Ok, I have come at the English language as someone who speaks it as a second language, even though technically it is my "maternal" language. I am tempted to say the next sentence in German, but German is the language that comes most naturally to me. People literally think I am German. Unlike in France, Germans will speak German to me.
I am indeed multilingual speaking English, French, German, and Dutch/Flemish. English is my "lazy language", but German comes a close second.
I have a serious problem with "gender neutral language". Does the modification of pronouns really change much about society?
Oddly enough, according to the grammarians, the first gender-neutral pronoun was generic he. How can he be gender neutral?
In 1542, William Lily wrote a Latin grammar, in English, proclaiming
the ancient doctrine called the worthiness of the genders: “The
Masculine Gender is more worthy than the Feminine, and the Feminine more
worthy than the Neuter.” Henry VIII made Lily’s Latin the official
grammar of all English schools. At the time, English was not considered a
language worthy enough to have a grammar. But that soon changed, and
when English grammars started to appear a century later, that worthiness
doctrine led English grammarians to promote generic he. If you didn’t know the gender of an indefinite like someone or anyone, or a member of a class, like the reader or the student or the grammarian, grammar books—even a popular 18th-century grammar written by Ann Fisher—said we must refer to that person with the generic he.
I'm not sure what the story is, but the "masculine" is also the neuter in French.
Anyway, while people claim that changing pronouns can somehow change attitudes: that doesn't seem to really be the case. Genderless languages: Chinese, Estonian, Finnish, and other languages don’t categorize any nouns as feminine or masculine, and use the same word for he or she in regards to humans.
As I said, technically, the English language is supposedly "gender neutral", yet some people object to its "binary" nature despite its "gender neutrality".
When this shit started somebody posted something idiotic about pronouns. My comment to which went something like: "if pronouns determine gender, then maybe we should get rid of pronouns and get rid of people". A lesbian friend said that some woman wrote that, to which I replied it was me!
The issue is that "gender neutrality" has been attempted for quite some time.
It seems to do fuck all to end whatever issue some people have with pronouns.
Oh, and a hat tip to Denis Baron, who I think is a brilliant grammarian for his work on parsing the Second Amendment and a couple of super paragraphs that I grabbed to use here. I'm not sure what my linguistic skills are other than I speak/use languages (machine and natural), but I think he is really bang on.
