mystery, except to the extent that the social media driven collapse of society is interesting. That's not a pronoun problem though.
Theoretically you ought to be able to argue against it.
This pronoun business is nothing more than a power game. Look at meeeee. Do as I saaaaay. You must acknowledge that I am spesh-shul.
- Krumhorn
This is just about power, and the way my boomer friends deal with it is to use the name again on second mention, no pronouns.
“You tell by the verb or the context.”
Where is they?
All comments good, with “Enigma” taking Threadwinner Trophy right out of the gate.
This chasing after magic words to convey and validate a contrived status is utterly sterile in all senses. It leads nowhere. It is not about pronouns, it’s about power. It’s sick.
The only way to win is not to play.
The "woke mind virus" as Elon calls it.
Why does they insist on mucking with both gender and verb agreement at the same time? I think it's actually easier to understand intuitively their fetish pronouns if you ditch the old verb agreement rules.
You could just add words but that makes these people different. AKA not inclusive.
That they wish to find a way to make themselves “backward compatible” with the historical usage is where the difficulty begins.
Yes...let's change our entire society and our language to suit one writer who's ego is larger than his wardrobe.
This is mass insanity. We will, at some point lose all of the pronouns that have been used in the language for hundreds of years and as a group, agree on one pronoun that will refer to everybody and anybody. Just one pronoun to mean him, her, I, you, me, they, them.
I suggest it be bollocks.
When the NYT tells the truth about its past lies and returns the phony Pulitzer Prizes they received for reporting FALSITY, this reader will consider reading current articles from them.
But they don't do that. Because it wasn't just falsity, as in errors. It was intentionally false propaganda for an ideology of destruction and killing.
The NYT on its very best day is the National Enquirer with ties on. Carefully crafted BS for its slavish audience. At its worst, it is an evil tool. Stick to their imaginary world if you like it there, Althouse, but this reader doesn't have the time for it.
Love German and all its rules. One day, after giving up on the pronoun conundrum, they will invent a portmanteau that conveys the attempt to define a gender that language can't encompass. It will be a beautiful, multi-syllabic concoction that we will all immediately use.
One of the many problems with the Alphabet people's insistence on us using special pronouns for them, is that it requires that the rest of us must be aware, on some level, of their sexual proclivities and peculiarities. Otherwise, how could you possibly know what pronoun to use?
I'd rather not.
Dress female-stereotype, and I'll use 'she.' Dress male-stereotype, and I'll use 'he.' Dress like Sam Brinton, and I'll just look the other way and ignore you. I'll practice 'don't ask, don't tell.' Don't want to know, thanks.
Oh no! Those poor non-binary persons in Germany are having PRONOUN PROBLEMS! My heart just bleeds - Wait! That's not real blood! That's KETCHUP!!!
So this pronoun thing is about creating one language? “Respect my identity by using my preferred pronouns, while I destroy your language because it isn’t inclusive”.
He. She. It.
German and English already have a nonbinary singular pronoun: the neuter (i.e., neither male or female) pronoun es/it. Although in recent decades English as shied away from using it for humans, it was still not uncommon in the 1950s and 1960s to use "it" for infants (see Dr. Spocks's book). German has been less reluctant to use "es" for human. Words like das Baby, das Kind, das Mädchen, das Fräulein are all neuter and the appropriate pronoun is "es." Only in recent years has there there a reluctance to use the grammatically correct pronoun based on the gender of the noun. But even in these cases, writers will often find an excuse to substitute er/sie (he/she) by introducing the name of the person, so that the name becomes the reference for the pronoun. (Incidentally, Mädchen and Fräulein are neuter not because of the patriarchy desexing females, but because all words that have a diminutive suffix, e.g. -chen or -lein, are grammatically neuter).
If someone rejects the binary, we should simply resort to the traditional neuter pronoun. Even if we acknowledge that proponents of a new pronoun have identified a real problem, that does not mean that we have to accept their proposed solution. They are not the dictators of our language. Fundamentally, as others have pointed out, this is a power issue. The progressives insist that we must bow down to their demands. There is no reason to do so.
German and English already have a nonbinary singular pronoun: the neuter (i.e., neither male or female) pronoun es/it. Although in recent decades English as shied away from using it for humans, it was still not uncommon in the 1950s and 1960s to use "it" for infants (see Dr. Spocks's book). German has been less reluctant to use "es" for human. Words like das Baby, das Kind, das Mädchen, das Fräulein are all neuter and the appropriate pronoun is "es." Only in recent years has there there a reluctance to use the grammatically correct pronoun based on the gender of the noun. But even in these cases, writers will often find an excuse to substitute er/sie (he/she) by introducing the name of the person, so that the name becomes the reference for the pronoun. (Incidentally, Mädchen and Fräulein are neuter not because of the patriarchy desexing females, but because all words that have a diminutive suffix, e.g. -chen or -lein, are grammatically neuter).
If someone rejects the binary, we should simply resort to the traditional neuter pronoun. Even if we acknowledge that proponents of a new pronoun have identified a real problem, that does not mean that we have to accept their proposed solution. They are not the dictators of our language. Fundamentally, as others have pointed out, this is a power issue. The progressives insist that we must bow down to their demands. There is no reason to do so.
Why “they”? Why not “we”? At least that would make sense on some level. You wouldn’t have the first person/third person problem.
German and English already have a nonbinary singular pronoun: the neuter (i.e., neither male or female) pronoun es/it. Although in recent decades English as shied away from using it for humans, it was still not uncommon in the 1950s and 1960s to use "it" for infants (see Dr. Spocks's book). German has been less reluctant to use "es" for human. Words like das Baby, das Kind, das Mädchen, das Fräulein are all neuter and the appropriate pronoun is "es." Only in recent years has there there a reluctance to use the grammatically correct pronoun based on the gender of the noun. But even in these cases, writers will often find an excuse to substitute er/sie (he/she) by introducing the name of the person, so that the name becomes the reference for the pronoun. (Incidentally, Mädchen and Fräulein are neuter not because of the patriarchy desexing females, but because all words that have a diminutive suffix, e.g. -chen or -lein, are grammatically neuter).
If someone rejects the binary, we should simply resort to the traditional neuter pronoun. Even if we acknowledge that proponents of a new pronoun have identified a real problem, that does not mean that we have to accept their proposed solution. They are not the dictators of our language. Fundamentally, as others have pointed out, this is a power issue. The progressives insist that we must bow down to their demands. There is no reason to do so.
German and English already have a nonbinary singular pronoun: the neuter (i.e., neither male or female) pronoun es/it. Although in recent decades English as shied away from using it for humans, it was still not uncommon in the 1950s and 1960s to use "it" for infants (see Dr. Spocks's book). German has been less reluctant to use "es" for human. Words like das Baby, das Kind, das Mädchen, das Fräulein are all neuter and the appropriate pronoun is "es." Only in recent years has there there a reluctance to use the grammatically correct pronoun based on the gender of the noun. But even in these cases, writers will often find an excuse to substitute er/sie (he/she) by introducing the name of the person, so that the name becomes the reference for the pronoun. (Incidentally, Mädchen and Fräulein are neuter not because of the patriarchy desexing females, but because all words that have a diminutive suffix, e.g. -chen or -lein, are grammatically neuter).
If someone rejects the binary, we should simply resort to the traditional neuter pronoun. Even if we acknowledge that proponents of a new pronoun have identified a real problem, that does not mean that we have to accept their proposed solution. They are not the dictators of our language. Fundamentally, as others have pointed out, this is a power issue. The progressives insist that we must bow down to their demands. There is no reason to do so.
Das ist schade.
The problem with commanding people to do things, is that now, unlike when Moses was the big man, everybody has their own tablet. Maybe that’s why ownership is said to be on the way out. “You’ll own nothing and you will be happy “
I call you what you are. If you want to believe you are a bear..that is on you. I am not going along with your delusions.
Here I’ve tightened up that headline to improve it: UNNEEDED TASK PROVES DIFFICULT BUT NPCs RESOLVE TO KEEP TRYING
@matthew49 Well done!
Mike: your revised headline is PERFECT!
Candide you were written for a time as yhis
Sex: male and female. Gender is sex-correlated attributes (e.g. sexual orientation): masculine and feminine, respectively. Trans- refers to a state or process of divergence from normal.
NYT is confused because they have a religious inclination to conflate sex, gender, and the transgender spectrum. Once you go Pro-Choice, you lose perspective.
"we need to create something new"
Also in the anglosphere. They used as singular makes no sense, except as an in-your-face culture war move. Bend your grammar to our wishes, or else.
"I would really like some elaboration of the "difficult" problem!"
Sie/sie/sie. See?
I dislike the new ideas about pronouns as much as anyone, but the proper objection is simply that they're over-personalized, and thus cumbersome and unpredictable.
Languages aren't millennia old. Old English is unreadable to us. Middle English would sound alien because so many vowels have changed. Middle English also had more pronouns than we do; we've lost "thee" and "thou."
Pronouns aren't hardwired for sex. This very post notes that German uses the same word for "she" and "they." French has different forms of "they" for a group of men and a group of women; English doesn't. French also has different words for male and female cousins and friends, and again, English doesn't.
Ann, I'd be curious if any of the discussion around this question reminds you of the controversy around the adoption of the title "Ms." in place of "Mrs." and "Miss"?
Words like ... das Mädchen, das Fräulein are all neuter
Further evidence that language does not necessarily optimize around biological sex.
how could you possibly know what pronoun to use?
This problem already exists in English. Imagine that you're emailing Terry Taylor, Pat McNally, or P.J. Smith for the first time, having never met them. You don't know them well enough to use first names - do you go with Mr. or Ms.? We find ways to work around ambiguity.
Thanks Mr. M!
German is one of my favorite examples of how bogus the treatment of pronouns by progressives is.
If it's patriarchal to use "he" to refer to an unspecified person, then what do we make of using "she" to mean "they" or "you"?
Notice the excuse made in the source: "the German equivalent to 'they' SOUNDS IDENTICAL"...
Okay, then the impersonal pronoun "he" just SOUNDS IDENTICAL to the male third person pronoun "he", right?
Saki's short story, Tobermory, is about a cat taught by a linguist professor to speak English. Over the course of an English country house weekend, the guests all decide the cat must be killed to protect their various misbehaviors. The story ends:
A few weeks later an elephant in the Dresden Zoological Garden, which had shown no previous signs of irritability, broke loose and killed an Englishman who had apparently been teasing it. The victim's name was variously reported in the papers as Oppin and Eppelin, but his front name was faithfully rendered Cornelius.
"If he was trying German irregular verbs on the poor beast," said Clovis, "he deserved all he got."
Leftist minefields under cunstruction everywhere.
Speaking of difficult, I heard somewhere that Bones, the tv show, ended because Dr. Brennan, the forensic anthropologist, could no longer identify the skeletal remains of murder victims as "male" or "female."
It is rumored that the LGBTABC movement demanded the inclusion of at least 20 different gender designations for consideration rendering solution of the crime too problematic for a one hour show. LOL!
We have literally let the insane take over
A recent Lexicon Valley from John McWhorter covered how English speaking people are organically trying to recreate a plural second person pronoun that was lost when we switched from using thou and thee, originally used when referring to familiar or subordinate individuals and groups, to extended use of the more polite you that lacked a plural version. The lack of a similar effort to create gender neutral language is glaring.
Germany leads the way on making changes to include women with words like "Schriftsteller*innen" to indicate male and female writers (Schriftsteller and Schriftstellerinnen). The Germans (and the Scandinavians) are likely to go in for further experimentation. There's a movement in France for similar changes, with the proposed new pronoun "iel" merging the masculine "il" and the feminine "elle."
US Latinos resist "Latinx," but I wonder if there's not a movement in Spain to change the language to be more "inclusive." It's been suggested that "todo" and "toda" be replaced by or supplemented with "todx," tod@," "tod*," or "tode." The only one I could see working is the last.
The problem with "Latinx" is that it was imposed from without and doesn't have much to do with the actual Spanish language. For example, it doesn't correspond to usual Spanish spelling and pronunciation. Also, a minority or immigrant culture can cling more tightly to its distinguishing characteristics than people in the homeland do, those in the homeland having a more secure identity.
Is all this silly? Of course it is. But some people have the time to worry about things like this and even get paid for doing so.
Someone please close the door to the insane asylum before all the lunatics escape.
Thread winner, Mike.
"extended use of the more polite you that lacked a plural version"
The plural version of you is youse, as in youse guys.
"'Words like ... das Mädchen, das Fräulein are all neuter'
Further evidence that language does not necessarily optimize around biological sex."
Actually, German does optimize around biological sex. It is extremely exceptional in German that the grammatical genders of word referring to a human not match the biological sex. The exceptions are words referring to young children and Mädchen and Fräulein, where the suffix determines the gender. I am aware of only two other words where there is a mismatch: das Weib (cognate to English wife) and das Frauenzimmer. The anomaly of Weib is possibly explained by the theory that the word was originally a collective noun referring to the relatives on the female's side of the family and only later came mean woman. Frauenzimmer is related in concept to the English word chambermaid, but is neuter because in all compound words, the last word in the compound determines the gender. Zimmer (room, chamber) is neuter.
What is really noteworthy here is that German has long used the singular neuter pronoun to refer to humans. Neither English nor German has any need to create a new pronoun. And has been noted by others, it it were needed, speakers would create it organically without it having to be imposed by the Thought Police (especially in the universities).
I am no fan of gender identity politics and trans ideology. And I find imperious and presumptuous the whole "everyone must accommodate my highly idiosyncratic pronouns" movement. I'm sorry some people are hydrophobic but that's not the ocean's problem.
That having been said, I can live with finding/using/developing/reviving a 3rd person *personal* pronoun (as opposed to "it" although Mandarin somehow manages) if that helps dampen the stupid fights over language.
I've studied 41+ languages (12 of them formally) and frankly am unsure if any of them provides an example from which we can draw. What's odd is how in many languages innovation revolves around 2nd person pronouns (see French and Portuguese).
Germany is going to have more serious problems than pronouns come January.
Isn't this whole business with pronouns just a euphemistic way of asking people "Are you a Boy? Girl?" There really is no other answer any reasonably person should accept.
Just in case, my pronoun are you/ye/thou/Ud/Tu. My sex is none of your business.
John Henry
Hoo boy... so here's Germany handing out literary kudos to writers flogging nonsensical mythology. It seems we've been over this ground before, does it not?
@Owen: "The only way to win is not to play."
The Woke Mafia is demanding that all Latin-based languages change in order to accomodate a small percentage of the population with mental disorders. "Latinx" was their first attempt, and it was firmly rejected by the majority of Spanish speakers.
I'm not playing this silly semantic game any more. If it costs me gigs, then so be it.
Someone please close the door to the insane asylum before all the lunatics escape.
Too late, there is a democratic/dictatorial consensus that progressive prices (e.g. Medicare/Medicaid/Obamacares, Green deals) can be sustained through shared responsibility. Throw another baby on the barbie, it's over, maybe. Even Schumer laments that our civilization is viable with sexual dysfunction, social contagion, and redistributive change schemes, thus the need for immigration reform, NOW.
It's not about pronouns, it's about power.
One segment of society is forcing economic disruption on companies, institutions, elected officials and individuals who won't conform to its whimsical demands.
Don't like it? Fuck you, hater!
ha ha
need "Unsettling" tag
The United States was settled by Europeans
Europe was unsettled by the U.S.!
and everybody was unsettled by so-and-so and that other guy
Michael K said...
"Germany is going to have more serious problems than pronouns come January."
Look at the bright side. They're not invading Poland.
"In that context, this quote from de l'Horizon is unsettling: "Life is messy, it’s sweaty, it’s dirty, it’s playful and fun. And that’s what this whole process should be."
Newspeak is hard.
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