Gender and languages

[AavaMeri]

EDIT: Old topic title was "Languages with non-gendered third-person pronouns". Now this thread is about gender and language in general, not only about those with non-gendered pronouns.

 

These are again my shower thoughts, but I think this is a topic that feels worthy of its own thread. No strict agenda here, feel free to talk about real/speculative languages and interesting cases of addressing gender.

So, my native language is Finnish, that one weirdo language in Nordics that isn't related to the other major languages over there. Finnish has many weird traits compared to several other European languages (for example grammatical cases and stuff making words into huge frankenwords), but that one most interesting trait in LGBTQ+ circles is that we have only non-gendered third-person pronouns; hän (about humans or loved animals) and se (equivalent to it). Finnish does still have some gendered kinks, it isn't the final linguistic utopia for LGBTQ+.

Over years, I've noticed that The Big Language English having gendered pronouns and a lot Finns using English media and communication has caused some funny translation issues. Enjoy my anecdotes.

 

• Non-gendered third pronoun is of course handy when talking to people of any gender; because everyone is a "hän" (or "se" if you are using informal language, 100% accepted), there is simply no need to think of anyone's pronouns. 
  • But things get funny when you are talking about your fellow Finnish-speaker in English to another party  "I have known this friend for FIVE YEARS and still I'm not sure what are their pronouns! I think they have referred themselves as a man before, so are they a he/him? ...better text them."
  • Even worse when you are talking about someone who you don't casually text. "I'm pretty sure my therapist is a woman, but am I doing it wrong if I just start using she/her?"
     
• Literature translated from languages with gendered pronouns. I've noticed that English texts rely a lot to pronouns to convey someone's gender, and it shows if the translator isn't careful!
  • I once read side-by-side a book (originally written in English) in English and in Finnish. There was a scene where a married straight couple was discussing. English version volleyed between he/him and she/her, Finnish switches those with an amount of given names of the characters and words like "the woman", "the man", "the wife", "the husband". Must be a challenge to the translator to use just right amount of words to clarify the text without sounding weird.
  • I've had A LOT of gender revelation surprises with translated books, especially those that were rapidly translated and gendering of the character vanished under "hän" words. It's funny sometimes, especially when it isn't intentional intent to hide genders. This mostly happened to me with fantasy literature, where names weren't a good indication of anyone's gender.
    • "WAIT, now you are saying this captain is a woman? Why didn't you tell me earlier??!"
    • "...oh, so this is a gay couple. I thought this other character was a woman. Now I get why this one hating character is getting a bad rep. He's a homophobe!"
    • "...what do you mean that this woman has a beard? Is she a bearded wo-... WAIT. Oh. It says here that this character is a son of that other character. But that name looks so feminine!"

[Piotrek]

@AavaMeri Hi, I've heard about the "hän" pronoun. (example, this song). Also, do I understand correctly that Finnish doesn't use gendered pronouns at all, not even for the sake of disambiguating? Having a neutral pronoun in addition to the genedered ones is cool and useful, but the complete absence of those may be problematic as, like it or not, it's a rather important distinction  Incidentelly, I've seen some cases of Finnish users on the Internet using the wrong pronoun in English (i.e calling a female vocalist "he") which I imagine must be under the influence of  "hän".

 

(Incidentally, my native Polish has gone in the opposite direction. Not only do we use gendered pronouns as a matter of course (using a neutral one referring to a person would sound bizzare), but the grammatical verb forms are obligatorily marked for gender too, especially in the past tense. )

[Anita195]

Hungarian is fine for an example. We use ő (plural form ők) for every gender.

[Guest]

35 minutes ago, Piotrek said:

Having a neutral pronoun in addition to the genedered ones is cool and useful, but the complete absence of those may be problematic as, like it or not, it's a rather important distinction

I don’t see where the issue is. For two people of the same gender, you just can’t use pronouns to tell them from each other; and that’s no unusual situation.

 

(I hate the hypergendered nature of slavonic languages. It wasn’t nice to omit gendered suffixes for myself for several months.)

[The French Unicorn]

6 hours ago, Piotrek said:

Having a neutral pronoun in addition to the genedered ones is cool and useful, but the complete absence of those may be problematic as, like it or not, it's a rather important distinction

I don't see why ? I mean, I don't see why the distinction has to be made through pronouns if we have to make it. And I think that if all language was like Finnish on that matter, it would have been easier as the use of pronouns would have never become a problem. Like, I don't know, the fact that first and second pronouns are not gendered : nobody seems bother by it.

It's like the fact that in some language things like professions or adjectives are not gendered. It doesn't seem problematic for people who speak the language.

[AavaMeri]

12 hours ago, Piotrek said:

@AavaMeri Hi, I've heard about the "hän" pronoun. (example, this song). Also, do I understand correctly that Finnish doesn't use gendered pronouns at all, not even for the sake of disambiguating?

No, nada. Gendered pronouns simply don't exist in the Finnish language. Gender expectations ARE alive and well tho, so people do refer each others by genders. They just use nouns for that.

12 hours ago, Piotrek said:

 Having a neutral pronoun in addition to the genedered ones is cool and useful, but the complete absence of those may be problematic as, like it or not, it's a rather important distinction  

I'm unsure about this. The aforementioned issues I mentioned are about translations: Finnish on its own does fine without gendered pronouns (if wanted, gendering can be done with nouns). It's co-existence with gendered languages that makes things funky. ^^' Such as sudden need to comment on someone's gender to make your grammar right.

 

12 hours ago, Piotrek said:

  Incidentelly, I've seen some cases of Finnish users on the Internet using the wrong pronoun in English (i.e calling a female vocalist "he") which I imagine must be under the influence of  "hän".

Been there done that. ^^' Now it's more automatic to me, but earlier, it was bit of work for me to keep consistent with pronouns. We are taught early about English gendered pronouns, but it still is a bit if chore to juggle the options when you normally have just one option.

 

(Siding this, this is partially a thing why I find neopronouns a little hard to understand. Why so many pronouns? I understand it in some logical level, but it doesn't quite "click" similarly than understand singular "they" that I understand as a gender neutral option. Without saying, I'm cool with anyone using neopronoun, it's just something hard to grasp.)

 

12 hours ago, Piotrek said:

(Incidentally, my native Polish has gone in the opposite direction. Not only do we use gendered pronouns as a matter of course (using a neutral one referring to a person would sound bizzare), but the grammatical verb forms are obligatorily marked for gender too, especially in the past tense. )

Sounds similar to Russian, a language I studied a little. Triple amount if grammatical cases by the gender of the subject! (Male, female, neutral - and also this whole "things have gender" thing going on @__@). I wonder how language revolution for, say, gender-neutral people go with those languages.

 

I'll change the topic title to include also gendered pronouns languages, by changing it into like "Gender in languages".

[AstrophelDragon]

14 hours ago, AavaMeri said:

that one most interesting trait in LGBTQ+ circles is that we have only non-gendered third-person pronouns; hän (about humans or loved animals) and se (equivalent to it).

That sounds really awesome

[AavaMeri]

23 hours ago, Piotrek said:

Having a neutral pronoun in addition to the genedered ones is cool and useful, but the complete absence of those may be problematic as, like it or not, it's a rather important distinction  

Now I recalled a language where this is: Swedish. Originally, Swedish had masculine and feminine singular third-person human pronouns (han/hon), but quite recently they introduced a third one, hen. Actually it has been introduced as early as 1966, but it became more common over 2010s. Apparently its used similarly than how English uses singular they (aka to address people with neutral or unknown genders), but with difference that hen doesn't look like like Swedish plural they (de). I think this is pretty cool. Hen is becoming more mainstream here, though there are still grumbling people who dismiss it is feminist propaganda and useless neologism.

(Disclaimer: Swedish pronouns have grammatical cases, I just used basic nominative cases here.)

EDIT: Someone might notice similarity between Swedish han/hon/hen and Finnish hän. They have in fact affected each other; Finnish adopted hän from Swedish's han/hon to refer to humans (the true Finnish third pronoun is actually se, which basically means it in English), and hen was inspired by Finnish hän. Despite not being related languages, Finnish and Swedish borrow a lot words from each other due to close geographical locations.

[Guest]

7 hours ago, AavaMeri said:

the true Finnish third pronoun is actually se, which basically means it in English

Gaaaah, i want that in my language. I really need to do some reordering in my list of languages to learn (you know, ambitions 😇) to shift Finnish as close up as possible. (I also somewhat wonder how it’s in Estonian & Hungarian, given these are relatives of Finnish; but they are not as high on my list, anyway.)

 

Also, thanks to the title change i guess i can now complain about gendered nouns? I like how it’s in English, where a teacher is a teacher and nobody cares. I hate how it’s in German & most Slavonic languages & where-ever else, where there is a sort-of neutral form, but given it’s actually (usually) masculine, one can’t use it inclusively.

[AavaMeri]

14 hours ago, packed struct said:

Gaaaah, i want that in my language. I really need to do some reordering in my list of languages to learn (you know, ambitions 😇) to shift Finnish as close up as possible. (I also somewhat wonder how it’s in Estonian & Hungarian, given these are relatives of Finnish; but they are not as high on my list, anyway.)

(Clarification: I called se the true third person pronoun of Finnish because it isn't a loan word from Swedish, actually Finnish-speakers used se instead of hän in le olden times. However, modern Finnish-speakers use hän as the proper third person pronoun about people, unless they are speaking informally. Se is currently equivalent to "it", and while casual speakers throw it around and no one bats an eye, it raises eyebrows if a formal text like news articles uses se about a human.)

 

Be warned: Finnish is VERY different from most other European-originating languages, so there may be a rather steep learning curve. That said, if you like vowels and having words that are spoken as spelled (with Finnish pronunciation rules in mind), welcome!

Hungarian and Estonian are indeed related languages to Finnish, as are Sami languages and other Finno-Ugric languages. Estonian is very close to Finnish and actually sounds a lot like Finnish with a dialect. However, Finnish-speakers can't understand any lengthy pieces of Estonian unless they have studied it. I've got headache when listening to Estonian because I feel like I almost understand it, but actually I don't, and it is very confusing. I don't know relatives of Finnish well, but given the profound lack of gendering in Finnish grammar, I wouldn't see a reason why its relatives would pick up gendered pronouns. (Except maybe outside cultural and linguistic influence?) I don't know how many Hungarian speakers are out there, but I think that Finnish is at least second-biggest out of the Finno-Ugric languages.

 

15 hours ago, packed struct said:

Also, thanks to the title change i guess i can now complain about gendered nouns? I like how it’s in English, where a teacher is a teacher and nobody cares. I hate how it’s in German & most Slavonic languages & where-ever else, where there is a sort-of neutral form, but given it’s actually (usually) masculine, one can’t use it inclusively.

As said, I used to study Russian a little, and this was everywhere. It was a tad odd to keep throwing extra a's everywhere just because I'm a woman. By my experience, I'm pretty curious about how Russian-speaking (and related-languages-speaking) enbies speak.

[AavaMeri]

Additional musing...

First a disclaimer: I know OF Japanese, mostly by Internet sources and reading and anime, but I don't REALLY speak or read Japanese. So if there are errors, feel free to correct me.
 

Apparently the Japanese language doesn't really use third-person pronouns that reflect the gender of the target  (Japanese-speakers may say things like "that woman over there" tho). Instead, the language is famous of having variety of levels of formality and expression related to who the speaker is and how they see hierarchies around them.

 

Most obvious thing is the singular first-person pronoun: anime watchers may recognize ore for masculine tough guys, boku for less upfront guys, atashi as regular for upbeat girls, and watashi as a neutral polite word (and the main "I" word taught to learners of Japanese). Real life also go roughly like that, except choice of pronoun may also be situatiational (like using ore with friends but boku with superiors). There are other things too, from using the singular second-person pronouns (=are you polite or insulting to who you talk to) to a large share of other linguistic things I'm personally unaware of.

 

I find this fascinating and think this is a pretty neat concept for gendered pronouns. Unlike in English, these pronouns tell about the speaker and their world-view. They comment on the gender of the only person they are allowed to decide gender on - themselves. And apparently Japanese people do use that; I've heard at least that some feminist women have elected to use the normally masculine boku to shed themselves from feminine expectations. And sometimes female singers use it just to get a two-syllable word for song lyrics. On the flip side, apparently the Japanese language is somewhat rigid on how different genders are expected to speak.

Wikipedia article on Japanese pronouns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pronouns

[Guest]

6 hours ago, AavaMeri said:

(Clarification: I called se the true third person pronoun of Finnish because it isn't a loan word from Swedish, actually Finnish-speakers used se instead of hän in le olden times. However, modern Finnish-speakers use hän as the proper third person pronoun about people, unless they are speaking informally. Se is currently equivalent to "it", and while casual speakers throw it around and no one bats an eye, it raises eyebrows if a formal text like news articles uses se about a human.)

I did understand that (altough it saddens me). What i’m excited about is the fact that this distinction is imported, therefore the language just... used not to be so egoistic (& white-male-[...]-human-centric) and has a rather straight pathway to fixing this silliness, while it’s a tough fight in other languages (see ‘they’ in English, which is, anyway, still mostly unused for things & even animals).

6 hours ago, AavaMeri said:

Be warned: Finnish is VERY different from most other European-originating languages, so there may be a rather steep learning curve. That said, if you like vowels and having words that are spoken as spelled (with Finnish pronunciation rules in mind), welcome!

Yes, yes, thank you for the welcomes! 😇 (I still basically haven’t learned anything, but yes, that’s close to me. Also the lack of prepositions [if i’ve noticed that correctly] and that kind of stuff.)

6 hours ago, AavaMeri said:

As said, I used to study Russian a little, and this was everywhere. It was a tad odd to keep throwing extra a's everywhere just because I'm a woman. By my experience, I'm pretty curious about how Russian-speaking (and related-languages-speaking) enbies speak.

(Otoh, it’s a nice thing when you want to clear up what gender you are.) Sadly, i don’t know any enby irl, but i’m certain it’s easier to just pick one of the three genders available (with the neuter sounding really really weird) or to avoid it altogether (it’s possible, but can lead to awkward constructions). Because reinventing several sets of gender suffixes and making everyone around you learn them is close to madness.

[AavaMeri]

49 minutes ago, packed struct said:

Because reinventing several sets of gender suffixes and making everyone around you learn them is close to madness.

Even if this sounds a little comparable to neopronouns, somehow having this in already insane suffixes of verbs, nouns etc. is even more scary! And sure burdensome to anyone to attempt to employ said suffixes. One option is to for example mix male and female suffixes so that new suffixes are easier to learn.

[Kroete]

I speak German and English.

 

Currently, one big challenge in German I guess is the lack of a popular neutral pronoun for people. You can translate "he", "she" and "it" to German "er", "sie" and "es".

But you cannot translate the "singular they". At least not trivially. There is no well-known German equivalent.

 

In the German-speaking enby communities I haved looked at, there are a ton of suggestions for a generic pronoun (which would be equivalent to the "singular they"), but they are all used by specific people on a case-to-case basis only. There is no "default option" to fall back to (e.g. in case the person is unknown). Any suggested neopronoun that exists is not well-established, and there are a lot of options, which doesn't make it easy, unfortunately.

 

I had great difficulty translating an English story which included a transgender person using the "singular they". Since there was no obvious German equivalent, I had to work out a solution. I actually had to seek out—as a cis person!—enby communities to look for options for the pronoun question. It was quite a challenge, because this world was still very new and unfamiliar to me at that point, but I simply arbitrarily picked a simple neopronoun I liked best, and then used it consistently in the translation. Thankfully, the text of the story already explained itself how to use the pronoun correctly.

 

If the German speakers would one day agree on a "default" generic pronoun, I would jump at it IMMEDIATELY. Not for myself (it's "he" and always was), but in general, because in most discussions, the gender of the people we write and talk about does not matter. In English, I use the 'singular they' all the time as a fallback.

 

 

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, Kroete said:

But you cannot translate the "singular they". At least not trivially. There is no well-known German equivalent.

Well... there is, but it’s already taken by the polite ‘you’. Basically means there would be four polite pronouns (ich, wir, sie, Sie – you can pick which s/Sie is 3rdP sg, or you can squash them into one). Noice 😜.

[Guest]

In Korean, you pretty much never use third-person and rarely ever second-person pronouns when speaking. You refer to everyone in the third person using their name or title all the time, and second-person pronouns are only for people very close to you, like family or a significant other. It is a relief for me in Korean not to have pronouns be a concern, since everyone just calls me my name. There are strictly gendered terms for family roles, but those don't bother me that much, since those gendered titles are imposed on everyone and can make it awkward even for cis people due to formality or hierarchy implications.

 

However, there is a third-person pronoun used often in literary Korean that is equivalent to how "he" was traditionally the default singular third-person pronoun in English academic writing. One of the successes of the modern Korean feminist movement in literature was in creating a feminine equivalent (I believe it was during the 1980s?), so that pronoun is now common in writing as well. I have mixed feelings about this, since I liked that Korean used to have only one third-person pronoun that could be used for everyone, but I also agree that in both English and Korean, "he" acting as a neutral standard third-person pronoun in writing just doesn't work. It implies male is the default gender and also when reading it immediately makes you think of a man, not any random person. I hope one day Korean will develop another third-person neutral pronoun that is equivalent to "they" instead of "it," but Confucian family structures are rigidly binary and leave no room for gender ambiguity, so I doubt that will be any time soon. I'm not too bothered by it, though, since as long as I'm not reading a novel, I won't have to encounter third-person pronouns in Korean.

[AavaMeri]

18 minutes ago, Haneul said:

However, there is a third-person pronoun used often in literary Korean that is equivalent to how "he" was traditionally the default singular third-person pronoun in English academic writing. One of the successes of the modern Korean feminist movement in literature was in creating a feminine equivalent (I believe it was during the 1980s?), so that pronoun is now common in writing as well. I have mixed feelings about this, since I liked that Korean used to have only one third-person pronoun that could be used for everyone, but I also agree that in both English and Korean, "he" acting as a neutral standard third-person pronoun in writing just doesn't work. It implies male is the default gender and also when reading it immediately makes you think of a man, not any random person. I hope one day Korean will develop another third-person neutral pronoun that is equivalent to "they" instead of "it," but Confucian family structures are rigidly binary and leave no room for gender ambiguity, so I doubt that will be any time soon. I'm not too bothered by it, though, since as long as I'm not reading a novel, I won't have to encounter third-person pronouns in Korean.

For sake of clarification: Is Korean "literary he" originally masculine, or is it due to the English use of "default he" that makes it perceived as masculine? 

 

As for another third-person pronoun, as mentioned above, Swedish has pulled this off. Well, English too, with "they", but Swedes created a whole new word instead of repurposing/reviving existing one. Maybe it spreads to other languages, too.

[Guest]

20 minutes ago, AavaMeri said:

For sake of clarification: Is Korean "literary he" originally masculine, or is it due to the English use of "default he" that makes it perceived as masculine?

It was always masculine, although since it previously was the only third-person pronoun used in Korean, it was never entirely equivalent to "he" until the Korean feminine pronoun was invented and then retroactively made it strictly for men. Hence my mixed feelings on the feminine pronoun.

 

20 minutes ago, AavaMeri said:

As for another third-person pronoun, as mentioned above, Swedish has pulled this off. Well, English too, with "they", but Swedes created a whole new word instead of repurposing/reviving existing one. Maybe it spreads to other languages, too.

Yeah, it is a possibility in the future for Korean, but what I meant to say is that since Korean has no use for third-person pronouns in speech and is relatively "behind" when it comes to the concept of a nonbinary gender compared to in Western cultures, there is less utility in developing a third-person neutral pronoun outside of "it" at this point in time. If there is no wide use for a neutral third-person pronoun, there will be no use in developing it, at least until awareness of nonbinary genders grows more in Korea. Which again may take a while due to Confucian foundations, which standardizes a very strict binary gendered family structure.

[AavaMeri]

6 minutes ago, Haneul said:

Yeah, it is a possibility in the future for Korean, but what I meant to say is that since Korean has no use for third-person pronouns in speech and is relatively "behind" when it comes to the concept of a nonbinary gender compared to in Western cultures, there is less utility in developing a third-person neutral pronoun outside of "it" at this point in time. If there is no wide use for a neutral third-person pronoun, there will be no use in developing it, at least until awareness of nonbinary genders grows more in Korea. Which again may take a while due to Confucian foundations, which standardizes a very strict binary gendered family structure.

I'm unsure how much nonbinary people affected the creation of the hen pronoun, given it was created already in 1966 in a newspaper. There it was intended to be an alternative for the han eller hon ("he or she") structure in official papers. Though given that hen got popularity in 2010s, changes are that raise of enby awareness boosted it.

[Guest]

50 minutes ago, AavaMeri said:

I'm unsure how much nonbinary people affected the creation of the hen pronoun, given it was created already in 1966 in a newspaper. There it was intended to be an alternative for the han eller hon ("he or she") structure in official papers. Though given that hen got popularity in 2010s, changes are that raise of enby awareness boosted it.

Yeah, the history of "hen" is very interesting, although part of why it works so well is that Swedish conveniently had its equivalents for "he" and "she" only a middle vowel apart from one another. Other languages don't have that nice construction in common, like English. "He" and "she" makes singular "they" sound unnatural in comparison, since it doesn't match at all in sound. Swedish definitely took the W in the pronoun battle, since that singular neutral pronoun fits right in with the singular gendered ones. I know there is still controversy about "hen," but it sounds like a natural evolution to the pronouns rather than a forced change; it makes sense it was first written in a newspaper in 1966 by someone who was just seeking to simplify awkward pronoun constructions rather than constructed specifically for a nonbinary person.

 

Let me explain Korean pronoun construction. The masculine third-person is 그, while the feminine third-person is 그녀. As you can see, the feminine pronoun is created with an addition of a syllable to the masculine pronoun, and that extra syllable is a root that literally means "woman." This construction is problematic to creating a natural-sounding neutral pronoun, because 그녀 defines itself /in contrast to the masculine pronoun/ because that made it easier for the wider population to accept. And in Korea, a not-man is a woman, not a neutrally-gendered person, making 그녀 one of the few logical choices for expressing "not a man" in third-person pronouns.

 

It will be interesting to see what people come up with in the future, but it will probably involve a lot of awkward neopronouns, rather than sound like a natural evolution. Or maybe it won't even matter, and nonbinary people will take up 그 again as a universal third-person pronoun as before 그녀 burst onto the scene. I don't know, but again, not too relevant to me as someone who primarily speaks Korean rather than reads it. It's great that feminists found a way to represent themselves in literature, and nonbinary people have that possibility as well, but third-person pronouns in the Korean language are to me lower in importance than basic awareness and rights for LGBT+ people in Korea. Pronouns are so huge in the West as a focus of representation, accountability, and respect for LGBT+ people, and that focus just isn't here in Korea, since third-person pronouns are not a huge aspect of the language.