cbostrum (04/14/83)
I would appreciate peoples' opinions on the following: I believe that a serious defect of the English language is its lack of a third person genderless pronoun for use in reference to persons. It is thoroughly ridiculous to be forced to refer to a person's gender when that information is decidedly irrelevant to the matter at concern. Thus, none of the he/she, type conventions solve this problem since you cannot say he/she when you know the gender of the person referred to. First question: do people agree with this? (Note that this is **not** the view that all worlds such as "chairman" etc should become "chairperson" etc. Although these may be *unfortunate* names, they do not carry the serious semantic problems with them that the present pronoun problem does) Second question: how can we change this? I have heard that some people are trying to push some particular pronoun. With a vague memory that this was "te" (and "ter" possessive) I have been using these "words" in my essays for a while now. Recently I just completed one that was not accepted for this reason. So it doesn't appear that I am doing any good for the "cause" like this. I believe that refusing to accept such a reform in an essay in unreasonable. Third question: do you? (Given that the intent of this reform is consisely outlined at the beginning along with other typographical/grammatical conventions).
leichter (04/15/83)
There is a notion of standard, accepted English. No individual or group of individuals "owns" that standard, or has any inherent right to change it. Lan- guages change through use; if enough people find a change desireable and use- ful for a long enough period of time, they will use the changed form and the changed form will become the new "standard". However, this is not a matter of logical debate or moral imperitive; it simply IS. You are welcome to try to change the language by using some new form, and you are also welcome to try and justify your change in any way you like - but be aware that "justification" for a change is neither necessary nor sufficient for a change to succeed; and that, further, people listening to you are under no obligation to be particularly understanding about your cause - they are perfectly within their rights to ig- nore your arguments and to judge you, at best, ignorant of the language, or perhaps just strange. You may not like this, but it's the way the world works. Language is NOT a matter of individual choice; it exists ONLY because of society and society has its own ways of dealing with language and language users. As to accepting your changes, explained or otherwise, in an essay: An essay is an exercise in the use of standard English, as defined today. The person grading your essay is quite justified in grading negatively any departures from standard English, however justified YOU may think those departures are. If YOU were the only one who mattered in writing, then why write at all? A piece of writing has one writer but potentially many readers. If you and a known set of readers agree on some "non-standard" use of the language, then no one will fault any of you for using that language among yourselves. However, an essay is written using the model of a single writer with a large audience, most of whom are certainly unknown to the writer. In this case, it is pure egotism to consider the WRITER'S views on proper language to be the only relevant ones. There are many more readers; it is THEIR view that should prevail. A writer who ignores has no right to expect that any of the readers whose view he thinks so little of will feel called upon to read his writings. -- Jerry decvax!yale-comix!leichter leichter@yale [Hmm, this really doesn't have much to do with net.women, does it. I suppose if a debate arises on this subject we should move it to net.nlang. -- J]
jsq (04/20/83)
What's wrong with they and theirs? If it was good enough for Shakespeare....
hxe (04/20/83)
I agree with a genderless personal pronoun. Marge Jackson (or Johnson. My mind just went blank but she wrote "Small Changes") wrote a book called "Woman On The Edge Of Time" (or something like that!) in which the pronoun "per" is used so consistently that I started to use it in my conversations. Needless to say, no one understood me, but we can keep trying! Heather ...!decvax!brunix!hxe
plw (04/21/83)
The 'genderless pronoun' in English is the pronoun 'it'.
bernie (04/28/83)
I agree, it's better to use 'they' and 'theirs' than to invent clumsy new words (like 'te' and 'per') that no is likely to use anyway. The language is already drifting towards use of 'they' in a singular neuter sense, so we may as well take advantage of it. (It's a little like overloading of operators, for any CS types out there). --Bernie Roehl ...decvax!watmath!watarts!bernie