New Pronoun Observed In The Wild!

[catsittingstill]

Since I was a kid, I have felt the lack of a third person singular gender neutral pronoun in English.  (Like he or she, but without specifiying if the person you mean is male or female.)

I started out using "they" as if it were number neutral, but I could never get the verbs to match naturally.  ("When a new student comes to college, they often finds new friends."?  "When a new student comes to college, they often find new friends."?)

Then I read a science fiction book that used "per" so I tried that.  Never felt right.

Then someone (I think it may have been my mom, actually) pointed out that German already has such a pronoun--"zie."  Well, English being a language that thinks nothing of pickpocketing other languages for spare vocabulary, I felt free to try that.  That actually works okay for me.  I just can't seem to persuade anyone else to use it.

But now a new third person singular gender neutral pronoun has been spotted in the wild, in general use among school kids in Baltimore.  Read about it here.

"Yo."  I don't know if I can get used to it.  I guess I can if other people can.  We'll see if it spreads.

Comments

[min0taur.livejournal.com]

"Yo" kinda reminds me of the archaic "ye" (except that's in second person) or the New Jersey (?) "yez" (also second-person but at least gender-neutral). Some folks tried "herm" as a conflation of "her or him" in the '70s, but to my ear that sounds like throat-clearing or somebody reading aloud from "The Watchmen."

It usually takes an inevitably awkward while for a language to adapt so it models an emergent reality (the only kind we seem to inhabit these days). At least we don't have the Latinate habit of assigning gender to all nouns.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

I believe that eventually "they" and "them" will become the default. (The second sentence would be what people generally accept, incidentally; the verb pluralizes even if the subject is being used as a singular.)

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Er, and I'm using this from experience with my students - this is what they tend to do to get around gender.

[mneme]

Huh. Language evolves strangely; strangeness evolves linguistically, I guess.

Re "they" -- this is what I prefer, particularly since it's been part of the English language in this role for centuries. I see your point about they/finds; that feels just wrong, and one finds oneself using "they...find" despite the fact that the use is singular--I think because "they" as third person is actually third person indefinite (ie, 1 or more), not singular, per se.

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

When I absolutely have to, I use "chi"/"hir", which I also found in an sf book, though I can't now recall which one. Mostly I find "s/he"/"him/her" works reasonably well. "They/them" doesn't, at least for me.

Pronouns being the one place where cases still matter, I don't like "yo" very much, particularly in the way it could be mistaken for "you," or by a Spanish speaker for "I." I don't think this is me being snobbish about slang, though I'm open to the possibility. I don't know if "zie" has cases, but if it doesn't I can see problems there. "Zie put zie arms about zie waist and kissed zie lips," as Lord Byron might have written in Sohrab and Rustum.

The underlying point, that trying to make a deliberate change to language almost never works, remains. If a gender neutral third person singular pronoun is going to happen, it will happen, I guess. If all else fails, we may overcome our hoity-toity scruples about sharing a pronoun with sofas and pebbles and consent to be referred to, in general cases, as "it." Nothing wrong with that. Perfectly serviceable word.

But I'll predict that if and when one does become part of general usage, it will be practically impossible to discover who actually invented it, or where.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

I've seen others use "zie" (I didn't know it was German) in print, although not in conversation; I dunno if "yo" will go or not. For me it has a Spanish connotation, being first person singular there... which adds to the uncertainty. Nevermind it *also* overloads the common Ebonics interjection/adjective.

English. *sigh* Most difficult language in the world. How the cornbread hell it got to be the lingua franca (double pun intentional)...

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'm sorry, but English isn't the most difficult language in the world. It may be the most convoluted, and the least internally consistent, but it's far from the most difficult. Japanese, I should think, has a better claim to that title.

Of course, Japanese isn't the bastard child of Latin and German, which does introduce its own set of issues.

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

I've seen "sie" used to refer to hermaphroditic characters, with "hir" as the possessive, but that's still not gender neutral.

Mind you, I'm still trying to figure out how to pronounce "s/he". Seh-hee? Suh-hee? Heorshe?

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Most linguists seem to think that Korean is one of the most difficult languages.

[mdlbear]

Japanese is, on the other hand, the bastard child of Chinese and some original native language. This leads to anomalies like certain Kanji having two pronunciations, and multiple sets of words for numbers.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

"Yo" feels like a corruption of "you"; I think it would take a great deal of getting used to before sentences using it didn't seem to be confusing second and third person.

I've been exposed to enough of "zie" that I can sort of deal with it, rather than being tripped up in my reading by something unfamiliar/wrong. I had no idea it was German; I thought it was just one of the many made-up forms. I'm not quite sure if it's supposed to have an objective form, but the possessive seeme to be "zir" (and the reflexive "zirself"). I don't know that I really like it, but I don't hate it as much as I hate all of the other ways I see people avoiding the traditionally correct construction of using "he" everywhere. For decades, I just stuck my fingers in my ears and went "la la la" whenever anyone tried to mix feminism and linguistics. I've finally achieved sufficient enlightenment to realize that it really would be better if we had an unambiguous, gender-neutral, and non-awkward pronoun; as soon as enough people get behind one candidate that it starts to feel like a consensus, I'll get behind it.

[msminlr.livejournal.com]

I've seen "zir" used in various LJ posts as a possessive form of "zie".

[infobits.livejournal.com]

Y'know, we could just drop the s and sh off, and go with E and Es for possive.


BJ

[(Anonymous)]

I've liked zie (and zir for object & possessive) for a long time. I suppose I could get used to yo. I like that kids have found it worthwhile to have a gender neutral pronoun, it seems to me that it signifies a shift in our societal perception of gender.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Hmm...wonder why my computer forgot I was logged in...Didn't mean to post anonymously.

[judifilksign.livejournal.com]

I teach in Columbus, Ohio. I hear a lot of "yo" as truncated "you" and as a pronoun, as well. Usually "yo" as pronoun refers to a person who is male, or if gender uncertain, looks very male. When the referent is clearly female, "yo" is not used.

[thymidinekinase.livejournal.com]

I studied German for three semesters, lived in Berlin for a month, and read modern books in that language every year -- and I have never encountered this gender-neutral singular pronoun "Zie" that you mentioned. There is "sie", which is indeed pronounced "zie", but it is feminine-singular or neutral-plural. Or if you write it "Sie" then it's second-person plural/formal. So I'd have to say it's either archaic, extremely specific to certain regions, or not actually German.

[rms-butterfly.livejournal.com]

I see zie/zir used alot in poly posts and groups, just fyi, to denote someone of any gender.

[ndrosen.livejournal.com]

Ich stimme damit uberein. (I agree with that.) Ich habe Deutsch auch gelernt, und ich habe "zie" nie gesehen. (I have also studied German, and I have never seen "zie.")

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I use "they/them" a lot; generally, I give it the plural verb. "They" as a third-person singular turns out to have a long and honorable pedigree--Jane Austen, among others, used it extensively. The main problem I have with "they/them" is that it implies a certain social distance, just as the archaic "you" implied a certain social distance; one can't use it directly to another person, for instance, or even of a person where one knows the appropriate pronoun gender. "Yo", hmmm.

[chatworthy.livejournal.com]

I've seen "zie" used in various places online for about ten years now, and have actually said it myself a time or two, but I don't know how to say "his or her" in German -- yet; I'm beginning to study German because our son-in-law is German, so it's inevitable: we'll be going to Germany sometime. But I digress.

"Yo" almost works well for me, sitting here rolling it around by brain. Almost, because I'm old enough to have "yo" as in "yo' mama" as the main usage. En espanol, yo is "I or me" so it's not too alien to me to shift. Next time I hit an anime con, I'll listen for that usage.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

"Zie put zir arms about zir waist and kissed zir lips" would be the construction as I understand it--except that the antecedents of some of these pronouns are not particularly clear--it might work out more like "Terry put zir arms around Robin's waist and kissed zir lips."

"zie/zir/zir" are the cases, as I recall.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

And two syllabaries (sort of like alphabets--but 1 symbol = 1 syllable).

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Pronounciation is also my major problem with s/he. It's okay for written material, as far as I'm concerned.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I think the author of the study mentioned in the post I linked to might like to hear your perspective.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

My mistake--I'll fix it. Thanks!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the correction--I'll fix it.

[mdlbear]

Plus the romaji (i.e.; our alphabet, for words that haven't been sufficiently integrated yet). Plus strongly-typed cardinal numbers (but only in the borrowed Chinese set), complications due to the fact that the Chinese word for "4" is the same sound as the Japanese word for "death", and a word for 10,000.

And no future tense, no gender on pronouns, verb endings on adjectives, ... Talk about different.

Oh, and different sets of verbs and verb endings depending on the relative social status of the speaker and listener.

[judifilksign.livejournal.com]

I did post to it, too.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Well, the social status issue shows up in other languages, and even in English, while the word endings might not change, word usage certainly does.

What tended to throw me in Japanese was the way that numbers got endings that changed with the nature of the things being counted. One ending if you're counting small animals, a different ending if you're counting small round things like oranges, and so on.

And in ASL, the word can change based on the expression on the signer's face.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

This is very like the Spivak pronouns mentioned in the Wikipedia post about gender neutral pronouns. I wonder if that's how he got the idea.

[mdlbear]

I particularly like the fact that, if you're counting beer bottles, it makes a difference whether they're open or closed (open containers for liquids vs. cylindrical objects).

Even the Japanese rarely remember all of them, so if you're buying three of something you use "mitsu" (the old-Japanese untyped word) and the shopkeeper will respond with the correct suffix.

[mbumby.livejournal.com]

Before I went to Japan last year, I took classes, studied up on the Hiragana and Katakana (and recognized them in many fonts about 80% of the time; some were just too difficult for me to remember) -- But what I was completely not prepared for was that the VAST majority of the writing was in the "Chinese" characters -- not "letters" at all.

[mdlbear]

I was prepared, intellectually. But it's still a shock going someplace where you're functionally illiterate.