There is no point in an old scrote like me railing now against the illogicality of these perceptions. The reason I am raising the issue again is to make an observation and to ask a question.
Observation
I have noticed that the pluralising of the pronoun has become widespread as a means of avoiding circumlocutions. Thus, for example, a clumsy sentence like Everyone must put his/her books in his/her locker, or take his/her things with him/her when he/she leaves is much more likely to be rendered these days as Everyone must put their books in their lockers, or take their things with them when they leave. And instead of A teacher should listen to what his/her students are saying, the plural form can be used: Teachers should listen to what their students are saying.
Question
Does this issue arise in other languages? How, for example, do Germans nowadays render the proverb Man ist was er isst (One is what one eats)? The word man is an indefinite pronoun like the French on (The word for a male is ein Mann in German), but the word er is the masculine pronoun he, in contrast to sie (she). I assume the same kind of construction occurs in other Germanic languages like Dutch and Danish. Fortunately for them, the Romance languages don’t have the problem, eg, On doit faire son bouleau, where on is gender neutral, and the possessive is masculine gender (son as against sa) to agree with the masculine noun le bouleau.
Postscript: you will have noticed that I translated the German man using the English definite pronoun one. The reasons why the pronoun one was not adopted to solve the pronoun issue are obscure, but there is a perception that it is affected, and that only posh people like Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the Archbishop of Canterbury use it. One wonders if one would be on one’s own in starting a campaign for its wider adoption. One suspects that one would only end up making a right fool of oneself, wouldn’t one?
3 comments:
Interesting about -oğlu, which means "son of". I assume -kızı means "daughter of".
In some languages, the gender in names is marked, as in Mr Semeonov and Mrs Semeonova and Mr Hubizki and Mrs Hubizka (Slavic languages). In Icelandic -son and -dottir are used for son-of and daughter-of respectively. So you would be Ekşidottir.
In Richard Russo's Straight Man, which is one of the best recent novels of academic life, there is a character whose nickname is something like "Hisorher" because of his pedantic insistence on pronoun gender equality.
I teach future teachers in one of my classes, and I tell them that it's better to say "Everyone must pick up their books" than to sound prissy by saying "his or her books." Much of the time it is possible to cast a sentence in the third-person plural and be both grammatical and nonsexist.
And if not, "their" has become the de facto neuter singular pronoun.
I like your word "prissy" to describe the selfconscious his-ing and her-ing that some people insist on using. What dietresses me is the way foreign leaners are pressured into imitating these awful circumlocutions. Thank goodness "they-them-their" is now increasingly accepted as a generic singular. Of course, some diehards get angry that we are avoiding the issue that way. As for me, I think it's great to solve a problem by avoiding it!
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