Concerning the point made in this article, what would be a sensible replacement to the use of they/them to refer to someone whose gender isn't known? Was "he" the adjective used by default before they/them was retrofitted for this use case?
"He" was always the default. I'd prefer to go back to that standard, although I wish English had a real gender-neutral pronoun. The issue with "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun is that it's already a plural pronoun, and makes things ambiguous in many situations.
In my daily speech, I usually use "he or she", "his or her", etc. That's the legal standard as far as I'm aware, and it cuts out ambiguity at the cost of being more verbose.
I'm not hung up on the retarded political connotations of using a gender-neutral pronoun, I only have an issue with "they" and "them" for this purpose because it conflicts with the existing uses for those words.
Thank you for the reply. It does sound a bit long to use "he or she" verbally, but if it is a standard way of addressing this problem it is maybe worth the extra syllables.
I'm surprised that I made no mention of it in the article, but the presence of "he" as the default pronoun was so absolute that "its" was not fully standard until the 18th century -- an object was an "it", but its plural was "his". You see it throughout the King James Bible, and readers today gloss over it with no understanding of what was meant. The root of it all is that Indo-European languages have noun genders, and inanimate objects have been understood for thousands of years to be "he", "she", "it". English rotted away to the point that everything became neuter, except traditionally we still recognize all countries as feminine and some animals as masculine or feminine.
On the topic of neuter possessives, I've noticed a jarring trend among illiterates and ESL Europeans in which they say "which's" instead of "whose". We may wind up living to see this become standard just because enough kids didn't lurk before posting.
I sure prefer people learning English over pretentious ” and ` users.
> English rotted away to the point that everything became neuter [...]
I did not know about that. So it seems plausible to me now that "they/them" completely replaces gendered pronouns eventually if it already happened with inanimate objects. Can the fact that English became the de facto international language be held responsible? With so many people learning the language today, it does make sense that everything about it becomes simpler.
English has not had European noun genders for about a thousand years now, first due to the Vikings conquering England and second due to the Normans (more Vikings) conquering England. Both Danish and Norman had noun genders, but the sheer instability and corruption that was introduced led to complex grammar in general being lost. However, Danish would formally lose the distinction between masculine and feminine nouns hundreds of years ago, meaning that there exists only a "common gender" and neuter gender. Dutch is the closest relevant language to English and it also has lost masculine and feminine distinction, in that the former's definite article is "de" and the latter's is "de". These would be "der" and "die" in High German, and of course are simply "the" in our genderless English.
Someone I know holds a theory that any Indo-European language that places stress on the first syllable will ultimately collapse into ruin just as English and other Germanic languages have. There are many greatly conservative IE languages alive today, including Lithuanian, most Slavic languages, and Icelandic.
It seems that I really don't know anything about the History of English, or any European language for that matter. If you ever make an article talking about this subject, know that I'll be the first one reading it.
>There are many greatly conservative IE languages alive today, including Lithuanian, most Slavic languages, and Icelandic.
It does not matter how much a 'language can be conservative', if it's using too much symbols, or symbols that are not popular it will always be a ruin.
Chynese. Rus'. Gryk. And so on.
I see one possibility: the only symbols that a modern, realistic language can use are the ones from the core Latin alphabet.
>>9
Frinch hands typed this post. Absolutely nuts. "Modern" as a linguistic goal is for the deracinated and cultureless... oh wait! I know what you think should be done with culture.
>Modern as a linguistic goal is for the deracinated and cultureless
Firm position. Would you say the same for situations like Korean getting rid of the Chinese characters? That's a language acting to be more modern and realistic.
>I know what you think should be done with culture.
You did not hear my thoughts extensively, stating this is not entirely logical, and your whole message is aggressive for a reason I cannot comprehend as well.
>>11
South Korea is one of the worst nations in the world regarding cultural degeneracy. Their birth rates are actually the lowest in the world, and their feminists are some of the only ones I've yet heard who advocate for complete racial extinction of themselves.
I can say that if Japanese got rid of its Chinese characters, its culture as well would be reshapen into something unrecognizable, because Japan is a nation traditionally with one of the richest cultures in the world -- regarding art, literature, political history, what have you -- all of these things were penned with Chinese characters. As a concept a cultural-linguistic reset might not always be a bad thing, but in the case of atomized worker ants hurtling toward extinction, there is not enough soul left upon which to found a new national culture -- if you think it's bad now, you don't want to see what would happen if you stripped away the ties to the past they do have.
>your whole message is aggressive for a reason I cannot comprehend as well.
Your whole message is a derailment of the topic with a contradictory assertion that holds no merit whatsoever. There is no reason why an empire that died 1,500 years ago should have an eternal stranglehold on all nations of the world, even though it does have a stranglehold on the world's most important language (which is still Germanic). One alphabet is not superior to another, but if I had to concede so, I'd say Latin is vastly inferior for not having the capability to transcribe the sounds of most European languages without letters being crafted for it, which you say should be erased. It is an alphabet belonging to a dead language that was heavily simplified in phonetics even in its time. Its use in more phonetically conservative and complex languages was never a good thing and in fact is overtly outdated today.
Note: Check the anti-spam filter, they prevented me from sending messages a lot of times - no profanity included of course.
... I'm going to host the paragraph enabling it to a paste site at this point.
At least rereading myself to track the word activating the filter is permitting me to remove germanic words.
paste dot debian dot net /hidden/c915ac5b/
word filter cannot compete with cig clack dock
>Someone I know holds a theory that any Indo-European language that places stress on the first syllable will ultimately collapse into ruin just as English and other Germanic languages have. There are many greatly conservative IE languages alive today, including Lithuanian, most Slavic languages, and Icelandic.
I'm curious if there's any linguistic or phonotactic phenomenon which would explain why this seems to occur so often. Surely there must be some theoretical underlying reason?
>>7
Actually sorry for the month-late reply, I've been so busy lately I initually didn't even bother to put in the effort to think about it and respond, but I hate to let it sit:
As a Southerner, and a student of two highly corrupt and redneckish Germanic languages, which are Norwegian and Dutch, the short answer is that placing stress on the first syllable makes the rest of the word go to Hell. You get about 1-2 opportunities for emphasis in any given word in our languages, and we Englishers usually use it on the first syllable with every other syllable receiving unstressed vowels. Think about how Americans pronounce long Japanese names: NAKǝmurǝ, TOYodǝ. While the horror of our pronunciations varies, it always gives you a pure vowel on the stressed syllable and a corrupt "uh" for following vowels, where applicable.
Languages which retain grammatical cases today necessarily must be ones that have not historically let the ends of words go unstressed, because if something goes unpronounced for a century or two it will be forgotten. While Japanese is nearly barren of grammar, it's known as "mora-timed" where Germanic languages are stress-timed. In Japanese each syllable is given a roughly equal amount of time and spoken with pure vowels, and emphasis is pretty much optional. In contrast spoken English hurtles haphazardly through each syllable with arbitrary timing, which I happen to think is interesting and musical in itself, but our languages are highly given to slurring which persists as a slippery slope because we now lack the grammar for it to matter.