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EspañolGENDER-NEUTRAL PRONOUN
(Redirected from Xe (pronoun))
'Gender-neutral', 'gender-inclusive' or 'epicene pronouns' are pronouns that neither reveal nor imply the gender or the sex of a person. 'Androgynous pronouns' are pronouns that can refer to neither or both genders.
Most languages do not have gender distinctions as an intrinsic part of the language: though it is always possible to specify whether one is talking about a male or female, the language does not require one to make that choice.[1] In such languages, all pronouns are "gender-neutral".
In some languages — notably most Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic and Niger-Congo languages — some personal pronouns intrinsically distinguish male from female; and the selection of a pronoun necessarily specifies at least to some extent the gender of what is referred to. Most such languages only distinguish gender in the ''third'' person. Outside the Afro-Asiatic family (where it is normal to have gender distinctions in at least the second person, as in Arabic and Hausa) there are only a handful of languages with gender distinctions in other persons. Since at least 1795,[2] some people have felt this requirement to be unsatisfactory (see Gender-neutral language) and there have been attempts to devise sets of pronouns which do not require the speaker to make the distinction, since sometime around 1850.[3] These are what is usually meant by 'gender-neutral pronouns'.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is often interpreted to mean that people will be less sexist if they do not distinguish gender in pronouns or other aspects of speech. Patriarchal societies with genderless languages, such as the Chinese, demonstrate that gendered pronouns are not a prerequisite for inequality to exist.
Traditionally, the masculine form has been taken to be the 'unmarked' form, that is the form to be used unless it is known to be inappropriate. This has dictated the masculine pronoun in cases such as:
★ reference to an indefinite person, for example 'If anybody comes, tell 'him'
★ …'
★ reference to a group containing men and women, for example ('Your parents, have they arrived?')
It is this property which has mostly led to the call for gender-neutral pronouns: the fact that the masculine form is used both for masculine referents, and also for those where the gender is unknown, irrelevant, or mixed.
In English:
★ The gender-specific pronouns are the personal pronouns of the third-person singular: 'he'/'him'/'himself'/'his' (for male persons or possessors), 'she'/'her'/'herself'/'hers' (for female persons or possessors), and 'it'/'itself'/'its' (for neither).
★ The third-person plural pronouns 'they', 'them', 'themselves', 'their', and 'theirs' work equally well for either sex and are androgynous.
A speaker may not know or may want to avoid specifying a person's gender. Traditionally, when one wishes to refer to a single definite person androgynously with a pronoun in the third person, the masculine pronoun is used. Some people have begun to challenge this tradition, however, usually by resorting to plural pronouns such as 'they', 'them' and 'their' for singular uses. This is called the singular 'they'.
Other common solutions include the generic 'she', 'one', the generic 'you', circumlocutions such as 'he or she', or using 'he' and 'she' in alternate passages, and rewording sentences to avoid pronouns. (See pronoun game.)
Historically, there were two gender neutral pronouns native to English dialects, 'ou' and 'a', but they have long since died out. According to Dennis Baron's ''Grammar and Gender'':
Baron goes on to describe how relics of these sex-neutral terms survive in some British dialects of Modern English, and sometimes a pronoun of one gender might be applied to a person or animal of the opposite gender.
Some groups and individuals have used non-standard pronouns, hoping they will become the standards. Various proposals for such changes have been around since at least the 19th century. The American Heritage Book of English Usage says of these efforts:
Here are the third person singular personal pronouns in English: ''he'', ''she'', ''it''; also the indefinite personal pronoun ''one'' and "singular" ''they''. Below them are examples of the better known neologisms.
The gender-neutral pronoun "co" is used in contemporary everyday language by the 100 people who live at Twin Oaks Community in Virginia, USA. It is used to mean "s/he" in the case in which the gender is not known or is irrelevant.[12]
In modern Chinese, there is no gender distinction in pronouns in the spoken language: the pronoun 他 (''tā'') means 'he' or 'she'. However, around the time of the May Fourth Movement, a new written form 她 of the pronoun was created to specifically represent 'she', and 他 is now often restricted to meaning 'he'. This language reform was part of a 'modernisation' movement, and copied from European languages. In writing, 他/她 is used to mean 'he'/'she' (in that order), 它 (''tā'') to mean 'it', 牠 (''tā'') to refer to animals and 祂 (''tā'') to denote God. These pronouns are pronounced identically; the difference appears only in writing.
The Cantonese third person singular pronoun is ''keui''. In written Cantonese, the character most commonly used to record this is ; it may be used to refer to people of either gender. The practise of replacing the "亻" radical with "女" (forming the character ) to specifically indicate the female gender may also be seen occasionally in informal writing; however, this is neither widely accepted nor grammatically or semantically required, and, unlike 佢, the character 姖 has a separate meaning in standard Chinese.[13]
Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are Finno-Ugric (thus not Indo-European) languages. All pronouns are gender-neutral. The third-person singular and plural personal pronouns are ''hän'' and ''he'' in Finnish, ''tema'' and ''nemad'' in Estonian and ''ő'' and ''ők'' in Hungarian, respectively, which always refer to persons or animals.
The national language of the Philippines only has gender neutral pronouns; ''siya'' (he/she) is used for both genders and occasionally animals. The pronoun ''ito'' (it) is used for objects.
Georgian, a South Caucasian language, has gender-neutral pronouns.
In Nahuatl all pronouns and pronoun affixes are independent of gender.
The Persian language has no trace of grammatical gender: 'he',' she', and 'it' are all expressed by the same pronoun ''u''. This lack of specification has allowed for fluidity in reading the gender of both human lovers and the divine beloved in Persian poetry.
All Turkish pronouns, like the other members in the family of Turkic languages, are gender-inclusive. The English pronouns 'he', 'she', and 'it' all correspond to the only Turkish third-person singular personal pronoun ''o''.
Before modernization, in Korean ''그 (geu)'' meant 'he', 'she', and 'it' like Chinese ''tā''. But in Modern Korean ''geu'' usually means 'he'. ''그녀 (geu-nyeo)'' with the suffix ''-녀(女, -nyeo)'' meaning woman, is used for 'she'. ''그것 (geu-geot)'' means 'it'.
Sometimes ''geu-nyeo'' means more than 'she' as pronoun, because the word ''geu'' is also used to show definiteness, like the article 'the' in English.
The choice of possessive pronoun in many Romance languages is determined by the grammatical gender of the possessed object; the gender of the possessor is not explicit. For instance, in French the possessive pronouns are ''sa'' for a feminine object, and ''son'' for a masculine object: ''son livre'' means 'his or her book', where ''son'' is used because ''livre'' is masculine. Non-possessive pronouns, on the other hand, are usually gender-specific. See also Gender-neutrality in languages with grammatical gender.
1. Siewierska, Anna; ''Gender Distinctions in Independent Personal Pronouns''; in Haspelmath, Martin; Dryer, Matthew S.; Gil, David; Comrie, Bernard (eds.) ''The World Atlas of Language Structures'', pp. 182-185. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-925591-1
2. History - Modern Neologism
3. ibid
4. Grammar and Gender, , Dennis, Baron, Yale University Press, , 0-300-03526-8
As cited by: History - Native-English GNPs
5. The American Heritage® Book of English Usage, , , , Houghton Mifflin Company, , 0-39576-785-7
6. First recorded use on usenet:
7. A discussion about theory of Mind: a paper from 2000 that uses and defines these pronouns''
8. Proposed by New Zealand writer Keri Hulme some time in the 1980s. Also used by writer Greg Egan for non-gendered artificial intelligences and "asex" humans.
Diaspora, , Greg, Egan, Gollancz, , ISBN 0-75280-925-3
Distress, , Greg, Egan, , , ISBN 1-85799-484-1
9. Ze, Zer, Mer
10. Example:
My Gender Workbook, , Kate, Bornstein, , , ISBN 0-41591-673-9
11. proposed in 1884 by American lawyer Charles Converse. Reference: Epicene
12. Visitor Guide - Twin Oaks Intentional Community
13. Chinese Character Database: Phonologically Disambiguated According to the Cantonese Dialect . The entry for "佢" (humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk) notes its use as a third-person pronoun in Cantonese, but the entry for "姖" (idem) does not; it only gives the pronunciation ''geoi6'' and notes that it is used in placenames.
★ Epicene
★ Gender-neutrality in languages without grammatical gender
★ Gender-neutral language
★ Gender role
★ Gender-specific pronoun
★ Generic antecedents
★ Grammatical gender
—
★ Gender-Neutral Pronouns - a style guide
★ Gender Neutral Pronoun Frequently Asked Questions
★ Gender-free Legal Writing
★ The Epicene Pronouns: A Chronology of the Word That Failed (link updated 5-31-06)
★ On the Creation of "She " in Japanese
★ Footnotes: pronouns (Archived by Wayback Machine Mar 08, 2005)
★ "Riismo" in Esperanto (in Esperanto)
★ Regender can translate webpages to use gender-neutral pronouns.
★ Is there a gender-neutral substitute for "his or her"?
★ [http://usingenglish.com/forum/general-language-discussions/45891-modest-proposal-pronouns.html
'Gender-neutral', 'gender-inclusive' or 'epicene pronouns' are pronouns that neither reveal nor imply the gender or the sex of a person. 'Androgynous pronouns' are pronouns that can refer to neither or both genders.
Most languages do not have gender distinctions as an intrinsic part of the language: though it is always possible to specify whether one is talking about a male or female, the language does not require one to make that choice.[1] In such languages, all pronouns are "gender-neutral".
In some languages — notably most Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic and Niger-Congo languages — some personal pronouns intrinsically distinguish male from female; and the selection of a pronoun necessarily specifies at least to some extent the gender of what is referred to. Most such languages only distinguish gender in the ''third'' person. Outside the Afro-Asiatic family (where it is normal to have gender distinctions in at least the second person, as in Arabic and Hausa) there are only a handful of languages with gender distinctions in other persons. Since at least 1795,[2] some people have felt this requirement to be unsatisfactory (see Gender-neutral language) and there have been attempts to devise sets of pronouns which do not require the speaker to make the distinction, since sometime around 1850.[3] These are what is usually meant by 'gender-neutral pronouns'.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is often interpreted to mean that people will be less sexist if they do not distinguish gender in pronouns or other aspects of speech. Patriarchal societies with genderless languages, such as the Chinese, demonstrate that gendered pronouns are not a prerequisite for inequality to exist.
Gender markedness
Traditionally, the masculine form has been taken to be the 'unmarked' form, that is the form to be used unless it is known to be inappropriate. This has dictated the masculine pronoun in cases such as:
★ reference to an indefinite person, for example 'If anybody comes, tell 'him'
★ …'
★ reference to a group containing men and women, for example ('Your parents, have they arrived?')
It is this property which has mostly led to the call for gender-neutral pronouns: the fact that the masculine form is used both for masculine referents, and also for those where the gender is unknown, irrelevant, or mixed.
English
In English:
★ The gender-specific pronouns are the personal pronouns of the third-person singular: 'he'/'him'/'himself'/'his' (for male persons or possessors), 'she'/'her'/'herself'/'hers' (for female persons or possessors), and 'it'/'itself'/'its' (for neither).
★ The third-person plural pronouns 'they', 'them', 'themselves', 'their', and 'theirs' work equally well for either sex and are androgynous.
A speaker may not know or may want to avoid specifying a person's gender. Traditionally, when one wishes to refer to a single definite person androgynously with a pronoun in the third person, the masculine pronoun is used. Some people have begun to challenge this tradition, however, usually by resorting to plural pronouns such as 'they', 'them' and 'their' for singular uses. This is called the singular 'they'.
Other common solutions include the generic 'she', 'one', the generic 'you', circumlocutions such as 'he or she', or using 'he' and 'she' in alternate passages, and rewording sentences to avoid pronouns. (See pronoun game.)
Gender-neutral pronouns used in Middle English
Historically, there were two gender neutral pronouns native to English dialects, 'ou' and 'a', but they have long since died out. According to Dennis Baron's ''Grammar and Gender'':
In 1789, William H. Marshall records the existence of a dialectal English epicene pronoun, singular "ou": "'Ou will' expresses either ''he'' will, ''she'' will, or ''it'' will." Marshall traces "ou" to Middle English epicene "a", used by the 14th century English writer John of Trevisa, and both the OED and Wright's ''English Dialect Dictionary'' confirm the use of "a" for ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they'', and even ''I''. This "a" is a reduced form of the Anglo-Saxon ''he'' = "he" and ''heo'' = "she". By the 12th and 13th centuries, these had often weakened to a point where, according to the ''OED'', they were "almost or wholly indistinguishable in pronunciation." The modern feminine pronoun ''she'', which first appears in the mid twelfth century, seems to have been drafted at least partly to reduce the increasing ambiguity of the pronoun system…[4]
Baron goes on to describe how relics of these sex-neutral terms survive in some British dialects of Modern English, and sometimes a pronoun of one gender might be applied to a person or animal of the opposite gender.
Neologisms
Some groups and individuals have used non-standard pronouns, hoping they will become the standards. Various proposals for such changes have been around since at least the 19th century. The American Heritage Book of English Usage says of these efforts:
Like most efforts at language reform, these well-intended suggestions have been largely ignored by the general English-speaking public, and the project to supplement the English pronoun system has proved to be an ongoing exercise in futility. Pronouns are one of the most basic components of a language, and most speakers appear to have little interest in adopting invented ones. This may be because in most situations people can get by using the plural pronoun they or using other constructions that combine existing pronouns, such as he/she or 'he or she'.[5]
Here are the third person singular personal pronouns in English: ''he'', ''she'', ''it''; also the indefinite personal pronoun ''one'' and "singular" ''they''. Below them are examples of the better known neologisms.
| Nominative (subject) | Accusative (object) | Possessive adjective | Possessive pronoun | Reflexive | |
| 'He' | ''He'' laughed | I kissed ''him'' | ''His'' head hurts | I am ''his'' | He feeds ''himself'' |
| 'She' | ''She'' laughed | I kissed ''her'' | ''Her'' head hurts | I am ''hers'' | She feeds ''herself'' |
| 'It' | ''It'' laughed | I kissed ''it'' | ''Its'' head hurts | I am ''its'' | It feeds ''itself'' |
| 'One' | ''One'' laughed | I kissed ''one'' | ''One's'' head hurts | I am ''one's'' | One feeds ''oneself'' |
| 'Singular ''they''' | ''They'' laughed | I kissed ''them'' | ''Their'' head hurts | I am ''theirs'' | They feed ''themself''/''themselves'' |
| 'Spivak (new)' | ''Ey'' laughed | I kissed ''em'' | ''Eir'' head hurts | I am ''eirs'' | E feeds ''emself'' |
| 'Spivak (old) ' | ''E'' laughed | I kissed ''em'' | ''Eir'' head hurts | I am ''eirs'' | E feeds ''eirself'' |
| 'S/he' | ''S/he'' laughed | I kissed ''him/her'' | ''His/her'' head hurts | I am ''his/hers'' | S/he feeds ''him/herself'' |
| 'Sie and hir'[6] | ''Sie'' laughed | I kissed ''hir'' | ''Hir'' head hurts | I am ''hirs'' | Sie feeds ''hirself'' |
| 'Xe'[7] | '' laughed | I kissed '' | '' head hurts | I am '' | Xe feeds '' |
| 'Ve'[8] || ''Ve'' laughed || I kissed ''ver'' || ''Vis'' head hurts || I am ''vis'' || Ve feeds ''verself'' | |||||
| 'Ze and mer'[9] | ''Ze'' laughed | I kissed ''mer'' | ''Zer'' head hurts | I am ''zer'' | Ze feeds ''zemself'' |
| 'Ze and hir'[10] || ''Ze'' laughed || I kissed ''hir'' || ''Hir'' head hurts || I am ''hirs'' || Ze feeds ''hirself'' | |||||
| 'Zie' | ''Zie'' laughed | I kissed ''zir'' | ''Zir'' head hurts | I am ''zirs'' | Zie feeds ''zirself'' |
| 'E' | ''E'' laughed | I kissed ''het'' | ''Het'' head hurts | I am ''hets'' | E feeds ''hetself'' |
| 'Thon'[11] | ''Thon'' laughed | I kissed ''thon'' | ''Thons'' head hurts | I am ''thon's'' | Thon feeds ''thonself'' |
The gender-neutral pronoun "co" is used in contemporary everyday language by the 100 people who live at Twin Oaks Community in Virginia, USA. It is used to mean "s/he" in the case in which the gender is not known or is irrelevant.[12]
Traditionally gender-neutral languages
Chinese
In modern Chinese, there is no gender distinction in pronouns in the spoken language: the pronoun 他 (''tā'') means 'he' or 'she'. However, around the time of the May Fourth Movement, a new written form 她 of the pronoun was created to specifically represent 'she', and 他 is now often restricted to meaning 'he'. This language reform was part of a 'modernisation' movement, and copied from European languages. In writing, 他/她 is used to mean 'he'/'she' (in that order), 它 (''tā'') to mean 'it', 牠 (''tā'') to refer to animals and 祂 (''tā'') to denote God. These pronouns are pronounced identically; the difference appears only in writing.
The Cantonese third person singular pronoun is ''keui''. In written Cantonese, the character most commonly used to record this is ; it may be used to refer to people of either gender. The practise of replacing the "亻" radical with "女" (forming the character ) to specifically indicate the female gender may also be seen occasionally in informal writing; however, this is neither widely accepted nor grammatically or semantically required, and, unlike 佢, the character 姖 has a separate meaning in standard Chinese.[13]
Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian
Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are Finno-Ugric (thus not Indo-European) languages. All pronouns are gender-neutral. The third-person singular and plural personal pronouns are ''hän'' and ''he'' in Finnish, ''tema'' and ''nemad'' in Estonian and ''ő'' and ''ők'' in Hungarian, respectively, which always refer to persons or animals.
Filipino
The national language of the Philippines only has gender neutral pronouns; ''siya'' (he/she) is used for both genders and occasionally animals. The pronoun ''ito'' (it) is used for objects.
Georgian
Georgian, a South Caucasian language, has gender-neutral pronouns.
Nahuatl
In Nahuatl all pronouns and pronoun affixes are independent of gender.
Persian
The Persian language has no trace of grammatical gender: 'he',' she', and 'it' are all expressed by the same pronoun ''u''. This lack of specification has allowed for fluidity in reading the gender of both human lovers and the divine beloved in Persian poetry.
Turkish
All Turkish pronouns, like the other members in the family of Turkic languages, are gender-inclusive. The English pronouns 'he', 'she', and 'it' all correspond to the only Turkish third-person singular personal pronoun ''o''.
Korean
Before modernization, in Korean ''그 (geu)'' meant 'he', 'she', and 'it' like Chinese ''tā''. But in Modern Korean ''geu'' usually means 'he'. ''그녀 (geu-nyeo)'' with the suffix ''-녀(女, -nyeo)'' meaning woman, is used for 'she'. ''그것 (geu-geot)'' means 'it'.
Sometimes ''geu-nyeo'' means more than 'she' as pronoun, because the word ''geu'' is also used to show definiteness, like the article 'the' in English.
Romance languages
The choice of possessive pronoun in many Romance languages is determined by the grammatical gender of the possessed object; the gender of the possessor is not explicit. For instance, in French the possessive pronouns are ''sa'' for a feminine object, and ''son'' for a masculine object: ''son livre'' means 'his or her book', where ''son'' is used because ''livre'' is masculine. Non-possessive pronouns, on the other hand, are usually gender-specific. See also Gender-neutrality in languages with grammatical gender.
Notes
1. Siewierska, Anna; ''Gender Distinctions in Independent Personal Pronouns''; in Haspelmath, Martin; Dryer, Matthew S.; Gil, David; Comrie, Bernard (eds.) ''The World Atlas of Language Structures'', pp. 182-185. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-925591-1
2. History - Modern Neologism
3. ibid
4. Grammar and Gender, , Dennis, Baron, Yale University Press, , 0-300-03526-8
As cited by: History - Native-English GNPs
5. The American Heritage® Book of English Usage, , , , Houghton Mifflin Company, , 0-39576-785-7
6. First recorded use on usenet:
7. A discussion about theory of Mind: a paper from 2000 that uses and defines these pronouns''
8. Proposed by New Zealand writer Keri Hulme some time in the 1980s. Also used by writer Greg Egan for non-gendered artificial intelligences and "asex" humans.
Diaspora, , Greg, Egan, Gollancz, , ISBN 0-75280-925-3
Distress, , Greg, Egan, , , ISBN 1-85799-484-1
9. Ze, Zer, Mer
10. Example:
My Gender Workbook, , Kate, Bornstein, , , ISBN 0-41591-673-9
11. proposed in 1884 by American lawyer Charles Converse. Reference: Epicene
12. Visitor Guide - Twin Oaks Intentional Community
13. Chinese Character Database: Phonologically Disambiguated According to the Cantonese Dialect . The entry for "佢" (humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk) notes its use as a third-person pronoun in Cantonese, but the entry for "姖" (idem) does not; it only gives the pronunciation ''geoi6'' and notes that it is used in placenames.
See also
★ Epicene
★ Gender-neutrality in languages without grammatical gender
★ Gender-neutral language
★ Gender role
★ Gender-specific pronoun
★ Generic antecedents
★ Grammatical gender
—
External links
★ Gender-Neutral Pronouns - a style guide
★ Gender Neutral Pronoun Frequently Asked Questions
★ Gender-free Legal Writing
★ The Epicene Pronouns: A Chronology of the Word That Failed (link updated 5-31-06)
★ On the Creation of "She " in Japanese
★ Footnotes: pronouns (Archived by Wayback Machine Mar 08, 2005)
★ "Riismo" in Esperanto (in Esperanto)
★ Regender can translate webpages to use gender-neutral pronouns.
★ Is there a gender-neutral substitute for "his or her"?
★ [http://usingenglish.com/forum/general-language-discussions/45891-modest-proposal-pronouns.html
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psst.. try this: add to faves
