this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Yeah, this is a whole thing. In Portuguese, like most other Romance languages I believe, every single noun is gendered, so cars are male, houses are female, and so on and so forth. We have the male pronoun ele (he) and the female one ela (she), and besides these there's also a neutral isso (it) but using that to refer to someone is very rude and dehumanizing, so we basically have no neutral pronouns (when talking about multiple people you generally use the plural male pronoun eles unless they're all women, but some people think that's kinda sexist I guess).
Some people have been trying to create new pronouns to fix that, such as elu, elx and ile, all of which have seen very limited adoption. I like to consider myself a progressive and inclusive person but I just can't bring myself to use these new words, they all sound terrible, it's like I'm butchering the language. So yeah, when talking about someone you don't know in Portuguese you basically have to guess their gender or just ask them what they like more.
I was just going to come and say basically the same. Portuguese has everything gendered, all words, impossible to speak without it. I would very much like to a have a non-gendered language.
On the other hand I kind of feel like if a house can be female and a car can be male then there can't really be much argument against using whatever gender any human prefers for themselves.
Exactly, it's painful because I want to be respectful and use a more neutral pronoun but none of the ones people created really feels natural to pronounce and it's always awkward when someone tries to use them in conversation. Now the they/them in English rolls off the tongue and I use it all the time without realizing.
My current strategy is to address someone by whatever pronouns I think is correct and if they correct me then I just ask for forgiveness and use the one they prefer
My strategy is to look grumpy and hope no one talks to me.
It was my strategy before pronouns became a thing and it suited me fine then, it suits me fine now
No, it doesn't. It's really awkward.
Canada has a player on the women's national soccer (football) team who wants people to use they/them pronouns when referring to them in the third person. It leads to trying to create sentences like "they've been playing well today but they haven't".
And it would be impossible to replace one of those pronouns with "the team" or the player's name. Completely impossible.
I feel like when you say that out loud it's actually very easy to understand due to intonation.
They (singular) has been used since at least Shakespeare, so every single student in an English-speaking country has learned how to use it correctly; including how to format sentences using singular they. 'The firefighter rescued a puppy from a burning building; they were really lucky they spotted the puppy in time.' In any sentence where two pronouns are the same, you'd replace one or the other (preferably the latter though the 'rules' on this are stupidly complex). Alex was drinking Jim's coffee. He should really buy ~~him~~Jim a replacement.
Native Spanish speaker here and I 100% agree with you.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable way to proceed. Why would that be an issue?
If they don't want to be called either, which I think is reasonable. Or if you're talking about someone who you don't know, we don't have this problem because they is just so general
Same as Spanish but we do use neutral nouns, I am not into bastardizing my native language when this same people can not speak good grammatical Spanish. The best we could have is a linguistic academy as RAE.