Comment by 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.
Russians use “yous” or “вы” which is both gender-neutral and a polite pronoun.
That's for the second person pronoun, which are all gender neutral in Russian, whether they are singular or plural. (Like English.)
We're talking here about third person pronouns, and the "the plural is the polite version and the singular is the casual version" doesn't extend to those. You wouldn't refer refer to someone in the third person as "они" rather than "он" to be polite.
> you wouldn’t refer
you wouldn’t do that because Russia is a paradise for homophobia, not because it does not make sense.
“Они” is a valid pronoun for the same thing than now means “them” in woke English.
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