Gender Neutral Pronouns: They're Here, Get Used To Them
Вставка
- Опубліковано 4 лип 2013
- There are important corrections to this video. Visit here: www.tomscott.com/gender-neutr... or pull down the description to read them. Original description: Grammatical gender is a silly concept. So I'm about to go against my vow of descriptivism, and risk being run over by the Linguistic Mafia's bus, and say this: it's a silly idea.
CORRECTIONS
March 9th, 2019
Back in 2013, I made a video about ‘singular they’ and gender-neutral pronouns. Looking back on it with half a decade of hindsight, there are several things I want to correct. I also have a few thoughts on how the reactions to it have changed over time, and why the video’s comments will remain off.
Firstly, while editing the video, I cut the first sentence of the script. That sentence didn’t seem to add anything, and I’m a believer in ‘don’t bore us, get to the chorus’. That would have been fine - if only the script didn’t refer back to that first sentence later on, noting that the viewer probably didn’t notice the singular they in it.
There used to be an annotation explaining that mistake, but UA-cam’s deleted all annotations now. I regret the error.
Secondly, I mentioned that recently-coined gender-neutral prounouns (hir, xe, etc) haven’t caught on in regular usage, and that trying to deliberately add new words into a language is extremely difficult. I think that’s true, but my tone was a bit too dismissive - there was an implied value judgment there. I’d rephrase that in a second video.
And finally, I co-opted a couple of LGBT slogans, both in the title of the video and the video itself. Those aren’t my slogans to rewrite, and adding ‘with apologies to’ in the reference line isn’t a great way of solving that. Looking back, I’m uncomfortable with those.
Changing times
In 2013, the video was uncontroversial. You can see that in this chart of likes and dislikes over time from UA-cam’s analytics tool:
[graph available on www.tomscott.com/gender-neutr... ]
The video received very few dislikes until 2016. And I remember the comments from back then: those dislikes weren’t from angry conservative types. Instead, those were speakers of languages that used grammatical gender - they were angry that I’d insulted their language!
But you can see the tide start to shift in 2016. This is why I turned off comments: it seems that a small number of people with limited empathy deliberately search out videos about subjects like this just so they can hit ‘dislike’, leave awful comments that are usually one of a few toxic in-jokes, and go. UA-cam's moderation tools remain desperately inadequate at dealing with that problem without appointing full-time moderators, and frankly, that would be time and money that could be better spent on almost anything else. For that reason, the comments are going to remain off.
If I were to remake this video in 2019, the most significant change would be focus: the title would be all about singular they, not gender-neutral pronouns. It probably wouldn’t even mention LGBT issues beyond a quick reference. It wouldn’t be a shout of hey, did you know about these folks, because five years later, most people watching the video do. Instead, it’d be a quiet nod of I see you.
What worked for a 2013 audience doesn’t work in 2019.
It seems that, over the last few years, non-binary and trans folks have reached stage three on the Williams Scale: ‘then they fight you’. Hopefully, it won't take long to reach stage four: ‘then you win’.
This comment section was reasonable a few years ago when I put this video up, but now it seems like there's a lot more kneejerk-reaction boors who comment without watching the video. Everything's already been said and I'm sick of banning jerks, so I'm closing these comments. (And yes, I accidentally trimmed the "very first sentence" that I refer to while I was editing. I regret the error!)
down south we also have "y'all"
"She" in german is "Sie". The formal version of "you" is also "Sie". And "They" is also "sie". I think we got a problem.
And then there's us Finns, who have no kind of gender words for anything. For example he or she are both " hän " in Finnish.
Just bring back thee/thou/thy/thine and get it over with.
I never knew that blond and blonde weren't interchangeable.
ValiantVole // SanicSquad a better example would be waiter and waitress
I see - actor and actress as well. Although, are they not nouns?
A lot of times when someone doesnt really know if a person is female or male 'they' say 'they' this isnt a new thing at all but people are acting like it is.
I've been using "they" and the only problem I've encountered are a few flustered self-proclaimed grammarians. Most people don't even notice I'm using it. I can't imagine going back.
+That Guy 007 It'll usually be pretty clear from context. If it's not, you can always supplement with "they all" (th'all?), just like we do with "you".
a key is... heavy?
In Spanish:
His table = su mesa
Her table = su mesa
Their table = su mesa
What about just "table"?
I love how in Spain computers are male (el ordenador) but in Latin America they are female (la computadora) 😆
Mine identifies as a leaf on a palm tree.
+carmarcam98 and thats how a computer virus spreads
+carmarcam98 Hispanic America, not Latin America.
In Slovenia they are male too
As a native French speaker, I can't imagine how hard it must be to learn what words are 'male' and others are 'female'. There's just no logic behind it !
What I find interesting about the use of "they" as singular is that it's kinda the same thing as what happened to "you". As in, "you" used to be exclusively plural while "thou" was exclusively singular, then "you" became both plural and singular, and "thou" got phased out. Now "they" is being used as singular too (and has been used as singular before, but in less specific cases) - the only difference is it's not really phasing any other pronoun out.
I've been using "their/them/they" in place of an unknown gendered pronoun since the 1980s. is it really a new phenomenon?
The only thing that ever surprised me was finding out last year that up until recently it was considered correct and not at all insensitive to use the pronoun "it" for all babies.
I kind of laughed at "if that surprises you, you need to get out more" because the only times I've ever in my life encountered this gender discussion thing, or people who identify differently, have been times when I'm sitting at home on my laptop or phone -being rather antisocial..
Great video! I find it funny how my English teacher said, "singular 'they' is grammatically incorrect," when she uses it constantly!
moutardism you could have even said "they use it all the time" and you would be correct
moutardism No examples?
Max Is Mad She says things like, "Who left their planner on their desk?" if that's what you were asking
Max Is Mad No need to get so mad :p
It's partly the point of the video. If she paid attention to what she was saying, and stayed true to her belief that "they" can't be singular, she would have said something like "Who left his or her planner on his or her desk"
moutardism no one says that -_-
I'm sure this comment section will go over well.
Blond and blonde? I didn't realize that was different. In my part of the US we use blonde for both genders
Oh, so that's the difference between blond and blonde.
2:07 Minor nitpick: his motions don't match the order of the cards.
Hah Chinese doesn't have this problem. But it has so much more ;7;
+ConWolf well, verbal chinese doesn't, but written chinese does.
+darkbuttrfly Also it has measure words, which are like the single dumbest things in language ever.
I would disagree on them being dumb haha, we as english speakers just aren't used to it.
+1Ewery1 Haha they're kind of weird but honestly, most people turn to 個 for most things anyways (my parents are native Chinese speakers). We still use specific measure words like the ones for clothes very often though. Since I can speak Chinese fluently, it comes as naturally as anything else in the language.
darkbuttrfly I guess, but they're mostly useless. When I was in China it seems like everyone just used 个 anyways, but I could be wrong.
Fact: In Turkish there is no separation of "she" and "he" and "it" , there is only one 3rd person pronoun which is "o"
Personally what I find questionable about always using he or she isn't that a few people don't fit that description but rather that is suggest that the gender of a person is always relevant to the subject. Especially when talking about a hypothetical person I find it irritating to have to assign them a gender to talk about them even if that is in no way relevant to what I'm trying to say.
+Elise Weusthuis my native language is german and (while I DO also think that every noun having a gender is unnecessary and hard to learn) we would just say "the person" everytime instead of he/she when talking about a hypothetical person (Yes, a bit complicated too I know !).
+Elise Weusthuis We only have 1 third person pronoun in Estonian :)
Also we use this word to refer to other animals besides humans.
+relo999 Not at all. It's awkward if you want to write or speak about people in general and have to chose a gender, which implies you are only talking about one gender.
relo999 You are right but in different languages 'they' isn't always gramatically correct.
relo999 Maar in het 2e geval zullen mensen er eerder van uit gaan dat het over een vrouw gaat. Zegmaar in een zin als 'Als de dokter een operatie doet gebruikt hij/zij een scalpel' Als je daar 'zij' zegt lijkt het een vrouw en als je 'gebruiken zij' zegt heb je het ineens over meerdere doktoren. Daarnaast heb je nog dat heel veel beroepen een mannelijke en vrouwelijke vorm hebben. Een boer is een man en een boerin is een vrouw, je kunt er dan bijna niet onderuit om er een te kiezen.
I'm a native French speaker and even though every noun in French has a "gender" I never actually thought of feminine noun as being feminine, nor of masculine nouns being masculine. I know it sounds absolutely impossible, but to me, giving a "gender" to words has absolutely nothing to do with actual genderism. Rather, it's just a way of making them sound more pleasant to the ear, and having them fit better in sentences. Yes, it's a bitch to learn, as there is no actual rule to determine what gender a noun is, you just gotta learn it, word by word.Plus it makes the writing and reading a bit harder. But I do believe that it adds a lot of beauty to the language. Without it, French certainly wouldn't be as pleasant to the ear as it is.
+Ray Evans I'm still confused as to how it's harder to learn. The way I see it, it's just an added syllable to the word, although not attached.
Ray Evans Oh, okay. That makes sense now. Thanks! :)
+Ray Evans Interesting. By conjugation errors do you mean spelling errors or actual wrong grammar in spoken French? I'm German and our kids stop mixing up conjugations in primary school or shortly thereafter. Then again, our spelling is very straightforward.
+Ray Evans I agree with that. But I think spelling is easier for non-native speakers. Think of "would of" in English, it's a common mistake for native speakers which people who learned English as a second language never make.
+crazy808ish Not really, when we're dealing with a language, that has complicated declination. Let's look at Polish. "He" is "on" and "she" is "ona". But when you say "he/she (is missing)" you say either "jego" or "jej". "(I'm giving it to) him/her" is "jemu/jej". "(I'm talking to) him/her" i "jego"/"ją". "with him/her" i "Z nim/nią", "About him/her" is "o nim/niej". And there is neutral gender (similar, but not identical with male) and two genders (maleperson and non-maleperson) in plural.
In Russian we would say "Tom Scott обновил СВОЁ изображение профиля", which means something like "Tom Scott updated SELF profile picture". Means his/her/its own picture
As a Finn, it is a little bit confusing while learning new languages, and the gender related words, since we only have the word "hän", and it does not give any information, other than that the target is human.
I don't know how it is with other Germans, but I don't think of keys as jagged, hard or heavy or think of a bottle wearing a pink dress. In general I don't associate any attributes to an object just by gender alone. And I have only ever heard such associations from people trying to learn German as a second language, who try to associate gendermarkers to objects just to remember the correct article.
Yet you're still putting gender on it. Though you're not consciously thinking about it, you're still doing it.
***** because the language requires to do so. Still doesn't mean I put gender markers on objects.
buciallstar
You don't really realizes what subconsciously means do you? Not only that but the language requiring it at all is still what's wrong. You're still implying an intimate object has a gender roll.
***** you don't understand the german language. The gender of a noun doesn't imply the sex of the noun. In german, gender is a grammatical structure and sex is well the sex of a biological creature.
In german, the word for girl has a neuter gender. That literally doesn't mean that the girl doesn't have a female sex.
Yeah, English speakers have a hard time understanding that it's more about the grammar and phonotactics(at least in Bulgarian). It's funny that a _linguist_ would say this sort of thing, because it sort of really demonstrates the bias in thinking caused by his own native language.
The English speaking countries have it easier, they don't have grammatical genders like Italians, French, Spanish, etc etc etc. I can't think of a neutral gender in my own language, because we don't have one. However, when it comes to objects, we don't really mean a bottle is a girl or the sun is male, it's just how romance languages evolved.
did he dieded
yes they did
well played, sir ... i mean it... they? hmmm
just use "well played". the sir is offensive.
yes, ma'am
They died, yes.
I've been using "they" as a singular gender neutral pronoun since I started studying English 15 years ago. I always thought it was common.
In Bulgarian we have grammatical genders too, which seemed natural to me until I tried learning German.
I love how you gave yourself the job of writing "linguistic mafia" in the bus
"Some people are 'they'
Get over it"
Brilliant
"Source: The Outside World"
Haha :D
+Barry Smith Tom Scott basically became my hero at this point.
D600Active I agree. Very interesting videos.
+Barry Smith This is a youtube comment thread, where the assholes congregate...
D600Active
Haha :D
Kilves X
"Mentally stable" is a relatively meaningless term, unless you're talking about mental stability in the context of an individual, not "humanity" as a whole.
Besides. Gender is 10% biological, 90% psychological. It's largely dependent on the configuration of the human brain. To claim that other genders "don't exist" is just the same as claiming that it's impossible for the human brain to be composed structurally in a way that already satisfies the laws of physics.
Here in germany, we have a big discussion about if the Breadspread called "Nutella" is female or neutral.
The manufacturer itself sais "die Nutella"(feminime), but there are still some dumb people who get angry about it and say it its "das Nutella"(neutral). It is one example for a system, which has no big purpose and only confuses foreign learners and also some Mother tongues.
But i would miss it tbh
I speak both German and Spanish, and I didn't associate "key" with any gender stereotype. I don't do that for any words based on their grammatical gender, it doesn't even cross my mind to do so. I can see why native english speakers might do that, though.
I use they all the time without thinking about it
in africa here we have gender pronouns for items, but i dont have many items hahaha.
Using "they" in place of "he" or "she" sounds awkward at first to me, but I really do like it. Makes things less awkward when addressing someone or a group of people.
Stefan Kojadinov not at all. "Your" is a possessive. "You're" is a contraction. You have to be a moron to not know the difference in their context. You're just making them relate somehow when they actually don't. And language evolves. It doesn't "dumb down" as you seem to think. If things do change with gender neutral pronouns, there would have be new grammar rules. It wouldn't just become some moshpit of speech. If anything, you're the moron for thinking that's the case. Now stop trying to act smart with your swearing and your uppercase typing.
Teddy Catnip No, if you NEED context it's dumbing down you moron.
Stefan Kojadinov you still haven't said why "your" and "you're" is relevant to this conversation. And once again, language evolves. That doesn't necessarily make it for the better, but it doesn't "dumb down" as you so stupidly think.
You must also really think that languages that already are using gender neutral pronouns are "dumbed down" languages, huh?
Teddy Catnip Evolves? Cause making it simpler is evolving? Man, no words how stupid you are. I don't see what you don't get to be honest If you NEED context it's bad and can lead to many misunderstandings, end of story. Needing context=bad. End of story
Stefan Kojadinov you really didn't get what I was saying. I said language evolves. When something evolves, it changes, for better or for worse. How can you even attempt to argue grammar with me when you clearly don't know what evolve means?
Now you just need to start using the royal "we", and the singular will be indistinguishable from the plural. The person will become the group, the group will become the person... A linguistic conclusion to collectivist thinking.
Vestin Okay, that is clever. I just hope it is not another complaint about changes in language.
Laetitian Madhatter That depends on what you have in mind. I'm not nearly insane enough to insist that English should never change in any way, but that doesn't mean I will automatically agree with everything. Just because I disagree with something, it doesn't mean that I will fail to recognize it as (linguistic) reality, however.
*I guess you might expect that I'd be for changes which help us make things clearer rather than the ones that cloud differences*... Not necessarily. Ambiguous third person can be useful when you lack the appropriate information (or when writing a book where you refuse to provide it), but "they" would obscure things even further. It DOES the job, but it's ugly.
I use "eee" to refer to gender neutrality because it ends both he and she so...
I bet ee would be reall mad.
+Vestin *cough* Anthem by Ayn Rand. c:
+Drigeolf The trouble is not the gender, you can always use “he” to mean a person of any gender where gender is not important. The trouble is when people use “they” as a singular pronoun: “Zeynep changed _their_ profile picture” sounds really stupid when you “Zeynep changed _her_ profile picture” sounds just ok. “They” has taken too many functions due to excessive political correctness and causes ambiguity. Kafayı yerim şu tekil they yüzünden valla :))
Funny and sad at the same time that years later people are still arguing about if those some people (the ones that are they) exist. I ran into this through recommend videos, thought about people I run into who would be all offended over the concept, and then read a few comments and was basically like "Oh. Of course they've been here being clueless and hateful. Why wouldn't they?"
It must be nice to have a language so simple you can basically do whatever you want with it and it still sounds okay-ish.
I totally agree. In fact, They as a genderless pronoun only became 'wrong' quite recently, and really there's just no point in insisting it's definitely a collective.
"Source: the outside world" I about died at that part
Whoever edited this wasn't listening. 2:08
in portuguese they and their have to be male or female
"they" can be "eles" (masculine) or "elas" (feminine)
"their" can be "deles" (masculine) or "delas" (feminine)
I know.. And I hate it. I want to be called by my correct pronouns but unfortunately I can't ( porque o brasil é uma merda ajhsjdjs )
Guess what! In Persian there are NO gender specific pronouns! All nouns are gender-neutral and we don't even have "Definite Article"! The lack of gender-specific pronouns sometimes leads to longer sentences and issues with writing as you have to specify the gender of your characters somehow but in general it's not a big issue. But imagine how frustrating it was for me to learn Italian!
I don't see what's the problem many English speakers have with singular they. I learnt to use that pronoun for unidentified gender before I even knew what binary gender meant. It's not hard to grasp that concept and I wish Portuguese had an equivalent to they.
I'm okay with grammatical gender. I think English speakers too often think of "natural gender" when they think of "gender". But "grammatical gender" is different from "natural gender". Grammatical gender is merely a way of classifying words that need to agree in a language. It's a classification system. You might as well call it "category 1", "category 2", and "category 3". All the modifiers associated with a noun in a sentence will match in their structure. An adjective will change its structure to match either a "masculine" or "feminine" noun. English speakers see this as ludicrous, because we know from experience that it's not necessary to express oneself. But in a lot of languages it seems ludicrous that you wouldn't want/need your modifiers to match what they're modifying. There are a lot of features that English has that aren't necessary. People of other languages are probably laughing and wondering why we still have them. We're thinking the same thing about their language.
My only issue with "they" is that it's not possible to tell if it is "one" or "more than one", and generally I am used to it being the latter.
I mostly agree. But to some extent I have the same problem with "you". Unless it's abundantly clear from the context, I always tend to assume "you" is singular. And sometimes that assumption is wrong, which can lead to minor confusion in the next few sentences. "They" is not that different in that sense.
Raizin I'm a Texan, so You is always singular and Y'all is always plural.
***** That's a bit dramatic - capitalization in English is already weird enough. Also, how could you tell the difference at the start of a sentence?
***** That only works for written language though... Which is a bit limiting...
***** The "it's clear in context" argument can be applied to written text as well.
"there are folks who don't want to be identified as either he or she and if that surprises you, you need to get out more." I LOVE YOU AND THIS VIDEO
Mandarin is interesting here: 他(ta1): He, 她(ta1): She, 它(ta1): It. Same word in spoken language but distinguished when written.
did anyone notice that when he pointed at "he" "she" and "it" they weren't in the right place
One linguist to another, I've been using singular 'they' for as long as I can remember, it just makes so much more sense.
When I was writing essays in the 4th grade I would often accidentally use they or their instead of singular pronouns because that's what came to mind.
I as a Spanish speaker (Argentinian) got curious about what you said about describing objects based on gender, so I asked around for people to describe three objects (it was about 50 people I had asked), most described the objects objectively (pardon the redundancy) and when they used words that might have been influenced by the "gender" of the object they were asked if they found a connection between the gender and the way they used to describe it, I've found most didn't, only five doubted if they did or did not.
2:30
"Source: The outside world"
LMAO
My only complain about English is the use of the neutral gender "it" when speaking of animals, I just can't get used to it, it just feels wrong.
Using "she/he" when talking about animals in English is perfectly correct when you know their sex (and when it does matter). You may say for example "I have a dog. She is pregnant."
I don't like it either. "It" makes it feel like it's a thing. Like you are taking away part of it's rights as a living creature.
Yeah, I've never understood that, I mean, it's not that hard to just use they instead. It's not just animals either, people use it for babies that are very young or unborn which, again, I'm not sure why people don't just say they.
***** No. Are you? Or do you just have anger issues?
***** What are you on about? I didn't say anything about hurting animals feelings. I am not even a vegetarian. But calling something "thing" takes away part of their rights as living creatures.
I'm glad finnish language doesn't have any of these or articles.
"Hän" is for everyone.
Though we use "se" more often which basically means "it" but it sounds more natural than "hän" :D
Minne se meni? (Where did it go?)
Se meni kauppaan. (It went to the store.)
2016 and I'm 19 now. I have never ever considered that a singular they would be a problem. I always thought it was just third person in general; in that you can either use it for a group, an entity, or just to describe someone in third person. THAT BEING SAID - I am in New Zealand.... we talk different here
Strange that we still refer to ships as "she."
My theory is that men (the only ones who would sail ships 100s of years ago) wanted to call them beautiful, but since only females could be beautiful (apparently) they called them 'she'.
+Shawn Ravenfire I would say that that's not about language but instead tradition.
+Toby Butcher Well, tradition is intertwined with culture which in turn influences language. The three are seldom mutually exclusive.
+Shawn Ravenfire Not exactly. According to the nautical press, ships have been "he" for some time now.
+Shawn Ravenfire Ships are vessels, you enter them.
Yeah, grammatical gender is stupid. For example, in German every fruit is feminine (eg: die Melone, die Banane, die Orange, die Birne, die Kirsche, die Weintraube ...) except for the apple (der Apfel), which makes no sense at all.
+HannosWelt | @HennoeR der pfirsich?!
+Vojak3 rofl that's the kind of nationalist bullshit I was looking for
+Vojak3 Thats stupid. You sound like you are coming from BuzzFeed.
+HannosWelt | @HennoeR why are germans telling fruits to die??????
+HannosWelt | @HennoeR
Yes, but the impression this video gives of peoples conception of objects with regards to gender here is in my view quite exaggerated - it has quite little effect, because the gendering of the words makes little sense to begin with, or is sometimes completely contradictory, like "Die Männlichkeit", masculinity being a feminine noun.
I never knew the blond/blonde rule, I just assumed it was a difference in U.S./UK spellings and call everyone with light hair "blonde".
Not only Shakespeare, but writers such as Dickens, Austen, and Hemingway. I figure if they can do it, so can I.
Grammatical gender actually has some pretty subtle and even beautiful uses in languages like French, but it has no greater role than that, and is pretty meaningless on the whole.
It's the little things that make this video great.
Ex. Look at the source around 2:25
To refer to the viewers, y'all always works
In Danish we got "dual-gender" and "non-gender" (would be the most direct ways to translate it at least I think)
might be, I only know the danish words for them :P
Fælleskøn = common. Intetkøn = neuter.
I was told that the danish pronouns don't really mean anything and that it's kind of random which one is used; just that "en" is more common that "et"
Don't usually comment on videos, but it is an interesting question.
In some ways grammatical gender can be confusing, and I always had a great deal of difficulty in languages such as German with 'der', 'die', and 'das'. Then I realised the problem was not with 'der', 'die', and 'das', but simply that we call it gender. If we just said they were three different cases, and ignored any sexual connotation, then why worry about it. In English, we have no difficulty understanding whether to use 'a' or 'an' depending on the word following; so what is the difficulty about using 'der' or 'die' or 'das' depending on the word following (and not worrying too much about the assumptions associated with sex and gender).
Hfil66 Your comment makes A LOT of sense to me. :)
In English there's a clear rule when something is 'a' or 'an'. In German you just need to know. For me, that is one detail that makes German so difficult to learn, not the fact that linguistics call it gender.
Hello. I'm a 15-year-old guy from a city near Barcelona, and I'm a native speaker of Catalan and Spanish, but I also speak English and a bit of French. I know that you probably won't read this but I want to say it anyway. I've been following you for a while and I really enjoy your videos, I think they're very interesting and I've learnt a lot. I don't usually write comments on videos but I wanted to give my opinion: I'm a little upset because of what you said about gramatical gender. I understand that you criticise a particular feature of some languages, which is perfectly normal since everyone should be able to give their opinion about anything they want to but saying that it's silly is a bit excessive I think, and you might offend some people. Just because you aren't used to it doesn't mean that it's useless. Catalan and Spanish have this feature, and for me it's perfectly normal and without it they would be worse in my opinion. Oh, and it doesn't mean that inanimate objects turn into people and they become male or female, but that the words are masculine or feminine, which is a big difference. And that might influence the way some people think, but some other features of English also influence the way English speakers think. Including not having gramatical gender. But I don't mean to criticise. I'm respectful with other languages (as you in all your other videos that I've seen), and plus I think that English is a really beautiful language. But Spanish and Catalan too. In spite of having gramatical gender. Which is not a bad thing at all. It's one of the things that make languages to be different from each other, to be richer, to be beautiful. And it's useful to tell words apart and to use metaphors, which in my opinion have a deeper meaning thanks to that. But I'm not here to defend it. And I'm sorry if that makes this kind of languages harder to learn because these words don't have a logical pattern (and actually most of them do). But it's what makes languages special. And I'm not criticising English for having phrasal verbs, for example, which is a comparable case. Or for having to mention the subject of each sentence or to include a subject for almost always (in Catalan and Spanish we have what is called a "sujeto elíptico", in Spanish (I think that's called a null-subject in English but I'm not quite sure)). And I don't think that's bad at all. It's just different. And I'm not criticising it because these things make English more special.
Thanks for your videos;) And thank you if you've read my comment.
Òscar.
Gran comentario.
marmjtin Gracias:)
tl;dr
oscaar_39 too long, but read it anyway. good comment.
oscaar_39 estudios en leguas y la forma en que tu idioma informa tu pensamiento han demostrado que todo lo que el dijo es verdad. el exagero solo por el efecto humorístico no lo puedes tomar tan a mano. la verdad es que la falda de un genero neutral que pueda ser usado the forma personal es necesario y que el esta igual mente criticando a las personas que juzgan que "they/them/their" no se puede usar singularmente en ingles. a el no le importa que tener generos para cosas haze el idioma mas dificil. NO LE IMPORTA el es un liguista. al linguista le interesa las características del idioma. por eso el dice que normalmente no quiere juzgar y que rompio su promesa de no juzgar los idiomas.
el genero gramático tiene un gran efecto subconsciente que esta ligado a el machismo . ahi el lenguaje no es el problema y el no dice que es el problema. pero el idioma aun así se puede usar para demostrar el problema. para idiomas con géneros gramaticales la idea no es desmantelar el idioma( el esta en contra de tratar de cambiar el idioma a la fuerza). estos son temas diferentes. la necesidad de una opción (UNA OPCION) neutral en idiomas para ser inclusivos de gente fuera de lo que en ingles se refiere al "gender binary" (no se el termino en castellano). el otro problema es el machismo que es expresado a travez de los limites y las characteristicas de los idiomas
In Sweden han is he, hon is she. Apparently they added hen recently, a singular version of they
Depends on what you mean by recently, the word can be traced back to 1966
facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150601729734077&set=o.191186619054&type=1&theater
Kristian Jörgensen In the scale of linguistic evolution, 48 years is very recent.
"Source: the outside world." :D
Btw the little source banner is quite cool!
My English teacher argues with us when we use "they" or "their" to describe a persons writing when we dont know the gender.
She says "It's obviously a she, look at the hand writing". This one girl almost ripped her head off for saying stuff like that
you probably got this a lot from the comments on this video but it really means the world to me that you acknowledged non-binary gender in a non-shitty-and-closed-minded way.
I have been waiting so long to finally speak out on this. Identifying inanimate objects with a gender is without a doubt the dumbest idea of any language.
1CombustionMan It's perfectly fine, you just aren't used to it. If they were to be removed, the whole language crumbles, everything would sound weird.
1CombustionMan I like it for poetry. Dunno why....
***** It's a finesse that I feel English is seriously lacking. I miss that feature in English; without it, language is maybe more concise, but feels sterile.
Miladin Ercegovcevic finesse? It's clunky and cumbersome . English is a langauge of getting right to the point. It doesn't need gender Identifiers like une chaise and una bottiglia. It's just unnecessary.
Miladin Ercegovcevic logical is not the same as sterile, and just because something is messy doesn't mean it's artistic or delicate.
So this is a pretty recent thing, yes? Because I remember arguing with my English teacher about 2 years ago and she insisted that there is no such thing as a singular "they".
***** Singular they has been used since the 18th century, but a lot of people don't know that
HM01 even older than that, 14th century! In fact the use of so-called "generic he" as well as "he or she" are much more recent, brought about by snobby 19th century [male] grammarians.
***** Teachers can be stupid and ignorant. There's no rule that says that teachers can't be wrong.
***** Hashtag wasn't a word then either. Things do change
FMAiscool Yes it was. Twitter has been around since '06.
And, since it apparently wasn't obvious, I was the one arguing *for* the singular they since I had heard it a bunch of times before.
French made a (somewhat controversial) rules : if you don't know, use "il" (he) and not "il ou elle" (he or she).
Some people are starting to use "ielle".
The german word for "they" is "sie", which is also third person singular female.
Damn, does my language complicate everything...
In Cantonese, 佢 (keoi) is used as a third-person singular pronoun regardless of case (he/him/his/she/her/it/its/etc) :D
grammatical gender is more about spelling and flow then literal gender, that's why 'inanimate' can be a gender. In german most words that end in an e are feminine, the cat is 'die Katze' and that sounds better than 'der Katze'. It only actually has anything to do with biological gender when in reference to humans, and in that case it is helpful because you can make more distinctions between people when talking about a third party 'he gives her the book' is more obvious in meaning than 'they give them a book'.
"and in that case it is helpful because you can make more distinctions between people when talking about a third party 'he gives her the book' is more obvious in meaning than 'they give them a book'."
That advantage disappears when we're talking about people of the same gender, so it isn't really too significant.
Really, gender-neutral pronouns are *much* more convenient than having to remember which gender goes to each noun. I mean, most languages that have gendered nouns don't have very consistent rules on which words are male and which are female, so it's usually an unwieldy, pointless mess. In English, all objects are "it", and *that's really damn convenient*.
Fernie Canto Okay, so it is a little pointless, but it makes for good flow and it does make it obvious who is doing what to who when talking about people of both genders, while not always being helpful it does take away some ambiguity.
So yeah, not perfectly necessary but what are you going to do? make everyone change the way they speak? no. I'll continue saying he and she regardless if a small minority doesn't use those words.
RAGNARTHEVIKING9595
"So yeah, not perfectly necessary but what are you going to do? make everyone change the way they speak?"
That happens all the time in every language. Languages change naturally over time, according to usage. As gender-neutral pronouns are becoming more necessary, future generations will use them without blinking, and will even wonder why the hell we didn't speak like that today...
Fernie Canto I was talking about forcing people to change the way they speak and how that's bad.
+Fernie Canto But, when using a gendered pronoun, you learn something about the noun - its gender. It can really help when there are a good chunk of people with names that belong to both genders.
And you shouldn't use two pronouns when talking about something that shares the same pronoun, be it "he", "she", "it", "they" or whatever pronoun because that complicates things for the reader.
If anything, gender neutral pronoun make the sentence structure more complex because then, you can use a pronoun for one of the people mentioned in the sentence and never the other, or it will cause the complication I've mentioned..
I don't hey why people don't like being called "they". I'm 100% biologically male and completely identify as such, and I don't even notice when some refers to me as "they".
That's because it's not a big deal, at all. It's just a pride thing, people are stupid.
I wonder how many times I've heard singular they without realizing it, before I actually learned about it. Now I am so accustomed to it that it comes naturally to me and sometimes even use it in German by accident. (Where it makes absolutely no sense.) I think pupils, who learn English as a foreign language, should learn this in high-school
I, my whole life, have used "They"
I just go with whatever people call me. my tits usually get me called her which is cool
+STLCODPS3123 No, they presumably aren't.
(that's me thinking you were referring to your own pronouns)
I'm in the UK where my tits and face generally get me a "love" followed by a confused "mate" after they hear my voice.
What is interesting about "they" is that some people (this is in the UK) go on to use plurals after using singluar "they" but context gets the meaning across as referring to the singular but it can create ambiguity. Meanwhile others use singular after singular "they" but that sounds clunky.
My native language Kapampangan (a Philippine regional language in the north), like other languages in my country, only have gender-neutral pronouns. There is also no distinction between "it" (inanimate) and the human third person pronoun "he/she". So in the sentence "Maragul ya," (He/She/It is big) the YA can be translated to he/she/it depending on the context. Also, our word for "man" as in mankind is gender-neutral: "Tau."
You = singular
You = plural
They = singular
They = plural
I have been using words like they and their as gender neutral pronouns for decades now.
PlasmaMongoose Me too. Strictly speaking it may be ungrammatical but its usefulness far outweighs that and I'm glad the usage has steadily risen in acceptability."If someone drinks too much they'll get a hangover". Another solution sometimes is to use "you" where the word refers to anybody. "You have to be strong to be a boxer." The Facebook usage is unintentionally humorous. It sounds as if Tom Scott has updated the profile of a number of unknown individuals ("their") rather than his own ("his"). Surely Facebook knows which sex Tom Scott is or could deduce it. (I don't use Facebook).
+Rosie6857 Facebook doesn't ask for sex, Facebook asks for gender.
Also, how would Facebook know or deduce what sex or gender Tom is for sure without asking him? And why would they hire anyone to check that?
in finnish hän = she/he
Also in Finnish se is usually 'it' but in spoken language it often means 'she/he', and it's not dehumanising to use it. Most foreigners still find this somehow nasty because in their language 'it' could never be used when talking of a human.
One theory as to why Finns tend to use 'se' a lot is that it's a much older and "Finn-er" word. Old Finnish, according to this, only had 'se' as its only third person pronoun. 'Hän' then emerged when the need to be fancy and differentiate and copy the Swedes arose (compare 'hän' in appearance with the Swedish 'hon/han'). And to me at least, 'hän' does sound a lot more clunky than 'se'.
I wish I had concrete proof to present with this, but alas, I have lost those sources.
HeapOfBones That sounds interesting! And it would make a lot of sense. It's a little sad that there's no way of proving this theory.
HeapOfBones We use "se" when talking about animals (in English it would be "it")
TheJanind That (+ non-humans in general) is indeed the official grammatical use but actual real life use obviously differs from that somewhat. The extent depends on your own dialect and idiolect of course (e.g. I'm a young southerner, so 'se' is my main pronoun of choice for almost all situations, as is the case with most of my peers).
Wow, that's interesting! I have been using "they" as a gender neutral term for ages and have thought it was weird. Also, a way to get around the whole "you = person you're talking to" as opposed to "you = a person that does something" (as in, you should avoid landmines), it is best to use "one" for the ladder.
In Sweden, we got "han" = "he", "hon" = "she" and "hen" = neutral.
when you hit 3:04 and rewind back to the beginning without reading the annotation!😂
"They" is okay but it always bothers me when someone uses it in a context where it's meaning changes based on whether or not there are multiple people. "They" approached me.
They were on the toilet when I phoned them.
Must have been crowded in that cubicle.
Jam Starling Yep, context is everything. The seat was up. That's how it happened.
+Zymoox excellently put. it's the ambiguity of the verb declension as much as the pronoun.
Most often, when 'they' is used, who 'they' are is already determined. It's only when you start swapping who you are referring to in a sentence that it could get confusing, but that can happen with he and she as well.
it's generally specified who you're talking about, if you use 'they' out of context, people will ask you who you're talking about, regardless whether it refers to a single person or a group of people.
You was once plural as well, for the singular, there was thou, now we use you for both singular and plural without problem, and in the few cases where it is unclear, just asking clarifies the situation.
I'm a native speaker of Russian and yeah, gendered words are confusing. But to me there's no association with actual gender. In Russian there's 3 genders for nouns Male, Female or Neutral. We also have 4 pronouns: оно (it) она (she) он (he) они (they)
The pronouns for it/she/he are used for objects.
Сегодня она не пошла на работу.
rough translation: Today she did not go to work.
Сегодня он не пошёл на работу.
rough translation: Today he did not go to work
Где окно?
Оно на стене.
translation: Where is the window?
It's on the wall.
The pronoun они (they) is used for plurals only.
Они приехали вчера.
rough translation: they arrived yesterday
Sorry if some things I've said aren't correct, even if I'm a native speaker, sadly my Russian isn't as good as it used to be.
h o t l i n e s l o t h . j p g You described it perfectly.
I love your language videos. As someone who is a native speaker of Swedish, learned English at a very young age, and have been studying Japanese for a while (granted, it's not exactly an impressive list of languages I know), I find these things very interesting. I once heard someone say that a language is not only a way to communicate, but also a way to view the world.
"Creeping it's way "? They has been used for singular for a long time
In russian "gender" of a noun depends on its ending, so the way the words around this word change make it easier to pronaunce.
This is unfortunately one of Tom Scott's less informed videos. Grammatical gender is a subset of lexical classification and is just one way some languages implement that feature. Broadly, it's a cognitive tool for the brain to categorize words, which he should have found searching the literature. Masculine and feminine are just labels society has come up with. The effects on thinking you've described are purely pragmatic; in other words, it's a case of one social convention producing a social subtext. Stated this way, it's not particularly surprising.
Blinky Lass I agree completely, it was a very strange thing to hear from a guy who seems into things like this. But it's fun to find out how people react to the way different languages and cultures are. Strictly descriptive approach would've been boring compared to this. :D
Blinky Lass I completely agree concerning what you say about the cultural impact which grammatical gender might have on gender perception, but I am not sure why you think he would not have been aware of the difference between grammatical gender and biological sex or gender.
Lexical classification is aided to some extent, but that does not mean he did not research that impact and concluded that it was insignificant. Which he would not really have had to cite a lot about, because that is not the point he was making.
Like he said, English still manges perfectly well without non-personal grammatical gender.
Blinky Lass He actually covers this. If three quarters of the world's languages don't have it, surely it's 'a cognitive tool for the brain to categorize words' that just isn't needed. I don't need any gender classification to understand what a chair or a computer is.
Total hogwash. If things needed to be gendered, why doesn't English have gender. Your point makes literally no sense.
No, you're saying because something exists, it is needed. So I guess Islamic State (by your logic) is needed, because it exists.
I'll keep this in mind the next time my teacher takes a point off for using they instead of he/she on a paper.
In Norwegian, most words that are primarily "female" words (ending in -a (-er) (-ene) you can chose do make the word "male" (which is still grammatically correct and change the ending of -a to -en, and since male words also end in -er and -ene you can change the words gender (in MOST cases). You cannot, however, change the gender-neutral words to a gendered word. So any word ending in -et stays neutral and you can't do anything.
But then you have the other Norwegian (Yes, there are two separate Norwegian languages, and most people don't speak the other one that well, due to the fact that they are VERY different), where the words gender is final, and you can't change it. And words in this Norwegian often have a different gender than in the other Norwegian. So a lot of times a word that is male in "bokmål" (one type of Norwegian) is more often than not female in "Nynorsk" (the other type of Norwegian).
Am I the only one who can't figure out where Tom used the singular they at the beginning of the video?
I guess you can't see or have deactivated annotations, then. Tom cut the line he's referring to from the video but forgot about the line that now confuses some people.
Sidenote: I really wish people would stop using "am I the only one", because unless the audience is very, very small, the answer is always "No, you're not".
Thanks for the info; I was on mobile so (annoyingly) annotations (still) don't pop up.
omgcow It's a common phrase, true, but it is entirely meaningless. It's filler. Casey here, whom I don't blame nor wish ill, could have simply typed "Where did Tom use the singular they at the beginning of the video?" and nothing of value would have been lost.
If anything, this phrase annoying me shows that I think about phrasing quite a bit. It might lead you to the conclusion that I might work with words. But then again, this is the internet and people prove their lack of imagination by calling others retarded for reasons known not even to themselves.
Tairneanach
My point is, they know they're not the only one, what they're really asking for confirmation or validation.
If you have a problem with that then you're not very understanding,
They can literally be the only one if the problem is with the device they used to watch the video.
The purpose of the sentence is to know if the problem they are having stems from their own end, or from, in this case, the video's end.
The best thing about the language I speak is that we agglutinate verbs with parts telling who is acting or acted upon and you can just leave out the subject of the sentence as it is if you want. You don't have to say "He ate an apple" just "Ate an apple" and the verb will have an ending that tells you all you need :D