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Comment by franga2000

5 years ago

But it's way less effort than checking, isn't it? The name in the footer isn't English, so it's hard to know from that and there's no about page that I could find. The Twitter profile makes it more obvious, but I only clicked on it to check because of your comment. Why bother??

32 comments

franga2000

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h_spacer  5 years ago

Slav surnames are gendered. * ski is male, * ska is female, * sko is neutral. Using gender neutral in this case is as insulting as calling him a dog.

Other cases where using gender neutral pronouns insults everyone speaking the language is using Latinx for Latino. If you want to butcher every other languages genders like they are in English, use Latin instead - the gender neutral form of Latino in English since only the middle ages.

Hope this helps.

  • franga2000  5 years ago

    I'm from Slovenia and this is bullshit. Maybe it holds true in a couple of Slavic languages, but I'm familiar with a handful of them and this isn't a thing in any of those.

    Regarding the "insulting" part, you're probably mistranating it. What would be insulting in many Slavic languages is using the "middle grammatical gender" (rough literal translation) which is equivalent to using "it" to refer to a person in English. If you insist on translating literally, using third person gender neutral (in Slovene and many Slavic languages) is actually a sign of respect and is how talks to their superiors (antiquated in 3rd person, but still the norm in 2nd).

    Not that it matters anyways, as we're all talking in English and thus English grammar is the only one that matters. Even if you know for a fact all parties in the conversation speak the other language, if you're using English, the rules of the other language don't matter.

    P.S. Re: Latinx: yeah, that's stupid and I'd see it as mildly offensive if directed at me, but that is neither a pronoun nor common practice, so is entirely irrelevant here

  • smnscu  5 years ago

    I'm Romanian and have many Polish friends. This is not even remotely accurate, except for basket cases that I have yet to meet.

  • antonfire  5 years ago

    > Using gender neutral in this case is as insulting as calling him a dog.

    In English? No it isn't. You are the one who is "butchering" a language's pronouns by improperly mapping considerations into it from another language here, not vice versa.

    I have a Slavic last name, and I speak English fluently and Russian not-so-fluently-anymore.

    If you use "оно" to refer to me in Russian because you don't know my gender, it would sound weird to me. (I haven't been to any Russian-speaking countries in a while, but I suspect there hasn't been a shift in Russian to use that pronoun that way while I've been gone.) I personally wouldn't be insulted, but I can easily imagine how somebody might; it would carry a subtext of referring to me as an inanimate object.

    If you use "they" to refer to me in English because you don't know my gender, it would not sound weird to me at all. (Though it might have 5-10 years ago, for different reasons.) A much closer (but still imperfect) analogy to using "оно" to refer to me in Russian would be using "it" to refer to me in English, which would sound weird to me.

    Hope that helps.