"A linguist would probably enjoy one's self" is not gramatically correct. We need a plural form of 'one' (besides 'two', I mean).
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"A linguist would probably enjoy one's self" is not gramatically correct. We need a plural form of 'one' (besides 'two', I mean).
...'three'? :confused:
They is the plural form of one, and oneself is a word. You can also say half, two, three, all, many, some, etc. An amount without an article can be a neutrel pronoun.Quote:
Originally Posted by cuppajoe_9
That is correct.Quote:
Originally Posted by cuppajoe_9
Doesn't "one" only refer to either the person speaking (like when the Queen talks about herself as "one") or 'people in general'? Whereas if you want to talk about a specific person whose gender/sex is unknown you'd still need a different word?
"A linguist" is in the third person, "one's self" is in the second person.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jtolj
It doesn't. That would turn it into another language. Say he, she, it, they, or be poetic. Use a title. Use pleonasms and prolixity.
Ha! This is one of my favorite rants. ^_^ A plural neutral-gender pronoun isn't what English needs... just that bothersome old singular. "They" is the plural personal pronoun in English, and it does just fine as that--it's when people use it singularly that really steams my broccoli. I can't even imagine who got the idea first. I mean, sure, it sounds normal now, but that's because you hear it everywhere!
'One' is suitable, most of the time, although passages that use it excessively come across as very florid. The "A linguist would probably enjoy one's self" example is certainly problematic. What I do is make the hypothetical linguist plural--"linguists would probably enjoy themselves." Ta-da! The construction doesn't always work, but it does most of the time.
Nice! That still doesn't solve the old 'his or her' problem, though. I'm in favour of 'hir', but that still leaves us with the problem of how to pronounce it in a way that isn't identical to 'her'.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sol
I was called out in a literature class for using they instead of he/she. I suppose for what I was writing (an explication of some william blake poem - I don't even remember which one) it wasn't appropriate to use they. The sentence had a pronoun-antecedent aggreement problem. I wish I could remember the exact sentence but I had a singular pronoun followed by the plural antecedent "their" to avoid the awkward he/she construction.
I remember doing it because in one of my writing classes the prof told us that it was acceptable to use a plural so as not to have so many he/she constructions. But I guess since I wasn't repeatedly having to write he/she, that one sentence was very noticable and not appropriate in that paper.
My biggest problem with ANY strict adhearance to 'proper' grammer is when it stifles creativity. There is a time and a place for everything, grammer is certainly no exception.
I suppose you could construct the sentence to avoid the wording of he/she or it's alternative formats.
However I do like the use of one and oneself but I also like to use the you especially in examples.
Let's say you went to the market and bought 3 eggs....
instead of
Let's say he/she went to the market and bought 3 eggs...
However, when dealing with legal jargon, as it seems in the first post, it is rather more appropriate to use (s)he because you don't want any legal loops due to omitting a letter. Legal jargon is not meant to be pretty or easily read. Instead it is meant to be precise, which I suppose translates to a very boring reading.
Granted the you doesn't always work either but it is gender neutral just as one is.
I suppose you could use whatever term you like that is gender neutral when writing a sentence as long as you construct the sentence to work for that term.
us
them
they
we
one
you
are all gender neutral as well as
member
payee
landlord
debtor
creditor
When it comes to literature though, I am not sure you want to have a gender neutral. Poetry and Fiction certainly have very little need for gender neutrality or for pc. Just to point out that I don't consider Reference, self-help, or cook books literature.
As for speach writers they would probably have more flexibility than legal documents.
My 2cents!
Quote:
Originally Posted by cuppajoe_9
Russians have "ono", but i've never met this word used in the context you mentioned. so i think it's not exactly neutral gender, you're talking about.
Anyway, the suggestion is a good and almost-necessary one, but not the variant "hir", I think.
somebody will create smth to use it in his work and it will be accepted maybe.. that somebody may be even you. or me. but not yet;))
My example was not supposed to be illustrative of legal jargon, but rather of firey political treatise, a form of prose which, I think you'll agree, is killed rather quickly by the dreaded 'he or she'. (Note to the mod squad: the politics in this particular treatise are intentionally neutral and almost nonsensical so as to avoid political discussion. Please don't hurt me.)Quote:
Originally Posted by Vada Dagon
I kind of like 'hir', it looks so Scandinavian.Quote:
Originally Posted by bacchante
Technically, you are right. In a grammatcial sense in Russian 'ono' is a neutral gender, and you are right about its uses. The pronoun of the neutral gender (normally in an Indo-European language its definite article) would not be used to refer to a person of unknown sex. The neutral gender (and it is not in any way related to actual or 'natural' gender) is simply a grammatical convention splitting words into various groups. For example, Old English had three genders, like all early Indo-European languages and some mdoern ones, but the grammatical gender had no relation to natural gender, for example, 'wife' in Old English was a neuter gender noun, so when refering to a 'wife' in the third person the article used would be 'it.' Ultimately this lack of correlation between natural and grammatical gender is what led to the total break-down of grammitcal gender in the English language in the later Old English period, but that is another story. It is interesting to note that modern German has a similiar dissonance between natural and grammatical gender, but their gender system is here to stay.Quote:
Originally Posted by bacchante
In fact there are many languages whose grammatical genders do not follow even natural gender catagories. Swahili, for example, has fifteen genders, and certain aborignal languages have three, one of which is a catagory for 'women, fire, and dangerous things' (the source of the title of a popular book on linguistics).
What people are refering to here is not a neutral gender, but rather a neutral, animate third person pronoun without a natural gender distinction. The difference is a minor but important. For example, Persian has no gender, much like English, but its third person pronoun is 'ou,' having no natural gender distinction.
Incidently, I am not one hundred percent on this because I am packing to move, do not have my books available to me on the subject, and am not an expert in English historical linguistics, but I do not believe that 'hir' was not Scandinavian, but instead was the old english pronoun for the neutral gender, however as an interesting side note, 'they' and 'them' are of Scandinavian origin, the native English third person plurals were something entirely different, but unfortunately I am not aware of what they were without my books.