It's almost like you're talking about how a lawnmower decided to run a child over and then incriminate itself by boasting about it on social media. It makes no sense!
I know she picked that pronoun herself, but I really wish she didn't. It just makes communication difficult.
(I'm going to presume here that crimew doesn't actually want to be considered an object, because we don't generally respect objects' pronoun choices. So calling them an "it" in the grammatical way would be paradoxically self-defeating; we call objects he/she all the time and they usually don't complain.)
This is also why I will always defend the use of "they" as valid. There has to be at least one universal pronoun.
A lot of people who like to cry 'transphobic!' may wish to understand that there are people who need accommodation in our society other than trans people, and that heralding chosen pronouns as truly inviolable will sometimes make other people less comfortable.
That said, I have so far managed to avoid any such accusations in this thread, thankfully.
As for competing needs and such, in this case it’s as easy as using she/her (as maia lists that as one of its pronouns), in other cases it’s usually acceptable to use they/them or no pronouns at all. The only thing that is generally absolutely unacceptable is (knowingly) using the wrong gendered pronouns or using gendered pronouns when the person only uses non-gendered pronouns.
I'm not sure how the under 20 is adjusting but in my groups of mid 20 to late 30 nobody is trying to disrespect anyone by not using preferred pronouns, but it just slips out from decades of usage, and people just end up replacing pronouns with the person's actual name after multiple times apologizing. The having to remember multiple names when meeting someone just doesn't seem tenable long term.
Oh god i hope. As a german, we have pronouns for all nouns. So far no societal backlash against those, but they just seem totally useless to me (beside maybe a teeny tiny bit of "forward error correction"). You just have to learn them. Surest way to spot an immigrant. Then there is job titles. In the US, "nurse" seems to be used for both genders, but the words origin is female. Yeah, we have that as well for many jobs. Others usually have suffixes. Ofc we want to be welcoming to all. You can imagine the job listings...
is a great non-gender pro-noun
I'm not a language historian, so I don't have an opinion on your last question.
(Not trying to make any point here, just thought it might be useful for context.)
Sadly. Overloading "you" and "they" feels rather clunky. I wish it got rid of "he" and "she" instead - gendering pronouns is completely useless, and that's coming from someone whose native tongue genders much more than just pronouns...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You says the singular "you" didn't occur until Modern English, and the singular form 'ye' died out in the 1600s with early Modern English.
The King James Bible, published 1611, uses "ye" as the singular form of the formal "you", as in "Ye shall know them by their fruits."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version further notes:
] In a period of rapid linguistic change the translators avoided contemporary idioms, tending instead towards forms that were already slightly archaic, like verily and it came to pass.[87] The pronouns thou/thee and ye/you are consistently used as singular and plural respectively, even though by this time you was often found as the singular in general English usage, especially when addressing a social superior (as is evidenced, for example, in Shakespeare). ...
] Another sign of linguistic conservatism is the invariable use of -eth for the third person singular present form of the verb, as at Matthew 2:13: "the Angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dreame".
One issue is that song's use of "ye" seems to be from the 1750s, so about 150 years after the KJV usage, which in turn was somewhat archaic. English changes.
Another is how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_(pronoun) says:
> In Early Modern English, ye functioned as both an informal plural and formal singular second-person nominative pronoun. "Ye" is still commonly used as an informal plural in Hiberno‐English and Newfoundland English
So it's possible that the KJV uses "ye" only for formal singular second-person, even if was also used more widely used for informal plural, and as that informal plural became more widely used, it became the go-to way to translate the Latin, which is in plural.
And then I read https://www.etymonline.com/word/you?ref=etymonline_crossrefe... and my eyes roll up in confusion.
Most likely I misunderstood the text I copied from the KJV entry, and "ye" and "you" are both plural forms?
I give up.
After Foo and Bar went to the store, they went to the bank.
If we don’t need a singular-only you, why would we need a singular-only they?
But that really didn’t have much to do with what I was discussing. That was a separate argument about how we use “it” to refer to objects as a rule. Humans are objects, but we also generally prefer to think of them as objects of a higher order variety. In conversation, we take advantage of this to parse and interpret context more quickly. Choosing to do otherwise makes it more difficult to know if the “it” I just used in this sentence is Maia, some other object, or an abstract point I’m making in this discussion. Anyway, that’s why I prefer she/her.
Hi, fellow autist here.
Yes, it feels like my brain hits some speedbumps with that particular pronoun. I wouldn't say I get "freaked out" though; it's just unfamiliar yet.
Despite what other comments claim, I doubt this is agrammatical. "It" is part of the same grammatical class (the class of pronouns!!) and so fits anywhere "he" or "she" does.
> "It" refers to inanimate objects, things which can't have free will
Could you bring yourself to see the choice of "it/its" pronouns exactly as a self-identification with things that feel no agency of their own? I don't know why Maia claims those pronouns, but I'd get this motivation for sure.
It may do so in English, but it is Swiss, so probably also speaks German, where 'it' - 'es' is Genus Neutrum, exactly meaning neutral gender. For example 'the child' - 'das Kind' is neutrally gendered. Hope this makes sense.
So, at most it could be said that "it" doesn't normally refer to persons... but even that's not true if you include sci-fi in your definition of "English language". When dealing with topics such as non-standard biological sex and/or gender fluidity, older sci-fi works would often use "it" for such people without any implication of non-personhood.