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Bugmaster comments on Local Ordinances of Fun - Less Wrong
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Comments (153)
Every time I see the word "ey", I can't help but think of Fonzie. Eyyyyyyy !
Anyway, I prefer using "he" or "she" as the gender-neutral pronoun, despite the fact that neither of these is actually gender-neutral. The singular "they" grates on my nerves like an unclosed bracket. I am probably in the minority on this, though.
Singular "they" has been around for centuries longer than you have; you may as well get used to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Lots of ideas have been around for centuries longer than myself, but this doesn't necessarily mean they are good ideas. Just to clarify, I did not mean to imply that the singular "they" is grammatically incorrect; merely that it is, in my personal and completely non-authoritative opinion, bad style.
You could choose to change your mind about that; and studying the actual history of the language might help.
Um, I don't want to change my mind just to change it, I want to change it to make my current beliefs less wrong (tm). I agree that studying the actual history of the language could help, but I'm more concerned with present-day usage as a practical matter, than with the historical perspective regarding the evolution of languages in general, and English in particular.
Whether it's a good idea to utter a particular sentence “as a practical matter” depends on what your listeners will think upon hearing it, which depends very much on what set of linguistic inputs they've been exposed to so far and very little about any purported stone tablets in the sky determining whether something is good style regardless of what any users of language do.
I wasn't talking about any kind of prescriptivist stone tablets, just my own preference. In my experience, which may not be representative, the gender of a person or people I'm talking about matters a lot less than the number of people, most of the time. Thus, sacrificing gender recognition fidelity is a good tradeoff, most of the time.
On the other hand, in English the number of people is usually already encoded in the antecedent of the pronoun, whereas whether the gender matters isn't usually encoded anywhere else.
You're going to need gender-neutral pronouns anyway, since not everyone is a man or a woman. Might as well use the same pronouns for people of unknown gender.
The difficulty of introducing new pronouns into English isn't just political reaction. Linguistically, pronouns are a closed word class in most European languages — unlike in, say, Japanese. Closed classes don't change much, unlike open classes such as nouns and (in English but not Japanese) verbs.
That said, there is apparently a strong and somewhat popular movement to adopt a gender-neutral pronoun in Swedish. Closed classes can be changed; it's just rare.
Whether verbs are a closed class in Japanese is largely a matter of perspective, I think. I'm pretty sure something like "janpusuru"(ジャンプする) is considered a single word. Am I wrong?
The claim that I've read and heard from linguists about this is that while words like janpusuru are semantically verbs, grammatically they are a noun janpu + the standard verb suru.
Contrast the English expression "I am doing homework" vs. "I am *homeworking". "Homework" isn't really used as a verb in English, but we can express the idea of homework-as-an-action by saying "do homework".
New non-suru verbs in Japanese do apparently happen from time to time (Wikipedia uses the example of guguru — "to google") but they're rare, so the class is mostly closed.
That makes good sense.