One other thing, to prove that I still deserve membership in the Prescriptivists’ Club: it’s “y’all”, folks, not “ya’ll”.
]]>Like Sergio Méndez said, it’s a written phenomenon. In spoken language, people usually try to get around that using both male and female words to address a group.
]]>Charles, I never ever heard a speach like that, and I doubt it ever happened. It is only a written phenomena, and only in certain formats
]]>This has not prevented the traditional Georgian idea of a woman’s place in the world to be the worst sort of barefoot, in the kitchen, and pregnant as often as possible patriarchal claptrap. While your point is well-taken that obviously there’s more than just language in achieving gender equality, it’s examples like these that make me doubt whether grammatical gender actually has much of an effect at ALL.
This is not to say that there isn’t a problem with people using ‘generic’ he in English; it clearly is still gendered. To return to the example I used before, it’s not just this guy that makes it semantically anomalous, but his as well. This is the evidence a linguist would use to suggest that he is still very much gendered in a way that you guys simply does not appear to be.
I liked the post very much, just to make clear, but as a linguist, I felt the need to quibble.
]]>For example, a pickpocket is not a kind of pocket. A highball (or speedball, for that matter) is not a kind of ball. Just because a string of phonemes happens to occur in the same order in a compound word and on its own in a different word, it does not mean it will have any of the same meaning. Brothel has nothing to do with broth.
]]>There’s a bit more to it than that.
I also love me some watermelons, and fried okra, and biscuits and cornbread. Fried chicken, too, but I don’t eat much meat anymore.
Erick,
Yeah, I’m familiar with the -@ construction from written (Internet) Spanish. I know that the standard rules from Romance languages would unambiguously solve the problem, but there are rules in some versions of English that do the same thing; in the privileged dialect, what you’re really supposed to do is just use he
(him,
his
) as a pronoun for a singular third person of indefinite gender. (E.g. If anyone knows of any reason why this union should not take place, let him speak now or forever hold his peace.
Purportedly the he
and his
don’t exclude a woman from speaking up or holding her peace.) That’s roughly equivalent to the defaulting-to-masculine rule in Romance pronouns. But the whole tussle here is over different ways that people have adopted to serve the same linguistic purpose while avoiding the sexist implications of treating maleness as the neutral
default and femaleness as a marked deviation from it. Some (including me) like to use she
as the default instead of he
(on the idea that it countervails against the tendency of treating masculinity as the default, while also calling attention to it). Others (also including me) like to use they
as a singular, which has long been a way that many people spontaneously speak anyway. (If anyone knows of any reason why this union should not take place, let them speak now, or forever hold their peace.
Sentences like that didn’t come to be widely condemned as incorrect,
by privileged-dialect grammar police, until about the 19th century.) Lots of people, especially in legal language or other contexts where exacting precision is considered much more important than style, use awkward constructions like he or she,
or ghastly formations like he/she,
s/he,
etc.
Some other people, especially those involved in trans activism or certain branches of academic feminism, like to make up new words that have little or no connection with any kind of English that people have spoken or written at any time prior to the 1970s, such as ze,
hir,
xe,
ey,
etc. In all the cases, the issue is not really that the privileged dialect of English doesn’t have any rules for handling gender neutrality in the third person; it’s that people don’t like the implications of how it is handled, and are trying to come up with new ways, or promote other established ways, of doing it.
Incidentally, one thing that I’m curious about with regard to the -@ construction, since I’ve only ever seen it written: do you know whether anyone who uses that in writing ever tries to pronounce it in speech (e.g., pronouncing Tod@s @s espectador@s
as Todoas oas espectadoroas
)? Or is it a purely written phenomenon?
smally,
In the United States, youse
is really strongly associated with working-class speech in the Eastern Seaboard, especially in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York. Apparently it’s also common in some parts of Ontario. It’s really strongly looked down upon here, too, as uneducated.
(Probably more so even than y’all.
) Judging from the way youse
is distributed around the world, I’d guess that it probably originally came from Irish or Scotch-Irish settlement in the Americas and Australia; apparently it’s also found in northern Ireland to this day.
Of course you’re right that the notion that it sounds bad
is absurd, if the judgment is just being based on what works well with, or clashes with, the sounds of normal English. The culture of correcting such bad
English has nothing at all to do with what actually sounds good or sounds bad in English speech, and everything to do with distancing yourself from how the (supposedly) bad
kind of people speak English.
Laura J.,
Well, yes. I just said that a language without structural encoding of gender would be simpler than one with structural encoding of gender (in that single respect). Not that it would overthrow global patriarchy. I’m all for exposing and combating presumptions that are encoded in language, because it’s not nothing and it’s easy to do, but I don’t mean to suggest that syntax alone will make the revolution.
]]>I think I personally use “you guys” and “y’all” or “you all” with more or less equal frequency, except when I need a genitive second person plural pronoun, in which case I would go with either “your” or “y’all’s”, since it’s awkward to try to make “you guys” explicitly possessive. When I’m using the phrase “you guys” as a pronoun, I use it as a set phrase without any gender considerations at all; I wouldn’t feel any twinges of awkwardness at using it to address several of my friends at once even if everyone in the group happens to be female.
I don’t think I could use “you guys” in formal speech however; it wouldn’t sound right if I were, say, addressing a group of professors, regardless of gender. I think I would normally get around this by restructuring questions to have phrases such as “any of you” or “all of you” as their subjects, for example.
So, for me at least, even though “guy” by itself in the singular or plural is clearly masculine, “you guys” is definitely encoded as an informal gender-neutral second person plural pronoun, regardless of its rather obvious etymology.
]]>Well, modern spoken Mandarin fits the bill, if you’re interested. Unfortunately, actual Mandarin-speaking communities tend to be fairly patriarchal regardless.
]]>The second-person plural youse is a part of the common usage of Aboriginal and “lower”-class Australians, but is considered abominable by “educated” speakers. I don’t see anything wrong with it, and find the complaint that it sounds bad absurd — it sounds exactly the same as the perfectly acceptable use.
But no Aussie could get away with ya’ll. :)
]]>I was just making a random commentary based on the difficulties you and others found trying to apply a pronoun to a gender-neutral reference. My own impression is that the existence of gender-neutral words has both good and bad sides. My native tongue is Portuguese, so for me it’s just natural that, depending on the reference, pronouns of gender vary accordingly. The difficulty you posted about would be no problem for me, neither stilistically nor grammatically.
However, I can see other problems with this. One that comes to mind is the fact that we have to apply a gender to a group irrespective of their formations. For example, I could formulate a sentence like “Todos os espectadores gostaram do espetáculo”, which means “All spectators liked the show”. Since “espectadores” is a male plural word that designates both a crowd composed exclusively of men and a crowd composed of men and women – even if the crowd were composed of a thousand women and one man – the plural would have to be male. Only if all spectators were women, I could use the female word “espectadoras”. I find this surely counter-intuitive, and the existence of a gender-neutral pronoun would certainly facilitate things. (Some people, worried about sexism in language, go as far as to put an @ in cases like the one I mentioned – “Tod@s @s espectador@s” – so as to make the words gender neutral. It’s an stilistical atrocity, IMHO.)
I certainly agree that a language that didn’t specify genders and sexes except in relevant situations would be much simpler, and would avoid both problems.
]]>