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by jhgb
1536 days ago
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> We still don't have a pronoun to refer to nonbinary people How could you have one? You have inflected nouns and adjectives -- you'd have to come up with new endings for those if you could use neither masculine nor feminine ones (not the neuter ones in case that this were offensive in German). And teach everyone to use them. English is in this weird place where pretty much the only morphological remnant of gender is in the third person singular personal pronouns. Even if someone felt that to be a problem in general (not everyone obviously does), in other languages, this is either a non-existent issue (say, in Finnish), or an outright unsolvable issue (say, in Slavic languages). So basically English speakers get the benefit of even being able to virtue signal just with tiny language changes that cost you very little. Pretty much nobody else has this option to begin with - either lacking opportunity (like in Finnish) or the ability (like in Slavic languages). |
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Two proposals that I've seen replace all endings with either -x or -ens.
German source - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lann_Hornscheidt#Gendertheorie...
Now one might think that these are outlandish ideas that will never fly, but...
> And teach everyone to use them.
...that's easy, because languages changes are implemented top-down. Considering how unpopular the neutral forms using : and * are in polls, it is absolutely fascinating to see them spread so quickly from academia, to tech (macOS, Spotify), to local governments, to normie coworkers. Nonbinary people wouldn't have to do the teaching themselves.
Edit:
> ...not the neuter ones in case that this were offensive in German...
My first intuition was that using the neutral gender would indeed be offensive. But children (das Kind) and girls (das Mädchen) are neutral - and it doesn't feel rude to refer to them as "it"? I think it could work.