Thoughts and Reflections on Philosophy and Literature (And Fancy Jazz Like That)
12 March 2012
"They" Are Lucky
My previous post was about the use of "they" as a singular pronoun. Speakers of the English language are lucky enough to have the ability to use "they" as a singular pronoun. As a brief note, there are some who replace sexism against women with sexism against men. I don't find that particular approach to be anything admirable because it creates the exact same problem for the opposite gender. It is for this reason that I express that English speakers are considerably lucky in this respect. If you were to study other languages, specifically the romance languages, you would find that it is impossible within that language to use "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun. In Spanish, for instance, "they" comes in either a masculine or feminine form. Ellos, the masculine form is used to refer groups which contain at least one man (if a group has women and 1 man, you use ellos). Ellas, the feminine form can only be used to refer to groups of only females. There is no gender neutral pronoun in Spanish. Addtionally, some languages incorporate gender into nouns. Water, for example, in Spanish is 'el agua;' el is the masculine article. The people who speak these languages will have an incredibly difficult time in becoming less gender specific.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)