Ann Leckie & Turkish & pronouns, oh my
Oct. 29th, 2019 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
As I occasionally mention, I'm learning Turkish on Duolingo, partly for interest (second non-Indo-European language! agglutination! vowel & consonant harmony!) and partly because it's turned out to be rather more useful in my day-to-day life than I anticipated when I started (for reasons various).
One of the things I find really very soothing about Turkish is that it's a language that doesn't have grammatical gender, and doesn't have gendered pronouns. Unfortunately, Duolingo hasn't quite caught up with current usage, which means that translations of the third-person singular pronoun "o" get marked wrong unless you use "he" or "she" (rather than "they"); obviously I stubbornly default to translating as "she".
I am also, As We Know, really very fond of Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy, which "she" as the universal gender-irrelevant third-person singular.
Taken together, this means I'm occasionally catching myself defaulting to gender-irrelevant/gender-unknown usage of "she" in English, and possibly drifting slightly more towards third-person singular "they" as indicating a specific gender space.
I am, as you might well imagine, rather facepalmy over the Entire Situation.
One of the things I find really very soothing about Turkish is that it's a language that doesn't have grammatical gender, and doesn't have gendered pronouns. Unfortunately, Duolingo hasn't quite caught up with current usage, which means that translations of the third-person singular pronoun "o" get marked wrong unless you use "he" or "she" (rather than "they"); obviously I stubbornly default to translating as "she".
I am also, As We Know, really very fond of Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy, which "she" as the universal gender-irrelevant third-person singular.
Taken together, this means I'm occasionally catching myself defaulting to gender-irrelevant/gender-unknown usage of "she" in English, and possibly drifting slightly more towards third-person singular "they" as indicating a specific gender space.
I am, as you might well imagine, rather facepalmy over the Entire Situation.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-10-29 05:31 pm (UTC)…I am afraid to ask
(no subject)
Date: 2019-10-30 03:23 am (UTC)Not everyone dislikes this. I do, because I see it as further narrowing the range of gender expression available to women, men, and everyone else. Now your precise length of hair determines if you're a man, a woman or a "neutral".
Also, EMOJI USED TO BE GENDER NEUTRAL UNTIL SOMEONE FUCKING DECIDED THE NEUTRAL OPTION WAS MALE AND ADDED A DISTAFF OPTION. *deep calming breaths*
(no subject)
Date: 2019-10-30 03:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-10-31 08:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-10-30 06:31 pm (UTC)(Where is my longhair emoji representation though)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-10-30 03:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-10-30 03:34 am (UTC)