= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
SoullessAutomaton comments on Sayeth the Girl - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (486)
In Old English, the word "man" was gender-neutral, while the words for male and female were something like wer and wif. The compound word wifman, meaning "female human" is what evolved into the modern word "woman" (interestingly, the word wer survives most commonly in "werewolf", which as you can see literally means man-wolf, and distinctly male). Cognates of "man", such as the German Mensch in fact remain gender neutral.
The gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun is "they", with documented use at least as far back as Chaucer and Shakespeare.
My apologies then, I was unaware of such. I lacked documentation, but had read in multiple sources (that memory fails to be exact about) that the roots were masculine, hence the comment.
And even ignoring that, "English was like this" is no reason for it to continue to be like that if the alternative is perfectly understandable. Languages change all the time for all kinds of reasons; we don't use the complex system of verb tenses from Old English, or hither, thither and wither, or yon and yonder, (etc.), so why should we feel obligated to use its pronouns? (side note: which were not the same as modern English pronouns; "you" used to be a second person plural object only, it was thee and thou singular and ye and you plural.)
But yes, "man" used to be gender neutral, and for most of the history of English "they" was the gender neutral third person singular.