Talk:Gender-specific pronoun

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[edit] Confusion

Yeah, sex is confusing enough without getting mixed up over gender roles! --Uncle Ed

Whose viewpoint is this?

The advantage of having separate pronouns for men, women, and inanimate objects is in sentences like the following: 'John loved Mary's dog. He had given it to her a year ago'. This is somewhat arbitrary: one could imagine race-specific or age-specific pronouns for the same purpose, but no need for these is felt. The disadvantage is that gender has to be taken into account in sentences semantically unrelated to gender, see also below.

It's not common knowledge, unless I'm unusually ignorant about grammar. (Which is a possibility. Considering that the last two sentences are sentence fragments. And you don't start sentences with a conjunction. Not to mention agreement of number...) --Uncle Ed

I agree with Ed, at least with his concern about the above passage. Besides probably being POV, I am not even sure it is true -- it sounds like an after the fact attempt to justify why something is the way it is. IS there any evidence at all that this is why the practice arose or persists? As Ed would have it, according to whom? My sense is that all languages have different ways of dealing with the problem of how to communicate necessary or useful information; I doubt that it makes any sense to say any language is better or worse at this; I don't see any point to talking about advantages and disadvantages -- I am for deleting this, and if anyone agrees with me, go ahead, Slrubenstein
It's a comment about an advantage of the status quo, not an assertion about how the status quo came about. But by all means delete it. Martin

[edit] Good lord, can't less violent examples be used?

Should people read about hitting and bleeding while trying to learn about gender-specific pronouns?

[edit] Ships

This is off the main subject of the article, but it's a custom in English to use 'she' for ships. Russian ships are masculine. That section could be made less culturally biased. Wyvern 19:31, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Some non-English examples, please?

This doesn't appear to be an article about an aspect of grammar. It seems to just be an article about an aspect of English-language grammar, along with some sociological discussion on how some people find grammatical gender offensive. Perhaps this should instead be moved to Gender-specific pronouns in English? Dewrad 03:32, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Trouble is, there are already the articles Gender-neutral language in English, Gender-neutral language in Indo-European languages and Gender-neutral language in non-Indo-European languages. FilipeS 13:06, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
The red links imply that the latter two don't exist. Perhaps a move to Gender-neutral language in English would be better then? Dewrad 13:39, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
They've been moved to Gender-neutrality in languages with grammatical gender and Gender-neutrality in languages without grammatical gender. FilipeS 14:22, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Why is the neuter possessive pronoun marked as nonexistent?

—Whose cage is this?

—This cage is its. Njál 21:56, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Do you often hear such sentences in real life? FilipeS 22:10, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
No. But I believe they exist, and isn't that the point? We don't say something isn't a word just because it isn't used very often. Njál 23:59, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
Well, I'm not a native speaker, but that use of "its" sounds very contrived to me... FilipeS 00:16, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
The phrasing is awkward, but an utterance like "That's its cage" (or, for a more realistically contextual example: "Where is an engine on a car?" "It's under its hood") is very common. At any rate, "nonexistent" is a pretty heavy word.71.104.3.185 19:07, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
In the examples you've given, "its" is an adjective, not a pronoun. FilipeS 19:09, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
No, that is a pronoun, specifically a possessive pronoun. Bob's is not an adjective, it's just the possessive form of Bob. As per the question at hand, there is no singular, personal, possessive pronoun in English that is not gendered, excluding interrogative pronouns. Its and it are not used as personal pronouns in standard English, and to do so is often highly pejorative. There are alternative and nonstandard sets of gender-varied personal pronouns, but they are not standard (as of yet). The example of "Whose is this?" presupposed that the owner of this is a person, which means there is no gender-neutral response. "This is its," would be incorrect. Cheeser1 21:48, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
No, that is an adjective. It's qualifying "cage" and hood". FilipeS 21:58, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm sorry, I'm confusing grammar from different languages, despite having the right idea. Its is a pronoun in its own right, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as I said. The OED is pretty much incontrovertible. Its may be rare in use (as a pronoun), but it's not labeled as archaic, improper, or otherwise nonstandard (as thine or ye might be). I have added the appropriate sentence to the examples, as well as a citation. Cheeser1 22:19, 18 April 2007 (UTC)