Comment by littlestymaar
2 years ago
“They” is particularly convenient when discussing about people over the internet, because not only we don't have to assume the person's gender, but we don't have to assume if it's an individual or a group either.
And tbh using gender in pronouns is artificially annoying, and it's good to see English has a way out of it, like it got rid of giving genders to common objects like most European languages (“Non, it's La chaise, chair is feminine in French” -_-').
Languages hold complexity in different areas, but that doesn't make it artificial. Grammatical gender (and noun classes more generally) may seem redundant, but redundancy in language is quite common. It helps disambiguate, as it turns out speech (especially, but writing too) is a very lossy method of communicating.
(You seem perfectly happy distinguishing between animate/inanimate nouns and choosing "it" or "he/she/they" -- that's a difference not all languages make, but should we get rid of it in English too?)
1. "it" does not distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns:
The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its face to see what was the matter with it. — Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
But he [Jesus] said to them, "It is I; do not be afraid." — John 6:20
2. gender distinction is artificial because it's not based on anything real, rather it's based on whether the "vibes" that a person (or an inanimate object in European languages) that you're referring to gives off are more feminine or more masculine. this "redundancy" creates all sorts of trouble for folks who are not comfortable with the "vibes" society assignes them with a particular gender at a given moment. the problem here is not that the speech is lossy, but that this particular "feature" of language demands that you convey the person's identity when it's almost always irrelevant in a way that's exclusive to gender (thank God nationalism wasn't invented when the language was forming)
1. Yes, as with many "rules" in language there are exceptions. I would find it a bit odd to refer to a baby as "it" in (current) English, though I do admit there are some situations where it wouldn't feel as out of place.
In my read of the Bible quote, it's not really referring to a person as "it" in the same way.
2. Grammatical gender has nothing to do with the "vibes" of an inanimate object - it's quite arbitrary, really. The problem you're associating here is much more with gender in humans, but we were talking about the grammatical construct applied to objects (like a chair as the grandparent mentioned).
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> not only we don't have to assume the person's gender, but we don't have to assume if it's an individual or a group either.
as someone with DID (formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder) this is actually kind of a nice bonus. (though people still often use he/him pronouns to refer to specifically me, which is fine)