I’m learning Russian and I don’t know what it is for that, but in German I’ve seen “xier”, “sier”, and “dey”. I might use “dey/dem”.
“Ő”. Everyone is “ő” in Hungarian, we don’t have gendered pronouns.
In French we have “iel”. It’s a mix of the male and female pronoms “il” and “elle”.
Don’t forget that other contraption : for “those” we have “celles” + “ceux” = “celleux” (and probably celle + celui into cuielle or something)
Then let’s have fun with everybody : “toutes” and “tous” is an easy one - toustes !
Checking wikipedia on the matter, TIL that until the XII century French had neutrals “al” or “el”, and these are proposed for a comeback
I am sincerely 100% for the transformation of language towards eradication of the default masculine and the new pronouns, but changing habits is hard.
Instead of having different words for plural of pronouns, in Chinese we append a character after single pronouns to make them plural.
- 我 (me) -> 我們 (us)
- 你 (you) -> 你們 (you all)
- 他 (him) -> 他們 (them (male))
- 她 (her) -> 她們 (them (female))
You get the idea. We also have pronouns for animals (牠), inanimate objects (它) and God (祂), and you can similarly add 們 to make them plural (except for god, I haven’t seen the character being used in plural). Using they/them as pronoun for a person doesn’t make sense in Chinese.
Chinese used to have no gender pronouns. Everyone is referred to as 他 (Mandarin) or 佢 (Cantonese). It’s in last century when 她 (“she”) is “invented”, and no new gender pronouns in Cantonese. However, in terms of speaking, they are all pronounced the same way (ta1 in Mandarin, keoi5 in Cantonese), so it’s literally impossible to use the wrong pronoun if you’re speaking or typing in Cantonese.
Disclaimer: I’m learning Japanese & I don’t know Chinese.
It looks like the original character for the 3rf person pronoun is now the masculine pronoun & the female pronoun is made by substituting the person component (人, I don’t know how to type the left-component form) with the woman component (女).
That’s exactly how to understand them
Does Chinese only have the one 1st person pronoun?
As far as I know, yes in modern Chinese. However if you include ancient Chinese there’s also 吾
他 isn’t the pronoun for masculine third person. It’s third person, period. Neutral gender if one has to ask.
Traditionally the character used to mean “that” is 彼. Apparently it’s also gender-neutral.
Swahili has 10 different “genders,” called “noun classes” or “ngeli,” and none of them correlate with sex. Instead, the third-person singular pronouns are:
- he/she and him/her: yeye
- his/her: wake
https://pronouns.page/ has some good information for pretty much every language.
I’m not Chinese, but in Mandarin, he and she are both pronounced “ta” (first tone, flat intonation), even though they’re written differently.
There is the non-gendered 它 which is also pronounced “tā”.
Honestly, it is not working in Spanish. I know some contexts where this is used, but as a gendered language it is quite complicated. While “Elle” is used for “them” in limited contexts like very inclusive universities, it’s not quite expected except maybe in the lgbtq+ community.
Most nouns end with an “a” for the female gender, so the proposed solution is to exchange the “a” for an “e”, but there’s a good amount of not gendered nouns and there exist already lots of exceptions to general rules. “Student” and “person” are two good examples of very important words with problems. “Student” is “estudiante” is Spanish, which ends commonly with an “e”, so it’s not gendered, you can call someone “el estudiante” (male) or “la estudiante” (female), the proposed “le estudiante” (singular) and “les estudiantes” (plural) sound good enough to me. Now, “person” is “persona” in Spanish, and it sounds gendered because it ends with an “a”, nevertheless, it’s actually neutral for any gender, but it’s usually accompanied by the article “la” which is used for female nouns, so, it’s “la persona” regardless of the genre of the person in question. This is also pushed in authorities, which used to be titled as nouns like “presidente” which is “president” and arguably gender neutral, except it is used for males and important women, like the president of Mexico, demand to be called “presidenta”. Most authorities, though, are going for the “persona presidenta” form, regardless of gender, to refer to the people in charge.
So, yeah, it’s been rather unpractical in Spanish.
In Finnish we don’t have gendered pronouns, everyone is a they. But in spoken Finnish, we usually just refer to everyone as “it”, and I think that’s beautiful.
Portuguese[1] doesn’t have that. People will use a variety of alternatives, like elu/eli/el@/elx, which frankly sound super dumb. It doesn’t help that almost everything in the language is gendered.
Ele = he; Ela = she; Add an ‘s’ to the end and both become plural while keeping it gendered. Under normal circumstances, “eles” is used for ambiguous gender plural ↩︎
deleted by creator
In German there is nothing established. The most common one I have heard which is still unknown by most is “en/en” (not sure if written correctly).
In Italian it’s not really used. There’s an extremely fringe group of people who use singular pronouns “Io” (I) but plural adjectives and participles. “Io sono andati” instead of “Io sono andato” or “Io sono stanchi” instead of “Io sono stanco”.
These are regarded as people who spend too much time on Tumblr and consume American media even within the most militant corners of the transfeminist movement, so it doesn’t have much traction.
Most of the discourse is about gender-neutral language rather than pronouns.
To add to the confusion, Italian has no neutral gender, only male and female, but it retains neutral pronouns: esso/essi. The problem is that by ending in “o”, most people think this is an alternative masculine pronoun and use it interchangeably with the masculine pronouns “egli” or “lui”.
Tagalog: siya. 3rd person singular.
Nandito siya. He is here. She is here. They are here.
Official norwegian: hen/hens
Countless unofficial ones
Basque language has no gendered pronouns.
