This article talks about a gender neutral pronoun being used in some Swedish schools in the apparent hope of dismantling differences between men and women in order to make a more equal society.
I'm skeptical. Swedish does not have a third person gender neutral pronoun, so they borrowed one from Finnish ("hän", but in Swedish they spell it "hen"). Finnish does not have any gender pronouns. So if this pronoun made a difference, surely we would already see the difference in Finland and all the other countries that have languages with no gendered pronouns, like Japan and Turkey?
The opponents are confused as well. Someone is quoted as saying that referring to a child with a gender neutral pronoun is child cruelty. Is it child cruelty when the Finns do it?
The confusion between grammatical and biological gender is heartbreaking but normal. It's perhaps not so obvious in languages like those in the Bantu language family, which can upwards of 13 noun classes (or genders in the strict grammatical sense of the word). There is a whole field of study in linguistics called language policy which is the intersection of language and government (mainly in the sense of control). For example, in Quebec with business signs in English, and in Brtianny the French post office would not deliver letters or newspapers in non-French languages or even orthographies.
Originally posted by zmježd: The confusion between grammatical and biological gender is heartbreaking but normal.
In this particular case, who is confusing grammatical and biological gender? These two things are sort of confused already when it comes to gendered pronouns, since a gendered pronoun has a grammatical gender but also refers to a gender identity.
Originally posted by Geoff: Please explain how noun gender is at all related to biological gender. Heretofore I thought that the two were unrelated usages of the same term.
Well, French il and elle are the pronouns for the masculine and feminine grammatical gender, right? But they also are used to refer to men and women respectively. So this is a place were grammatical gender and gender identity converge, it seems to me.
True. "He" and "she" are the English equivalent. But isn't that way different from the concept of gender in a language's grammar? While we may have vestiges of grammatical gender, isn't English essentially gender-free? We don't have masculine, feminine, and neuter.
Yeah, grammatical gender is a way of classifying nouns. German has 3 and Bantu languages can have 13. They don't necessarily line up with biological gender. Der Mann is masculine but das Mädchen "girl" is neuter. And I'd say English is essentially gender-free, but we do retain gender in the pronouns, and we do distinguish between animate and inanimate in some cases (who/that vs which).
Swedish has 2 genders: common and neuter. The common gender is a combination of earlier masculine and feminine genders. But Swedish does have masculine, feminine and neuter third person singular pronouns.
I can understand that. However, the concept of considering it child cruelty when someone refers to a child with a gender neutral pronoun seems quite odd to me.
It seems ridiculous to me. It would mean that Finns, Turks, Japanese, Basques, Hungarians, and Mandarin speakers are all guilty of horrible child cruelty.
