LogFAQs > #882624267

I appreciate the discussion about "they" as a singular, although I do want to remind my fellow posters that I'm also interested in how gender neutrality is possible in languages such as Italian, French, and Spanish.

When learning such a language, I especially enjoy that each noun is assigned a gender: an apple, a tree, the earth, the sea, a cloud, etc. It gives me pleasure to visualize my ancestors, learning about their world, ascribing a male essence or spirit, a female essence or spirit, or even a true neutral, to everything they encountered. To me, it's poetic.

I believe that "preferred pronouns" should evolve through language naturally (e.g. as the word "they" seems to have done), rather than enforced through legislation. I also hope that transgendered people will limit their pronoun preference only to those pronouns that affect themselves, and not take offense to languages which since antiquity have ascribed binary gender to every noun.

It's my every intention to respect the trans community and I'm simply expressing my wish that language neutrality does not spill into existing language. For example, I think Italian should still have male and female nouns, and not "rewritten for the new age" as Class 1 and Class 2 nouns. Not that I hear that happening; I'm just thinking out loud.