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

[cosmolinguist]

third-person singular "they" as indicating a specific gender space.

It's partly my belief that this would be A Good Thing that led me to agree that neopronouns like ey/em or zie/hir are like Betamax to they's VHS: they more clearly and obviously and necessarily carve out their own space.

[horselizard]

That darn owl. *shakes fist* One of these days I might actually poke the Duolingo Turkish course (it's at the end of a very long list because I'm both greedy and lazy!), and if/when I do I'll be sure to stubbornly get every single "o" question "wrong" by using "they", and report it as "my answer should be accepted" ;)

What's your first non-Indo-European language, btw? Maybe I already know this, but I'm blanking. Been watching some animes with Romaji-subbed theme tunes with house, and marvelling at just how opaque Japanese feels to me without any PIE hooks to hang things on - and that's with a Japanese GCSE XD

(As an aside, making this observation to house prompted the question "Is BSL non-Indo-European?" Discuss :D)

[vass]

*heavy sigh at Duolingo*

It is soothing. I was watching Nirvana in Fire on Friday, and there was a moment when the protagonist mentioned another character in absentia, without naming them, and the subtitle translated the pronoun as he used as "he/she" and then his friend replied "Who, [male character]?" and the protagonist replied "No, [female character]." It's just... oh right, it doesn't have to be this way.

I am, as you might well imagine, rather facepalmy over the Entire Situation.

Speaking of nonbinary gender as a specific gender space: you might not want to look at the new "neutral" gender emoji until your face has recovered. Your palm might become permanently attached. They are very... specific.

[pipisafoat]

All I can do is sit here thinking about how awesome you are and giggling slightly.

[fyreharper]

:delighted face:

[cadenzamuse]

Apologies, I am commenting at everyone from Very Tired Very Mentally Ill brainspace, but all I can register is my semi-agender dismay at losing the universal-ness of my they pronoun set. (Such an unproductive response, sorry.)

[sporky_rat]

My gender is 🐊 (alligator) frequently.

Works for me and I can bite people.

(I honestly have no preference, I'll take any pronoun.)

[ludy]

My Dad used to be a little disconcerted by East Asian colleagues (mostly native speakers of Taiwanese Hokkien) defaulting to she as their standard/neutral English language pronoun. He's of a generation taught at school that he is uncritically universal and only came to understand that being problematic later in life, so will default to it when tired etc. So i think being casually and very definitely non-maliciously misgendered at work might have been been kind of good for him?