h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How about "sheesh" as a genderless nominative pronoun? If pronounced correctly it interpolates quite nicely between he and she, and also conveys an appropriate tone of exasperation.

Slightly more seriously, what about languages which lack pronouns but have gendered verb forms (which would, therefore, require grammar-level modification)? What, for that matter, of languages whose forms are all gendered, and where no neutral or polygender alternatives exist?

I suspect that ultimately this will not be as simple as neologising a word (such as "neologise", to create a neologism) but will qualify more under modification of grammar, even for languages where the appearance of gender being at the word level is given, like English. For example, a regular neutral/common form for adjectives would have to be added to French, always assuming that using the masculine form for uncertain or multigendered plural items (as is currently conventional). Moreover, imagine if you had to remember a new word for "water" whenever the freshness or salinity was in doubt (or something more obvious, although I can't think of anything ... sorry). Since adults can always learn new words but most grammar is learned before about the age of four, we may not live to see this change.

Finally: what's wrong with "they / them / their"? You could argue that it's grammatical because gender uncertainty postulates two people, one male, one female ... of course, in French you have "ils" or "elles" so this is no improvement ....

I think h'orsh'*t is a better example of such exasperation...

I agree that heavily gendered languages may have problems trying to be gender-free, and not just with pronouns. It's not something I can really comment on - I only know very basic French and German - though I'd be interested to hear what people say.

> "gender uncertainty postulates two people, one male, one female"

Eek. If you followed that logic you'd have to pluralise all hypothetical people - since a woman with 'hair-uncertainty' would postulate three women - a redhead, a blond, and a brunette. That's a much larger change to English than is necessary, and I think it'd be over the top.
I'm even more uncomfortable with the application is specific cases - if Kat is androgynous, should sie be automatically regarded as somehow being two people?? What if sie feels that sie is neither male nor female - is sie now no people? That's a dangerous mental path, imo.

-Martin

Firstly, most people fall neatly into one category or another.

Secondly, hair colour, like skin colour or eye colour (which makes the "racist language" point, while informative, somewhat disingenuous) is probably more trivial a difference than gender. This is because while I can avoid vitamin D overproduction or skin cancer with sunblock and a darker-skinned person can always take supplements (although afaik this is not usually necessary -- ?) and I can dye my hair, I can't lose four inches in height, narrow my shoulders, widen my hips and gain a uterus, or at least not for the day. So the majority of the time, gendered pronouns make sense. It's only in cases of uncertainty or genderlessness that we have problems. Tables have no gender, and this is fine. Audio connectors do have gender but you probably still wouldn't refer to a socket as "she", but "it". I am male. My brother is male. My sister is female. Wherever a specific entity is concerned, three categories are usually enough.

There are two exceptions.

The confused are probably not a problem linguistically since although someone might not like the fact, they are likely to be male or female, and apparently transgendered people feel a stronger sense of gender identity than most people (you'd have to feel pretty strongly about it to undergo enormous amounts of surgery, after all). Anyone who really feels strongly enough about it is probably exceptional enough to forgo pronouns and use their proper name all the time.

People actually born with more than one gender (about 0.1% of people have these characteristics, of whom a small minority do not show a marked physical tendency towards male or female, although I don't know the stats for that) are a trickier problem. I'd rather we explored the nature of the problem more thoroughly before attempting to make a linguistic framework for it, since language should mirror life and not the reverse. IMO.

: )

Don't get me wrong - I'm happy enough for people to use 'they' as a gender-neutral pronoun - though it's not my personal choice. But I don't think your grammatical justification holds water. A better justification would be to say that 'they' is an exception to the normal grammatical rules, or that 'they' is a pronoun of indefinate number

And you do seem to agree with me that in specific cases, that justification doesn't hold water - to quote you: "Anyone who really feels strongly enough about it is probably exceptional enough to forgo pronouns and use their proper name all the time". We might disagree about the frequency of such people (and I might respond to that seperately), but at least we do agree that your justification of singular 'they' is problematic with such people.

Which leaves us with your justification for singular 'they' for hypothetical people. And while hair-colour was something of a disingenuous choice, there are plenty of more important bifurcations than gender. Consider a hypothetical accused rapist. There's a bifurcation there between a guilty rapist and an innocent rapist, and in most contexts that's going to be a hugely important distinction. Would you advocate use of 'they' in such cases.

Basically, your reasoning for 'they' assigns a vastly greater importance to gender than it deserves - in hypothetical situations, rather than treating the person as a single person of unknown gender, you suggest we should treat them linguistically as some kind of quantum superposition of two totally seperate states. I don't see how you can justify that.

-Martin

It was just a daft idea, like the one where I think that people pluralising phrases with an apostrophe (as in 1960's) is a vestigial quote mark. I actually have no idea. The only reason my superposition is different from yours is that language already has discrete states for masculine, feminine and neutral and therefore "they" is a superposition of two: although guilt and innocence are linsuistically expressible they are not embedded at the grammar level, as (I would argue) gender is.

They could even be a superposition of male / neuter, female / neuter or male / female / neuter.

Some languages, like Japanese, have grammatical states for degree of respect. Could these be an interesting test of the phenomenon?

vestigal quote mark? You've lost me. I always figured it was a possessive, so the 1960's is the decade 'of' 1960.

Yeah, I'll agree that gender is in some sense embedded at the grammar level, but I'd suggest that it's now embedded with four genders: male, female, common/unknown, and neuter. As in, 'fireman' is male, 'firewoman' is female, 'firefighter' is common, and 'fire engine' is neuter. And the common gender is still treated as singular: we say 'the firefighter plays football', not 'the firefighter play football'. It's just that pronouns evolve slower than nouns, so we're short of a third-person common-gender singular pronoun.

Jumping from foreign languages could be risky - the French use 'vouz' as a polite form of 'tu', but that doesn't mean they view such people as more than one person. Perhaps the real answer is contained in the comment I got elsewhere: grammar should be descriptive, not prescriptive - so the focus is only on 'what', not 'why'.

Ooh, that's a good one. Forgotten about them.

Actually I'm looking for a class / instance description, which is where my idead of "they" came from, but it is just a theory and thoroughly half-baked. I suspect it's actually in default of a better alternative.

The problem with firefighter is that it is a class of person (there's another one!) rather than an individual: fireman and firewoman are subclasses, and each individual firefighter ("Janet") belongs first to the subclass ("firewoman::firewoman Janet") and thereafter automatically to the parent class ("firefighter::firefighter Janet").

Of course Janet is also a woman, which has nothing to do with being a firefighter per se. Clearly the tree-diagram is not, therefore, going to work.

To summarize: people are a problem.

Your point about vous is excellent, and one I had already thought of (on the can, yesterday), and probably provides a better explanation for "they". Most people are vaguely uncomfortable with "they" but it is just beginning to gain acceptance amongst grammarians (I think I said this?) as a correct way to refer to a non-gender-specific gendered individual ("audio connector" vs. "audio plug", "audio socket"). It could be a nascent example of syncretism. Syncretism is a tendency for one word to be used in many ways (I like examples like "like", but in this case a better example is the have in "I have" as opposed to the have in "I have likened this to like in that it is an example of syncretism"). Language has a great deal of syncretism and relies heavily on context to make it clear what a word means (which is why computer language systems are so hard to write) although some languages have no reliance whatever on word-order, and therefore syncretism would be very hard to have (I shall have to pester my friend Matt Stankiewicz for information on this one!) I've never heard a theory of where syncretism comes from, and this could be a perfect opportunity for study.

"a non-gender-specific gendered individual"

????

Oh, A770960 is the version that will enter the Guide, after sub-editing...

Firefighters all have gender. Their gender is not specified. Firefighter is a non-gender-specific term which refers to a gendered individual. A firefighter (any firefighter) would be a non-gender-specific (or non-gender-identified) gendered individual.

It's basically to distinguish between neuter objects and classes, and unidentified non-neuter objects and non-neuter classes.

I'll have a look at the article in a short while ....

I had a further and rather interesting thought. It's based on the UNESCO comment right at the beginning.

Basically, you've heard the story about the guy and his son in a car crash, and the guy is killed and the son is rushed to hospital where the surgeon refuses to operate: "I cannot operate on him, he's my son".

And everyone assumes the surgeon is male in spite of the fact no pronouns point at her until two to five words ago?

Basically, I suspect that even if we had genderless pronouns people would still fall into that trap.

This raises an interesting question. Normally (and I suspect this will remain the case as information tends to increase in density) if speaking of an individual whose gender is known we say "he" or "she" and would only use "sie" or "they" for an unidentified person, or someone who kicked up a fuss. But we, the storyteller, know the surgeon is a she. By using "sie", therefore, as in

"the surgeon refuses to operate on hir son"

we give the game away by making it clear that there IS a game. Alternatively we point up this particular surgeon as a stickler for gender issues, which gives the game away as it gets us thinking about gender issues.

And so on.

Right - it's what I would call common gender then. Gotcha

Of course, as in canis in latin: being third declension there is no gender preference (unlike first declension, which is almost always feminine -- except "agricola", farmer -- and second declension, which is almost always masculine, the other declensions have no marked gender preference, so canis can be either (or neuter), and indeed is (either, not neuter, at least, not at first), very, very rarely).

What would you call a eunuch?

What would you call a 5-pin DIN plug?

That I've heard. A father and his son are driving to Birmingham, and crash into another car. The father dies instantly. The son is rushed to hospital, where the surgeon refuses to operate, saying "I cannot operate on him, he's my son". How can this happen?

> "everyone assumes the surgeon is male in spite of the fact no pronouns point at her until two to five words ago?"

Well, the way you phrased it, the only pronoun pointing at hir is "I". Of course, another explanation of the story is that the dead father was the biological parent, and the surgeon is a foster parent or a step parent.

But isn't the point of the puzzle to get people thinking about gender issues? Maybe in this case 'giving the game away' isn't so bad...

In this case I disagree. The point is, you are quite correct, to get people to think about gender issues, but not in an obvious way. The puzzle doesn't announce itself as a gender issues puzzle, and hence people get a genuine index on their own sexism or otherwise (I got it right, btw, but that might say more about my lateral thinking ability, and the fact that my maternal grandmother was a GP and my aunt was a radiologist, than my sexism or otherwise).

The double-take is effective, therefore, because it gets people to realise that their own prejudices were what clouded the issue -- and take this seriously. Saying "hir" just announces to people that, here we go, we don't know what gender the surgeon is. Big deal. Only of course you erase the assumed information.

Here's what I mean.

Picture a spoon.

The spoon is made of copper.

What was the image of the spoon like before I said that? Spoons can be copper, of course, but I bet you didn't picture one. In fact, I bet you pictured one made of shiny steel, silver or aluminium.

You are prejudiced about spoons? No. You have just created a placeholder in your head for the spoon until you have more data (which in the case of a hypothetical story, you may never have).

For example, my surgeon was white because most of the people I have seen are white so my "prototype" is white -- but I am not racist. One of my earliest heroes was Daley Thompson (he still is a dude) and my first crush was probably Floella Benjamin (aged about four). It's just that people automatically form images to fit things they are thinking about, and have to be taught to remove the placeholder information quickly enough to picture the world properly. Images fill in unknown data. The surgeon had brown or dark hair. No information is available about eye colour.

Actually, the surgeon looks rather like Dr. Kildare. Damn my 1960s television-watching habits.

Talking of gender stereotypes, are you a Martin who wears nail-polish, or a Lucinda who has a friend called Martin?

> "What would you call a eunuch?"

If I knew what gender sie wanted to be, or if it was pretty obvious, I'd refer to hir as that gender, out of politeness. Otherwise, I'd refer to hir as common gender, using sie/hir.

> "What would you call a 5-pin DIN plug?"

To my mind, when we say a plug or socket is female or male, we're talking about polarity, not gender, if that makes any sense. So plugs are always referred to as 'it', regardless. We only say male and female as a convenience - it'd be equally valid to say 'sticky-out' and 'sticky-in'...

Makes sense about the eunuch -- that's probably what I'd do, too.

As for the plugs, did you know that female-to-female RCA or phone plug convertors (for extending instrument and hi-fi leads, which are usually male on both ends) are called gender-benders?

It's all good fun!

Yeah, I've heard of lesbian connectors and suchlike. Raised a smile

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/gender-mender.html

Yeah - and I agree that when you first provide the puzzle, it's best to do it without using gendered pronouns of any type, including 'hir'. I was more thinking about the stage after that, if someone is having difficulty solving the issue - typically they'll ask questions like "was the surgeon lying?". You can still avoid pronouns by saying "no lies" or something - but in an interactive case it can be difficult to quickly think up a pronoun-free response that isn't somehow awkward and gives the game away that way. In that case, using 'they' can draw *less* attention (so can 'sie/hir' in groups where it is routinely used, but there aren't as many of them).

Incidentally, I couldn't figure out the puzzle the first time. Which says something, perhaps.

> "[people] have to be taught to remove the placeholder information quickly enough to picture the world properly."

I think you're bang on the mark there. Though I think the amount of placeholder information people use varies from person to person: some people have more 'solid' imaginations than others.

> "Talking of gender stereotypes, are you a Martin who wears nail-polish, or a Lucinda who has a friend called Martin?"

*wry smile* A person with a number of names, including Martin, Lucinda, and some others. Lucinda wears nail-polish, I discuss linguistics.

-Martin (when he doesn't forget to sign his name off)

I have a thing going a bit like that, except all of me are male and we're the greatest live rock band ever. : )

Actually I'm only capable of playing bass right now but there it is.

Not done the nail varnish thing ... oh, no, wait, I did, about four years ago when this girl who was convinced I was bi put some on my right hand. I left it there all day and then scraped it off with a penknife because it was annoying me.

My brother is thinking of doing the Ziggy Stardust thing while I do the Pete Townshend thing, and we form a band (really, this time) ....

I have a fairly solid imagination but work aroud it by imagining several outcomes: hence "they"! Also it's a good way to use up spare time and gives you some great ideas for fiction.

"Man is the naming animal"

Man?

In an article about gender-free pronouns?