restructr!

jaded16india:

deadgeraniums:

sententiola:

I’m not quite sure what you mean by saying that those pronouns ‘might do’.  If this means they might be usable as gender-neutral pronouns in English, er…  Well, personally I’d hesitate to do that.  That’s partly because it would seem appropriative (for me at least, since I’m not remotely Chinese and don’t speak any Chinese languages) and partly because I just don’t really see the point of using pronouns from other languages as pronouns in English.  The fact that they’re established and well-known pronouns in another language doesn’t make them any more familiar or comprehensible to an Anglophone ear than entirely invented pronouns like ‘ze’ and ‘ey’.  But perhaps you didn’t mean this as a suggestion for raising children in English anyway: I note you changed the title of your reblog from ‘Gender for kids’ to ‘Gendered pronouns and Chinese’.

When I said it ‘might do’, I was replying to Tiara’s comment on the use of the Malay & Indonesian pronoun dia. I meant they - ta or yee to me as a Hokkien Chinese, or qu as a Mandarin-speaker - might do for me. That they might do for me as a Chinese person who lives in a place where English and a dozen other morbid tongues can cross and be repackaged into creole.

I don’t intend that they be familiar or comprehensible any more than thoroughly Anglo pronouns like ou. I don’t care. That’s not my context or my community. Anglophony isn’t cookie-cutter. I am a native Anglophone too. (Must this still be said? 192 years ever since the British bought my homeland for $5000?)

I just don’t really see the point of using pronouns from other languages as pronouns in English - the thing is, the English I use is full of intermingling, where I can say at home, ‘Why won’t you have dinner soon? Mai jiak eh? Qi de yao ming, my God.’ Although I perform ‘standard English’ in public, such is the demand of code-switching.

Tagged: language, postcolonialism, tropical living

Agree with Deadgeraniums here, in my native tongue Gujarati you don’t address anyone’s gender while addressing them — we have the word ‘ainey’ which means ‘someone’ rather than a particular sex. Some regional tongues do have this space of gender neutrality. Urdu, similarly uses ‘wo’ and ‘aap’ for everyone. 

Another thing, if we can use gender-neutral pronouns from other tongues, then why not? I know quite a few people for whom “ze”, “zie”, “hir” etc don’t fit — mainly because we don’t see ourselves as people who are uniquely anglophone. Those of us who are privileged enough to know English and be fluent in it do routinely code-switch — without even realising it most of the time — and English does pepper our conversations, so why not the other way around?

I’m not expecting native English speakers to suddenly pick up a pronoun from [x] language — rather see that not all genderqueer, trans* etc people are native English speakers, even if they may be, some may not be comfortable with western significations of gender neutrality etc — so here we have room for own native languages and other forked tongues to wander in.