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Comment by jagrsw | Hacker News Reader

English is increasingly using the singular 'they' as a workaround, since alternative options like 've,' 'ze,' 'zhe,' and 'xer' didn't gain traction. This comes with its own set of issues—initially, it was a bit disorienting for me, and even now it often requires a mental pause to parse what the speaker is referring to.

I'd welcome a more authoritarian approach here: globally adopt a new pronoun, go through a transitional period, and then we're all on the same page. Some sci-fi novels have toyed with this concept.

IMO gendered pronouns don't add much value in many languages (with exceptions - poetry etc.). In Slavic languages, it's relatively straightforward to deduce gender from the pronoun, but in Germanic and Romance languages, it's more obfuscated.

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> initially, [they as a singular pronoun] was a bit disorienting for me, and even now it often requires a mental pause to parse what the speaker is referring to.

If it makes you feel better, the use of “you” as both singular and plural pronouns did not become universal until the 60s (thanks to TV amd some school rules); thee and thou remained common in northern regions of England, particularly around Yorkshire, into the 1940s. Yet you use it today without thinking about it.

And I notice the singular “they” in Jane Austin; likely it well precedes her usage as well.

> And I notice the singular “they” in Jane Austin; likely it well precedes her usage as well.

It's in Shakespeare.

(If you go back to Chaucer, "girl" is gender neutral for a child.)

That’s a residual germanic influence (Mädchen is still neuter today, while Junge is masculine)

English is definitely leading in terms of genderlessness, but that advantage is more than offset by its complete detachment between spelling and pronunciation.

It would be nice to have a language with sensible spelling/pronunciation but no gender.

Welsh is about 95% phonetic in spelling. Maybe English with Welsh spelling?

> its complete detachment between spelling and pronunciation.

Whose dialect are you going to choose to render phonetically? Mine from the West Country, or that of my friends from Newcastle?

Will you standardise on short a in castle (Newcastle upon Tyne, North East England) or long a in castle (Restormel Castle, Cornwall)?

Or should each person just write phonetically so that we have millions of idiolects?

Or you do it the French IIIème République way: you crush all linguistic diversity[0] from your country and standardize it all around the way it's spoken in London.

Also, in English there's so much detachment from spelling to pronunciation than even choosing to write it down like a random[1] dialect would be an improvement: the problem with English isn't so much about “long a” vs “short a”, it's about “through tough thorough thought, though”.

[0]: sure there's still some pronunciation differences between parts of France, but not much. And it has very little consequence on the spelling/pronunciation relationship.

[1]: in practice, it could be the most commonly spoken dialect, or the dialect that has the most pronunciation in common with others).

in practice, it's usually the snob/spoken dialect of the capital city.

See parisians thinking they're better than anyone else, non-french and other-french included.

Im guessing london didn't implement this method because it's useful for them to keep differentiating themselves from the masses now that everyone can have education

And then since pronunciation shifts, you’ll periodically want to have international treaties adjusting spelling, hyphenation, capitalization and other rules, as the German-speakers have done.

Or freeze it once and for all as the French have chosen to do?

I think the pronunciation shifts might be the real issue with English. All languages shift, but I've got the feeling that English shifts a lot more, faster and more dramatically than most languages. And I'm not sure why.

Dutch seems to be quite the opposite: spelling changes a lot. The best way to read old Dutch texts is to sound them out in your head, because the words look totally different, but they sound the same. Hearing medieval Dutch is probably easier than medieval English, but medieval English is much easier to read.

> All languages shift, but I've got the feeling that English shifts a lot more, faster and more dramatically than most languages. And I'm not sure why.

Probably because they go off to colonize very far away places and then develop separately.

Isn't Afrikaans pronunciation shifted Dutch?

I've got the feeling that Afrikaans is more like old fashioned Dutch. It sounds a bit archaic and sloppy to me ears.

I've got the feeling that most of the shifts in English don't come from the colonies, though, but more from mainland Britain. Various city accents rising in popularity and spreading their quirks around the country, like the recent i -> oi shift.

Also, I heard recently that American is actually closer to how English used to be in the 17th-18th century than UK English, which has had more development, including color -> colour and that sort of stuff.

> It would be nice to have a language with sensible spelling/pronunciation

I get the impression that this is impossible in the long term because pronunciation tends to drift, but spelling is more rigid, so over time they mismatch.

Yet there are languages that are much more phonetic than English. In fact, most probably are. But I've been told that Polish is perfectly phonetic without any weird pronunciation surprises. (I don't know Polish, though.)

And spelling is only more rigid in English. Plenty of languages update their spelling over time. Only in English this is useless because there is already barely any connection between spelling and pronunciation, so the break would be far bigger than in other languages.

> But I've been told that Polish is perfectly phonetic without any weird pronunciation surprises.

I don't know about Polish, but I have had conversations where native speakers think that until exceptions are pointed out, because they are unaware.

There's also the issue of accents, where we expect spelling to be universal across the language, but pronunciation in some accents have drifted (ie. it's not a straightforward mapping).

Polish orthography – however bizarre it may look to foreigners at first glance – does map pretty closely to the spoken language, but it still isn’t perfectly phonetic. For example, the reflexive pronoun się is written with a nasal vowel, but whether the vowel is pronounced as a nasal vowel or as a non-nasal vowel differs across regions.

There's quite a few languages with very good bidirectional mapping between written and spoken forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Compariso...

The fact that English preserves the root bindings in so many cases often makes it easier to figure out what a new word means when you encounter it in text. Just writing the sound would abandon this valuable tool.

Anyway, writing the sound just helps the beginning reader. When you read flowing text you don’t actually read the words aloud in your head, letter by letter.

I actually love “they” because it waves off every ambiguity at once: not only you don't have to care about the gender of the person, you don't even have to bother whether it is an individual or a collective (this super convenient when discussing about open-source projects).

they built this and that and did it all by themselves doesn't sound to bad ymmv

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