From: Christian Weisgerber (naddy@mips.inka.de)
Date: Sat Mar 02 2002 - 18:41:38 MST
Andrew Clough <aclough@mit.edu> wrote:
> Until now I've been using (Ve / Vim / Ver / Verself) to represent people of
> unknown gender/no gender.
Note that Greg Egan, who introduced this pronoun set in his novel
_Distress_ and related stories, applied it to people of the *asex*
gender, which is very different from using it for an indeterminate
gender.
> standards, some of which might be more common. (Sie / hir / hirs /
> hirself) seems to be relatively common, but Sie = she in German
"Sie" is rather overloaded in German. It serves as
1. third person singular feminine (she),
2. third person plural (they), and
3. capitalized as formal second person singular and plural (you).
(The identity of #2 and #3 is the result of convergent reduction.
English escaped a similar fate by borrowing the Old Norse forms for
the third person plural. #3 is historically derived from #2.)
> Is Ve the (semi?) official extropy mailing list gender neutral pronoun?
I hope not, considering that this usage looks rather stupid to
people who are aware of its source.
FWIW, I think "they" works reasonably well as a gender-neutral
pronoun, and it has the distinct advantage that its usage in this
role pre-dates modern political correctness by several centuries.
-- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de
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