Ann Leckie & Turkish & pronouns, oh my

[kaberett]

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.

Comments

[niqaeli]

My glance through them from when they crossed my twitter feed gave me the impression that they all are very much drawn as androgynous/ambiguous. Which is... fine, as far as it goes? But, ASYK-Alex-Bob, ambiguous-could-be-either type androgyny is not a particularly accessible aesthetic for a great many non-binary people, and is not necessarily actually gender-neutral.

[alexseanchai]

yup.