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

I speak Standard British English. I grew up in Essex and can therefore do flawless estuary. My cockney is quite good and I've often been mistaken for Australian. Lowland Scots is possible, but Welsh comes out as Pakistani. I can manage a couple of American accents over the phone (but not face to face) and used to be able to come out with South African English and South Yorkshire.

The reason we don't speak Chinese is that they didn't get to the west. The Brits had an empire and now the Americans do.
Cantonese has no use outside Guanzhou and Hong Kong. Not much literature either. Mandarin (Putonghua) is useful throughout China and in some of the other Chinese communities of Asia. Esperanto has missed the boat

I'm not above the clouds - I couldn't read h2g2 if I was! I'm just trying to stay out of arguments

So it's still rainy on my comfortable seat, but I've got tea and biscuits if anyone wants to join me?

I may be born in Britain (England) but my grandparents only just made it to Britain before having children. With an ancestry covering most of Europe, how could I feel comfortable subscribing to "English Above Everything"?

Fenny (more colourful than "x x Fenny")

About American English being a bastardisation:

Which American English? Most Virginia tidewater, and much general Southern dialect is actually much closer to the language spoken in England in the 1600-1700s than Standard British English. Blame Oxford, the traitors .

Where I am, in southern Texas, there are two opposing movements: one to allow records to be kept in English and Spanish and an English-only movement, the reason being that a number of border-area residents are more fluent in Spanish than in English.

I'll have some tea and biscuits.

--Cooper (Longing for Tuscany)

Sheesh, I thought you made up the word herstory to show how ridiculous it is.

The Scandinavians might speak good English but we have terrible accents. Luckily I have managed to adopt a British accent, can fool people into thinking I´m a native.

What a fascinatin' thread to stumble upon! Allow me to barge in after all the good stuff has been hashed out and offer up some tired and no longer-relevant secondhand thinkings like I had any business doing so.

I was born and raised in the American South, starting back almost 50 years ago. Regional idioms and vernacular were far more stratified back then at the 'Dawn of the TV Age'. I never developed what is often referred to as a 'Southern' accent, and I have always blamed the resulting "You ain't from aroun' hea, is you, Yankee?" epithets that I grew up with on an over-exposure to the 'Standard American English' on this dawning television. Subsequent life in all other regions of the US has done nothing but complicate things, and today I'd wager that Henry HIggins would be flummoxed by my speech patterns.

All this is to merely suggest that American television and movie exports may have had more of an impact on an international English than the sheer size of the US or the belligerence of its capitalism.



As to the value of studying grammar: It is by knowing the 'rules' that we can break them most effectively, thereby highlighting their shortcomings and ridiculousnesses. This allows us to re-use (and, of course, mis-use) words in fresh new ways that give greater emphasis to what we are attempting to say. Say, like changing an adjective such as 'ridiculous' into a plural noun. Bollixing up word usage without really knowing what you're doing is frightfully effective at earning you little serious attention. The English language is far too malleable to suffer from people who take it apart and put it back together in different configurations, but rarely survives those who force it with a hammer into something it wasn't designed to do. This proves that the English language is really a cuckoo clock.



Which sorta drops the house on the Wicked Witch of the original thread: "Gender-specific Pronouns in the English Language." Resistance to and attempts to change these pronouns as they are now used is usually indicative of several schools of thought. There are those who feel that 'men' (people usually defined as possessing penii) have run roughshod over everything in their path for far too long and, by gosh, it's time for others to have the chance to run roughshod. A possible method of rectifying this imbalance could be by replacing gender-specific pronouns: it would become impossible to give or imply preference to 'male' over 'female' or vice versa. (Use of the term 'herstory' and others similar are, I believe, more of an effort to illuminate this imbalance than create new words that perpetuate the sexism. A form of irony, perhaps?)

Then there are those who feel that dividing things and people into 'male' and 'female' is far, far too limiting, and that it shortchanges the individual to be lumped into one or the other by a language too lazy to do otherwise. Gender determination should be up to only the person involved - not to the possibly inaccurate assessment of an observer. (For what it's worth, I go to this school.)



Just some observations - no recriminations. Thanks.

-7rob7, International Busybody of Mystery

Hi 7Rob7 - from what I understand, you're saying that if I hosted the meeting, I could be the Chairman, the Chairwoman, the Chairperson, or the Chair? I like this power!

Fenny

I'm curious as to why the gender issue is such a big deal in English. This is a language which has almost no gender at all, and yet in heavily gender-based languages such as French, German or Italian, this is virtually a non-issue. The Bantu languages have 22 genders between them (Kiswahili has 20 all on its own) but I can't ever recall them making a fuss about it. Conversely, it's not as if completely gender-free languages do a great deal for equality: Farsi-speaking Iran isn't exactly a feminist paradise.

There are certainly areas where gender-neutral pronouns would help - when discussing with pregnant friends their babies of as yet unknown sex I hate using the term 'it', and using 'they' seems a little impersonal when the person in question is in the room, so I end up ditching pronouns and using 'the baby' all the time instead.

What's wrong with using the epicene they, anyway? It's only because a bunch of anal grammarians decided that it was non-U in the late 19th century that there's any stigma attached to it. Prior to that it had impeccable literary credentials, and has the considerable advantage over all other proposed alternatives that people actually use it.

Fenny,

You could be the Setteeperson if you want, or the Bolsterperson. We can only know what you prefer if you tell us.

(Aren't new ways of thinking exhilarating? This, of course, is simply another way of saying that they take your breath away so's you can't breathe...)

Thanks.

-7r7

Two items:

The plural of "penis" is "penes" in Latin, or "penises" in English.

My thought is that since English has so little gender, we're not used to it and place too much importance on it. It's a nonissue in gender-heavy tongues for the same reason number is a nonissue in English: no-one cares.

--Cooper

*mind boggling at the thought of a man with two penises*...

I have a friend who calls himself Persian, his first language is Farsi, his second language Swedish, and his 3rd language English. He sounds to my british ears as if he was born in the USA - he claims to have had no formal English lessons, but to have picked it up entirely from Television.

***B

>Say, like changing an adjective such as 'ridiculous' into a plural noun.
Right, but then you have to change the pronounciation, because the singular would be a ridiculou. One ridiculou, two ridiculous? (Or is that just TOO ridiculous?)
What is a ridiculou, anyway?

It could be an irregularly pluralised noun like moose.

--Cooper

(sigh...)

I deliberately mangled (persongled?) the plural of penis for rhythm. I had hoped that my fancy-shmancy wordplay elsewhere in the posting would have implied that I knew how to spell the really big words.

Believe me, the idea of incorporating gender-neutral options into everyday English is nowhere near high on anyone's agenda. It just would be nice, for a change, to have an easy way of showing respect for a person's personal wishes.

Maybe we do need 22 gender forms - people certainly come in at least that many flavors.

(sigh...) (oops, I said that already...)

To be precise, Cantonese has no literature. It's a dialect - purely spoken. However, it's not true to say that it has no use outside Hong Kong or Guanzhou. Although Mandarin is now *the* official language of China itself, dialects continue to be spoken by Chinese people both in China and overseas (like me!). I remember an incident when my mother was working for the Birmingham City Council Social Services department and they asked her how to write leaflets in Cantonese... that was funny...

Emily, Hokkien speaker

Sorry Emily. I didn't mean to be insulting .
It's just that I'm surrounded be Cantonese speakers who don't want to do anything in English, let alone improve their standard. The jobs they want ask for Putonghua, English and a third language in that order. They seem unaware that just over the border there are millions of Putonghua speakers/writers who have better English than they do. It worries me that the brain jobs may (will) go the way of the industrial jobs -over that border where the workforce is cheaper.
I know nothing lasts forever in the language fields: I was teaching in Shanghai a short while after all the Russian teachers were told "from next Monday you will be teaching English" and something similar happened at the end of my first year in Poland. (Perhaps all non-native English speakers should beware of the Wand'rin ?)
Incidentally, I hope all readers of this thread are also reading/posting to "British English, the sequel" You're just in time for a landmark posting

Hey, I wasn't insulted at all, Wand'rin star. You'll probably know yourself how much different Chinese groups insult one another... it's very amusing...

Oddly enough, I missed this thread until. A few thoughts after reading through a lot of posts.

I have been in circles where non-gender-specific pronouns are used in regular speech. And I tell you, it sounds very odd for the first hour or so that you hear it. Then you slowly acclimate.

Anyway, 'zir' and 'hir' rhyme with beer. You may hear them pronounced with a slight rolling r at the end. If you've seen Babylon 5 the TV show, you can think of how Molari pronounces the name of his assistant Vir. The others, sie or zie, rhyme with knee. Usually the 's' version is still pronounced with a 'z' sound at the beginning. Those aren't used as often.

Now I'm a bisexual woman, a mild feminist, and a sex-positive gal. And I believe that the English language is evolving and should evolve. But I don't use those pronouns (no offense to those who do). Partly, this is because they freak normals out. Partly, it's because I don't think we're ready for this language evolution yet.

Perhaps someday... Perhaps when it is possible for a person to change their gender more than once in their life, or even at will, 'her' and 'him' will become meaningless distinctions. To some, they are already dubious. After all, shouldn't a person be primarily defined as human, and only secondarily by their gender? That's my opinion.

I doubt I will be around to see genderized pronouns bite the dust. In the meanwhile, I use 'they' sometimes. I sometimes use gendered pronouns, often using the less expected gender. I don't think there's any one right way to handle this dilemma for now. The evolving language seeks a solution in response to changes from the past 50 years or so. It has not yet found that solution, or we wouldn't be having this discussion. Your mileage may vary.

Sorry. I meant to say, 'I missed this thread until now.'

And I thought of something else! I have only used the word 'herstory' used in a cheeky manner. It's supposed to be a joke, kind of like me pointing to my differently coloured socks and calling myself 'bisocksual.' Anyone taking it too seriously doesn't get it.

To clarify some points of German language:

Wife is "Ehefrau", which is feminin, "Weib" is more like old wife, and is neutrum, but you would not say it, but her. Understandable? No. Ok !

So there are two rules: the gender of nouns are picked at random, but the bioligical gender is always respected.


Hi Fragilis the Beautiful!

Hello, Wonko! We do keep running into each other, don't we?