Did you know that Chinese didn’t have a word for “She” until about 100 years ago? In fact, Chinese operated without a female 3rd person pronoun for thousands of years, and it wasn’t a problem – until interaction with the west. Watch this video to learn the fascinating (albeit winding) history of Chinese gendered pronouns.
I remember watching a documentary about trans people living in China. The subtitles were making it look like ordinary Chinese folk were misgendering someone by translating ‘tā’ as ‘he’.
The fact that they did not care that this would be an obvious bad faith translation to anyone who spoke Chinese while being uncritically absorbed by Westerners pissed me off so much.
Exactly. It’s not the person speaking who is making the assumption about the subject’s gender, it’s the person writing the subtitles. The fact that they decided to go with the male pronoun for the trans person says more about them, the translator, than it does about the Chinese person who was speaking.
Even then, in spoken language he/she sound exactly the same. The distinction only exists in written form.
Everyone and everything can be Ta and I won’t apologise for that
The funniest part: just as interaction with the West in the 19th and early 20th centuries led the Chinese to introduce gendered pronouns, now exposure to the cultural trends of the West may once again be leading to the introduction of another pronoun: this time an explicitly gender-neutral one. One cannot help but feel that this whole complication could have been avoided by just sticking with a single non-gendered pronoun, as many other languages still do.
Wow, I guess the woke gender pronouns took over their country then
(Unironically I think no gendered pronouns is better than a bunch of gendered pronouns)
It’s obvious that gendered pronouns are not a necessary linguistic feature when you look at how many languages don’t have them, either in writing or in spoken speech. Humans can understand each other perfectly fine without specifying gender. Including that distinction is a choice.
Chinese people did not choose to not include that distinction, and people speaking languages with that distinction did not choose to include it either.
Grammatical gender is a structure that appears and disappears through spontaneous processes that happen over the span of several generations. We can support inclusive language and gender equality without making unscientific claims.
I say this as someone who appreciates the content you regularly post. Let’s keep to the facts, comrade.
I agree with you that it’s a gradual process, but i think to say that it just appears spontaneously mystifies this process too much. Languages are spoken and shaped by people. They don’t exist in a magical void. Ergo, if a feature becomes adopted, it does so through social interaction and because of a series of choices by individuals. Once a new linguistic convention gains a critical mass of support, it catches on as the new norm. Nevertheless, every norm originates somewhere. That’s all i was trying to say. Not that everyone who adheres to these norms is making a conscious choice.
You are misunderstanding. We can talk about adopting linguistic conventions in terms of orthography and vocabulary for example, but let’s look at a practical example of completely unintentional change in grammar and phonology.
In Latin, there were 3 genders: masculine, feminine and neutral, marked at the ending of words. In the descendants of Latin, the same spontaneous changes that create different accents of the same language happened to make the neutral ending sound identical to the masculine one, and so they were merged.
There is no series of choices, no magical void.
We’re discussing gendered pronouns, not grammatical gender. Mandarin didn’t have gendered pronouns until the 20th century.
And adding gendered pronouns was a more or less conscious choice.
I’ve got a number of indigenous friends, and Shawnee doesn’t have gendered pronouns either! Didn’t even add them, too.
That’s interesting. I know very little about indigenous North American languages. Near where i grew up the main languages without gendered pronouns are Turkish and Hungarian.
Apparently it is more common for languages to not have gendered pronouns than you would think if you only looked at European languages.
This analysis seems to suggest that only 30% of languages worldwide have them?
Back to gender neutrality
2020: HOMOPHOBIC China KILLS femboys live on TV. SAD! 2025: WOKE China FORCEFEMS their PROUD and MASCULINE MEN. SAD!
The gender neutral pronoun is literally just TA now
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
