Gender neutrality and language

[Ronald Kephart]

On 3/3/08 9:12 PM, "Ann Evans" <annevans123 at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's interesting that this post has degenerated into a religious discussion
> ....
> 
And I apologize for that, since it was my fault. I am especially sensitive
to this issue this semester because I am teaching a cultural anthropology
course that seems to have an unusually high number of creationists,
intelligent designists, and theistic evolutionists. So when a poster here
seemed to suggest that the male first, female second order of things was put
there by a god, my anti-nonsense reflex went into overdrive. Sorry.

At the same, though, I agree with Lynn that this wasn¹t necessarily a
³degeneration.² Folk models of language play an important, sometimes
Determinative, role in language policies, and beliefs and values regarding
the supernatural are often a part of those folk models.

> ...when something extremely pertinent is at hand.  How are we to express the
> gender-neutral pronoun?  I tell my classes that it will be up to them to
> figure this one out, but I would like to be a of a little more help to them
> than that.  Is it true that "they" was once legitimately the gender-neutral
> third-person singular pronoun?  How else, other than rewriting sentences, can
> this issue be resolved.  One posting recently mentioned "yo" as a
> gender-neutral pronoun, but I don't see that catching on.  Any other
> inventions lately?
> 
Yes, ³they² has been, historically, used as a generic pronoun, and by some
pretty good writers, too. For example:

There's not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their
well-acquainted friend
‹ Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene 3
(1594)

"To be sure, you knew no actual good of me -- but nobody thinks of that when
they fall in love."
__Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

A person cannot help their birth.
‹ Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)

And so on. So, I don¹t think we need to invent anything, and in any case
inventing a pronoun (closed lexical class) is a lot harder than inventing
nouns and verbs, which are open classes. (Note though that we already
invented ³y¹all² and ³youze,² and ³you-uns² to express second person plural,
which ³standard² English lacks, and some African American communities
borrowed the Igbo second plural; ³unu² to fill this gap.)

The simplest and most elegant way to fix this, in my view, is to make
generic sentences plural, so that ³they² doesn¹t upset the Grammar Police.

Ron


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