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MixedNuts comments on Local Ordinances of Fun - Less Wrong
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Comments (153)
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.