Perhaps this is just my autism speaking, but am I the only one who gets completely freaked out by sentences like the above? "It" refers to inanimate objects, things which can't have free will, do crimes, or be prosecuted.
It's almost like you're talking about how a lawnmower decided to run a child over and then incriminate itself by boasting about it on social media. It makes no sense!
I know she picked that pronoun herself, but I really wish she didn't. It just makes communication difficult.
Competing access needs: autists need regularity, ??s ("the category of people who go by it/its") need ... creativity? chaos? uniqueness? Those goals are at direct odds.
(I'm going to presume here that crimew doesn't actually want to be considered an object, because we don't generally respect objects' pronoun choices. So calling them an "it" in the grammatical way would be paradoxically self-defeating; we call objects he/she all the time and they usually don't complain.)
This is also why I will always defend the use of "they" as valid. There has to be at least one universal pronoun.
Yes, it's likely that I am more challenged by the grammatically incorrect pronouns than most neurotypicals in this thread, thanks for pointing that out.
A lot of people who like to cry 'transphobic!' may wish to understand that there are people who need accommodation in our society other than trans people, and that heralding chosen pronouns as truly inviolable will sometimes make other people less comfortable.
That said, I have so far managed to avoid any such accusations in this thread, thankfully.
I fail to see how any of the mentioned pronouns are ungrammatical.
As for competing needs and such, in this case it’s as easy as using she/her (as maia lists that as one of its pronouns), in other cases it’s usually acceptable to use they/them or no pronouns at all. The only thing that is generally absolutely unacceptable is (knowingly) using the wrong gendered pronouns or using gendered pronouns when the person only uses non-gendered pronouns.
It's not that it's hard in any absolute sense, it's that imposes an ongoing overhead cost on people who may already pay a high cost to interact at all. (Also, of course, a cost on reading discussion about it. (Does that 'it' refer to the discussion or the author? You don't know! Have fun investing effort to work it out, every single time it's used.)
I wonder what the motivation was. Anarchism is mentioned elsewhere, so if I wonder if that’s a motivating factor here. At any rate, I appreciate that people are trying their best to be respectful. Personally, I’d also prefer to use “she” if that’s alright with her (it?). This becomes confusing quickly when we’re also trying to use it abstractly to refer to arguments and concepts.
I totally understand wanting to be respectful, but respect goes both ways. She needs to respect the fact that her odd pronouns are literally breaking the English language for people who want to use them.
I personally think that the ultimate end game for pronouns in English will be creations of new ones with no connotations (so easy to apply like names) that get incorporated into the language or more likely an eventual move to a single pronoun that applies to everyone. Chinese, for example, only differentiates in written form so would be an easy adjustment. They is every high schoolers preferred choice in essays before English teachers complain.
I'm not sure how the under 20 is adjusting but in my groups of mid 20 to late 30 nobody is trying to disrespect anyone by not using preferred pronouns, but it just slips out from decades of usage, and people just end up replacing pronouns with the person's actual name after multiple times apologizing. The having to remember multiple names when meeting someone just doesn't seem tenable long term.
> more likely an eventual move to a single pronoun that applies to everyone
Oh god i hope. As a german, we have pronouns for all nouns. So far no societal backlash against those, but they just seem totally useless to me (beside maybe a teeny tiny bit of "forward error correction"). You just have to learn them. Surest way to spot an immigrant. Then there is job titles. In the US, "nurse" seems to be used for both genders, but the words origin is female. Yeah, we have that as well for many jobs. Others usually have suffixes. Ofc we want to be welcoming to all. You can imagine the job listings...
You can't 'break' a language. You either just follow its rules or flaunt them. If your output is still comprehensible - which 'it' as a pronoun is - it's still language. Back in the day English used to have two pronouns for 'you'. Was merging them both into one pronoun also literally breaking the language?
She's actively making the language less comprehensible by breaking the rules. Multiple times in this thread, people have said "it" and I've been confused as to what - or who - they're referring to.
I'm not a language historian, so I don't have an opinion on your last question.
Really not. Most sentences can be easily rewritten without pronouns. I know a bunch of trans people and have trouble remembering who likes to be called what, so I just reduced the number of direct references. It's not that hard to do, because most conversations don't involve so many subjects that it becomes complex.
People seem to be assuming that this request for certain pronoun usage is made in good faith. Asking to be called "it" is probably just trolling on "its" part. "It" would probably laugh at the people bending over backwards to accommodate.
Have you considered that someone who chooses "it/its" as its pronouns is intentionally trying to break the English language with said choice? In this case, it is Swiss, and therefore it is likely not a native English speaker which could be a factor as well.
The singular only version of "they" is "they", just like the singular only version of "you" is "you". "You" was formerly plural, with "thou" as singular, but "thou" has since fallen into disuse.
> "You" was formerly plural, with "thou" as singular, but "thou" has since fallen into disuse.
Sadly. Overloading "you" and "they" feels rather clunky. I wish it got rid of "he" and "she" instead - gendering pronouns is completely useless, and that's coming from someone whose native tongue genders much more than just pronouns...
You was always both singular and plural, but in the singular form it was the formal second person pronoun, whereas thou was the second person singular informal pronoun; it's the same as the difference between du/Sie in German, tu/vous in French, or je/u in Dutch. This is why the King James bible uses thou: it's intended to feel more accessible to its readers with a friendly tone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You says the singular "you" didn't occur until Modern English, and the singular form 'ye' died out in the 1600s with early Modern English.
The King James Bible, published 1611, uses "ye" as the singular form of the formal "you", as in "Ye shall know them by their fruits."
] In a period of rapid linguistic change the translators avoided contemporary idioms, tending instead towards forms that were already slightly archaic, like verily and it came to pass.[87] The pronouns thou/thee and ye/you are consistently used as singular and plural respectively, even though by this time you was often found as the singular in general English usage, especially when addressing a social superior (as is evidenced, for example, in Shakespeare). ...
] Another sign of linguistic conservatism is the invariable use of -eth for the third person singular present form of the verb, as at Matthew 2:13: "the Angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dreame".
I've been trying to figure this out and just end up being more confused.
One issue is that song's use of "ye" seems to be from the 1750s, so about 150 years after the KJV usage, which in turn was somewhat archaic. English changes.
> In Early Modern English, ye functioned as both an informal plural and formal singular second-person nominative pronoun. "Ye" is still commonly used as an informal plural in Hiberno‐English and Newfoundland English
So it's possible that the KJV uses "ye" only for formal singular second-person, even if was also used more widely used for informal plural, and as that informal plural became more widely used, it became the go-to way to translate the Latin, which is in plural.
Sure, but that’s not what the page says. The Wikipedia article says that. The page says “it/she”. From what I’m familiar with, the order is usually “singular/plural” and when multiple are preferred I’m used to seeing it written as you notated it here as pairs in a list e.g. she/her, him/his, they/them, it/its, xe/xim, etc, in a list. I guess I can infer that’s the intention, however, which is fair enough.
But that really didn’t have much to do with what I was discussing. That was a separate argument about how we use “it” to refer to objects as a rule. Humans are objects, but we also generally prefer to think of them as objects of a higher order variety. In conversation, we take advantage of this to parse and interpret context more quickly. Choosing to do otherwise makes it more difficult to know if the “it” I just used in this sentence is Maia, some other object, or an abstract point I’m making in this discussion. Anyway, that’s why I prefer she/her.
> Perhaps this is just my autism speaking, but am I the only one who gets completely freaked out by sentences like the above?
Hi, fellow autist here.
Yes, it feels like my brain hits some speedbumps with that particular pronoun. I wouldn't say I get "freaked out" though; it's just unfamiliar yet.
Despite what other comments claim, I doubt this is agrammatical. "It" is part of the same grammatical class (the class of pronouns!!) and so fits anywhere "he" or "she" does.
> "It" refers to inanimate objects, things which can't have free will
Could you bring yourself to see the choice of "it/its" pronouns exactly as a self-identification with things that feel no agency of their own? I don't know why Maia claims those pronouns, but I'd get this motivation for sure.
This is the result of most of progressive society saying that it is socially acceptable for a person's preference of expression to mean more than grammar and clearness of communication.
It may do so in English, but it is Swiss, so probably also speaks German, where 'it' - 'es' is Genus Neutrum, exactly meaning neutral gender. For example 'the child' - 'das Kind' is neutrally gendered. Hope this makes sense.
In English, animals are routinely referred to as "it", and they're obviously animate.
So, at most it could be said that "it" doesn't normally refer to persons... but even that's not true if you include sci-fi in your definition of "English language". When dealing with topics such as non-standard biological sex and/or gender fluidity, older sci-fi works would often use "it" for such people without any implication of non-personhood.
I find it particularly amusing that you used the wrong pronoun while scolding me to use the correct pronouns for her.
If that doesn't prove the impracticality of using "it" as a pronoun, I don't know what does.
It breaks the rules of English that we all understand subconsciously, so it's difficult to do without consciously thinking about every single usage of a pronoun in a sentence, which is not how most people type.
I use the word "they" in that context all the time regardless of gender or pronoun. I actually thought about that before using it. It's a common use of the word "they" in casual English.
