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Should we call each other the same pronoun or no?


Turo

How do you feel about this?  

7 members have voted

  1. 1. Poll

    • yes
      1
    • no
      3
    • not sure
      3


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I'm asking this discussion to be completely friendly. No need to insult, offend or fight anyone. I'm bringing this up because I wanna know how people feel about 3rd this.

Yesterday, this question came into my mind. How do you exactly feel about people calling each other "he, she, it, they" in English language? How would you react If we call each other with same pronoun. I'm curious about how people with first language being English feel about this because there is actually a difference between 3rd pronouns in English and Turkish. In Turkish language, there's no seperation actually. Males, females and others such as animals, plants, objects have same 3rd pronoun. I'm wondering, how would you feel If all of 3rd personal pronouns were same. Like what If we all call each other "they, them"? Personally I wouldn't mind too much If all of them were same. My first language doesn't really seperate people and we call each other same pronoun. But there's also that If people wants them to be called with a different pronoun instead of just same pronoun like everybody calls themself same in Turkish, I'm okay with that. I could get confused as well because I'm also used to call people "he, she, they" in English. I'm gonna call the person what pronoun they want because I really don't want to offend anyone. How do you feel about this? Should we call each other with same pronoun or are you ok with calling each other with different pronouns?

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Everyone using the same pronoun would be a lot more practical, but having only three {he, she, they} is good enough.

I'm fine with using "they" for certain people, but I'm not even remotely willing to use pronouns outside of the basic 3 groups.

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From what I can tell, English doesn't use as many pronouns as other languages. Spanish for example uses pronouns for almost everything, even objects, English on the other hand doesn't.  But its really more of a personal choice, if people want to call everyone with the same pronoun then they should do so, I got no problem with that.

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8 hours ago, Teamwork said:

Come on, it's simple ze zem, ze zerself, ze zemself.

Can you stop ruining serious discussions? Thanks.

Anyhow, I wouldn't really mind using only one pronoun, but I'm also ok with the main three as Hal said.

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Guest hilaryfan80

I can step in from a linguists' point of view (a linguist is someone who studies language). The problem with this discussion is that English is odd in that we do not have a specific "grammar authority" - that is, someone who actually makes the judgment on what is "standard" English. For example, the official "grammar authority" of Turkish is the Türk Dil Kurumu (in English: "Turkish Language Association"), and they decide what is considered "standard" Turkish. France has something similar called the Académie française (in English: "French Academy") that determines what is considered "standard" French. English does not have such an entity, so we only have what is the closest thing to a "grammar authority": the dictionary.

Because we do not have a "grammar authority" of any kind, making a worldwide change to our pronouns would be extremely difficult. You will have some people arguing that there's nothing wrong with the he/she/it pronouns, while others can point out several flaws with that system. Unfortunately, you can't please everyone, so making a change in the English language would take an immense amount of work. We just don't have anyone who can slam a gavel down and say, "This is what is considered 'standard English,' so you must now obey the new rules of the language!" Nobody was put in charge.

According to prescriptivist views (people who believe that we should follow the strict grammatical rules of 18th century England), the 3rd plural pronoun "they" cannot be used as a 3rd singular neutral-gender pronoun. In other words, you cannot replace "he" or "she" with "they" without breaking the rules of the English language. In academic language, this is a following trend as well. Unfortunately, this method will not please the academic folks, which means it will never work.

As for my own opinion, I strongly approve of the "ze" pronoun. Instead of saying "he" or "she," you can replace it with the new 3rd singular neutral-gender pronoun "ze." This would also become an indefinite pronoun (where the subject is unknown) when you use "ze" when the gender of a person isn't known (e.g. you read the name "Alex" and you are not sure if it is a boy or a girl - you would use "ze" in this case). This also does not break any prescriptivist or academic language as we are only adding to the grammatical rules and not changing them. It's also easy to say. :)

But again, it would be very hard to get a lot of people to recognize it as a new pronoun because we do not have a grammar authority.

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I think we should stick to the 3 basic groups. As I believe that's what necessary and more practical.

But I'm fine if anyone wants to use anything else, as I'm not a dick.

Edited by Jekuma
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