Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun
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Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun
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Re: Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun
#2And this is relevant to hacker news because of?
Re: Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun
#3Destroying the language indeed... Now if only there were some way of measuring that. Perhaps if a neighbouring country with a similar social structure, with a similar government, with a similar school system, with similar core values, already had a gender-neutral pronoun in their language? Then we could look at that country, measure the language development and gender confusion among school children in that country and actually know if this new word would "destroy" the Swedish language.
A country like... Finland perhaps?
The debate is ridiculous, a few people feel very strongly either way, but most people don't care at all, don't use the word, but won't get angry if someone else uses it. Whatever. It's a mountain out of a molehill.
Re: Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun
#4Having a gender-neutral pronoun is really good (I've experimented with a few in English, but most people don't understand them or care when it is explained), but some aspects are possibly going to far: I don't see any reference to the actual physiological differences between the genders.
This quote particularly got to me:
> The Swedish Bowling Association has announced plans to merge male and female bowling tournaments in order to make the sport gender-neutral
In any physical contest men are highly likely to be the victors: there is a reason why the female marathon record is 10 minutes behind the male one, and it's not lack of training and effort. Maybe this doesn't apply to bowling so much, I don't know, but at the risk of committing the slippery-slope fallacy, I hope sports don't just jump on the gender-neutral bandwagon because it's politically advantageous/correct.
Re: Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun
#5I'm from Sweden. I haven't used "hen" many times but I like it and it might integrate well with our society. (haven't read the article yet, sorry)
Re: Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun
#6Usage of 'they' in English seems to be fairly common and it has only made the language better.
Re: Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun
#7Destroying the language indeed... Now if only there were some way of measuring that. Perhaps if a neighbouring country with a similar social structure, with a similar government, with a similar school system, with similar core values, already had a gender-neutral pronoun in their language? Then we could look at that country, measure the language development and gender confusion among school children in that country a…
The great thing is that the word for "he/she" in Finnish is "hän". Pronounced almost the same as the Swedish proposal.
(for the ignorant: these two are otherwise wildly different languages)
Re: Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun
#8 Morgan Freeman: I don't want a Black History Month. Black
history is American history.
Mike Wallace: How are we going to get rid of racism...?
Morgan Freeman: Stop talking about it. I'm going to stop
calling you a white man. And I'm going to ask you to stop
calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace. You
know me as Morgan Freeman.Re: Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun
#9The gender-specific pronouns are one of the usual things to trip up native Finnish speakers in Germanic languages. In Finnish we've never had them, which may explain some of the early gender neutrality in the country. From Wikipedia:
The first European country to introduce women's suffrage was the Grand Duchy of Finland—then a part of the Russian Empire with autonomous powers—which also produced the world's first female members of parliament as a result of the 1907 parliamentary elections.
Re: Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun
#10It's a great move. It might cause a slight confusion when translating to other languages, but that's not really important.
Some languages (including my native language) had always used gender-neutral pronouns, and it has never caused me (or anyone else that I know of) any problems. So I think the fear that it might destroy the language or cause mass-confusion is pointless.
[edit]
Aside from Persian, it seems[1] that Turkic, Filipino, Nahuatl, Malay, Indonesian, Georgian, Esperanto (which is not a natural language), Estonian, Armenian, Bengali, Nepali and probably tons of other languages have gender-neutral pronouns. None of them are as widely-used as Chinese, Spanish, English or Arabic though, and that's why many take gender-specific pronouns for granted...