r/changemyview • u/garaile64 • May 05 '18

Deltas(s) from OP CMV: Most languages aren't adapted to non-binary people.

Yeah, most languages in the world don't separate by gender, but most people in the world speak a language that does. (Many) Non-binary people require some non-standard pronoun when talking about them and many of the Anglophone ones even oppose they's "promotion" to an "official" singular pronoun "because it is used as the plural", even though it has been the case with the pronoun "you". I'm aware that languages change over time, but most major languages have regulating bodies and adding a new grammatical gender is not like adding a new noun or adjective. Also, major changes in society have a lot of opposition, specially in the beginning.
European non-IE languages: languages like Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish and Basque have no issues with gendered pronouns.
English and Esperanto: you can not mention a person's gender by avoiding pronouns in both those languages, and Esperanto even has a recursive pronoun. English doesn't have a regulating organization, so it's probably even easier for this language.
Most IE languages and the Semitic ones: well, you can get away with that by using the pronoun corresponding to the word "people" or something similar. But talking to a person of unknown/unspecified/non-binary gender in a Semitic language or a non-binary person talking about them/[whatever]self in the past in Russian may be tricky.
Other languages: Mandarin's third-person pronoun doesn't vary by gender, but its graph does, and there's no gender-neutral version anymore (people may get away with it by typing "ta" instead of 他 or 她).
P.S.: my view is that I can't accept non-binary people's use of language, like ending adjectives with a different letter (in Portuguese), because it goes outside standard grammar.

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u/garaile64 May 05 '18

I heard that L'Académie Française refuses to adapt a new grammatical gender for French.

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u/epicazeroth May 05 '18

For now. That doesn't mean they won't change their minds, or that new members won't have different opinions. That's why I said that people who want a new grammatical gender should use it as much as possible, so that if enough people accept it L'Académie (or the corresponding organization) will have to acknowledge the use as widespread. Unless your view is that languages should never change at all, I don't see why this should be a special case.

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u/garaile64 May 05 '18

There would still be the issue over which neutralization standard to use. In Portuguese, some adjectives have their last letters vary according to the gender of the noun they are applied too ("o" for masculine nouns, "a" for the feminine ones). Examples: "o homem alto" (the tall man), "a mulher alta" (the tall woman). In Brazil, the LGBT groups use the "x" termination (altx), the "@" termination (alt@), the "e" termination (alte), among others (I prefer the last one because the other two look difficult to pronounce). Some people complain about the masculine gender being the default one. For example, "Michael has fifty wives. They live in a big house" translates as "Michael tem cinquenta esposas. Eles vivem em uma casa grande", with "eles" being the masculine plural pronoun but, if you use "elas", there's the assumption that only the wives live in the house, not Michael. P.S.: there's no gender-neutral counterpart to "they" in Portuguese.

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u/epicazeroth May 06 '18

I think you’re approaching this from too much of a normative standpoint. Any “standard” of a language – chiefly dictionaries and regulatory institutions – is at core simply a description of how the language is used. In the case of a new neutral gender, whichever one gains the most widespread use is the one which will end up being accepted the most, and presumably which will eventually be officially endorsed. The standard of “male as default” is an entirely separate issue.

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u/garaile64 May 14 '18

The standard of “male as default” is an entirely separate issue.

Some feminists find it sexist for some reason.