Quote from: mightybrain on December 30, 2020, 09:23:42 AMWhat do they do in other languages where nouns have a gender?

Tell us to remove the vowels at the end of them and replace them with an X, then pretend that it's still a real, pronounceable word and that it helps address real discrimination, somehow.

Quote from: jhkim on December 29, 2020, 04:47:58 PM

Quote from: kidkaos2 on December 29, 2020, 04:03:37 PM
I disagree that it only stands out if you're looking for it because my experience is the vast majority of gamers are men, so it's weird when I see the vast majority of rulebooks written using she as the pronoun.  That is weird.

Just like when my ex-wife was into the scrapbooking hobby.  Every scrapbooker around was female, so if I picked up a scrapbooking guide and found "he" uses throughout, it would stand out as strange.

So did AD&D1 stand out as strange to you? Do you think its pronoun use was a mistake, and Gygax should have instead used default "he"?

At this juncture I believe you are intentionally missing my point purely in order to be argumentative and my initial post was put up in good faith.  I have no interest in arguing for arguing's sake.  My intention in putting up this point was trying to understand why it has become MORE common to use the pronouns for the gender that's LESS common as gamers, as some way of being inclusive.  It makes no sense to me and I was hoping someone could explain how rulebooks are improved by employing this practice.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on December 29, 2020, 05:09:23 PM
I think that in part the desire to use the feminine pronoun as the default neutral is an attempt to prove this effect to male readers -- and to be honest, I do sort of see it myself, despite being a thorough skeptic of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of which this is an offshoot.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on December 29, 2020, 05:09:23 PM
every time I tried to read the book, I kept tripping up on the fact the protagonist/narrator identifies every other character encountered as "she" or "her" in ways that I knew would not always be accurate, and so I got stuck every time trying to figure out if this character actually was female or not.

I think there is definitely some effect from language onto culture and viewpoint. I think it's more a question of how strong that effect is. Some people certainly overestimate it, but I think it is there. Certainly in English, many people feel an overwhelming need to know whether someone is male or female, to the point of being confused as to how to think about a person or character without knowing. I find it bizarre. It's particularly strong with babies, where people will get angry and be unable to interact with the child without knowing. My impression from people who speak gender-neutral languages (like Finnish, Korean, and Chinese) is that this is less of an issue. So, for example, you could have a minor character in a book whose gender isn't specified, and it isn't considered a problem.

That said, there's still plenty of sexism in those cultures. So I don't think the effect is strong, but I'll buy that there is an effect.

Quote from: VisionStorm on December 30, 2020, 10:48:47 AM

Quote from: mightybrain on December 30, 2020, 09:23:42 AMWhat do they do in other languages where nouns have a gender?

Tell us to remove the vowels at the end of them and replace them with an X, then pretend that it's still a real, pronounceable word and that it helps address real discrimination, somehow.

The "x" ending isn't used in most of the Spanish-speaking world. There is an "e" ending has slightly more adoption, from what I hear, but it's still rare. (ref) Still, "he or she" is relatively common in Spanish, along with collective nouns instead of masculine default ("la plantilla de la empresa" instead of "los trabajadores").

In Swedish, a new gender-neutral pronoun has been widely adopted, now included in the dictionary but not in formal style guides. As an alternative to "hon" and "han" (he and she), there is now gender-neutral "hen".

Quote from: jhkim on December 30, 2020, 12:11:37 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on December 30, 2020, 10:48:47 AM

Quote from: mightybrain on December 30, 2020, 09:23:42 AMWhat do they do in other languages where nouns have a gender?

Tell us to remove the vowels at the end of them and replace them with an X, then pretend that it's still a real, pronounceable word and that it helps address real discrimination, somehow.

The "x" ending isn't used in most of the Spanish-speaking world. There is an "e" ending has slightly more adoption, from what I hear, but it's still rare. (ref) Still, "he or she" is relatively common in Spanish, along with collective nouns instead of masculine default ("la plantilla de la empresa" instead of "los trabajadores").

In Swedish, a new gender-neutral pronoun has been widely adopted, now included in the dictionary but not in formal style guides. As an alternative to "hon" and "han" (he and she), there is now gender-neutral "hen".

I saw someone post about that a few weeks ago, but it's still not used outside of rare instances in social media (in Puerto Rico at least), and most regular people wouldn't even know WTF you were talking about if you were to tell them about it. It doesn't even make sense, because there isn't a single Spanish word that I can think of that you would even understand what someone was telling you if you pronounced it with a "e" at the end, instead of an "o" (masculine) or "a" (feminine). The post that I saw had a picture suggesting that people use "Todes" instead of "Todos" or "Todas" (Everyone), and I'm like, WTF does "TodEs" even mean? Who tha hell speaks like that?

Quote from: jhkim on December 30, 2020, 12:11:37 PMI think there is definitely some effect from language onto culture and viewpoint. I think it's more a question of how strong that effect is. Some people certainly overestimate it, but I think it is there. Certainly in English, many people feel an overwhelming need to know whether someone is male or female, to the point of being confused as to how to think about a person or character without knowing.

That effect has also become much more prevalent with the dominance of the "show, don't tell" school of fiction writing that is so dominant nowadays, which often attempts to evoke the experience of being visually present for key scenes.  For example, I have no problem not knowing the sex of a minor character if the prose never brings the character "on stage", but find it very frustrating if the prose is presenting it as a "live" scene; consider the difference between the following prose samples:

QuoteI visited the DMV today; the clerk, a thoroughly unpleasant individual, kept me hanging for nearly an hour before finally admitting there was nothing that could be done here, and I left in high dudgeon.

and:

QuoteI stared at the DMV clerk in disbelief. "Nothing can be done? I waited an hour to find that out?"
The clerk, a middle-aged fat woman with tiny rimless glasses, shrugged and favoured me with a smile just short of a sneer. "Sorry," she called after me as I stomped out.

That the clerk isn't visually described takes nothing from the first sample, but if you take that description of the clerk out of the second sample it immediately renders the scene less vivid and tangible.

This is part of why I think Leckie's novel didn't work for me; the clash between the habits of imagination created by the prose style, and the deliberate denial or misrepresentation (because the feminine pronoun isn't just used as a default neuter where sex is not known, but as the only pronoun regardless of whether sex is known or not) of information normally used in that imagination, continually thwarted the "flow" of the reading experience for me.

Quote from: jhkim on December 30, 2020, 12:11:37 PMThere is an "e" ending has slightly more adoption, from what I hear, but it's still rare.

And there was me thinking they'd just be more sensible and write it off as baizuo nonsense.

Quote from: VisionStorm on December 30, 2020, 10:48:47 AM

Quote from: mightybrain on December 30, 2020, 09:23:42 AMWhat do they do in other languages where nouns have a gender?

Tell us to remove the vowels at the end of them and replace them with an X, then pretend that it's still a real, pronounceable word and that it helps address real discrimination, somehow.

God, that is so annoying. Priviliged white folks inventing words for poor, oppressed minorites.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on December 30, 2020, 01:12:37 PM
have no problem not knowing the sex of a minor character if the prose never brings the character "on stage", but find it very frustrating if the prose is presenting it as a "live" scene; consider the difference between the following prose samples:

QuoteI visited the DMV today; the clerk, a thoroughly unpleasant individual, kept me hanging for nearly an hour before finally admitting there was nothing that could be done here, and I left in high dudgeon.

and:

QuoteI stared at the DMV clerk in disbelief. "Nothing can be done? I waited an hour to find that out?"
The clerk, a middle-aged fat woman with tiny rimless glasses, shrugged and favoured me with a smile just short of a sneer. "Sorry," she called after me as I stomped out.

These examples don't really illustrate the issue at hand. In the second one, the clerk is already described as a woman - so it doesn't matter if the pronoun was gendered or not. Changing to use ungendered pronouns wouldn't make any difference to that case. I think a better example for the issue is where the only marker for gender is the pronoun. For example,

QuoteI visited the DMV today; the clerk, a thoroughly unpleasant individual, kept me hanging for nearly an hour before she finally admitted there was nothing that could be done here, and I left in high dudgeon.

This is almost exactly the example where you didn't mind not knowing the gender, though.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on December 30, 2020, 01:12:37 PM
This is part of why I think Leckie's novel didn't work for me; the clash between the habits of imagination created by the prose style, and the deliberate denial or misrepresentation (because the feminine pronoun isn't just used as a default neuter where sex is not known, but as the only pronoun regardless of whether sex is known or not) of information normally used in that imagination, continually thwarted the "flow" of the reading experience for me.

This is where Sapir-Whorf issue comes in. For example, if you were Finnish and read a translation of the novel, do you think you would still feel like there was deliberate denial or misrepresentation? I wouldn't think so. That would imply that because of English grammar, people *need* to know the gender of minor characters - and it's denial or misrepresentation if it isn't specified.

Quote from: jhkim on December 30, 2020, 12:11:37 PMI think there is definitely some effect from language onto culture and viewpoint. I think it's more a question of how strong that effect is. Some people certainly overestimate it, but I think it is there. Certainly in English, many people feel an overwhelming need to know whether someone is male or female, to the point of being confused as to how to think about a person or character without knowing. I find it bizarre. It's particularly strong with babies, where people will get angry and be unable to interact with the child without knowing. My impression from people who speak gender-neutral languages (like Finnish, Korean, and Chinese) is that this is less of an issue. So, for example, you could have a minor character in a book whose gender isn't specified, and it isn't considered a problem.

My personal experience agrees with your supposition.  When I learn a new language, I find myself thinking new things and in different ways, enabled by the language, which supports my belief that we think at least partly in language, rather then just worldless brain-activity.  This is why I find the PC SJW language fascists so offensive.  They're trying to change my mind by coercing my language, which is a disrespectful and deceitful way to approach it.  If you want to persuade me of something, I'm generally willing to talk - maybe I'll think you have a point.  But I will not go along with being manipulated in this fashion.

Quote from: Mishihari on December 30, 2020, 04:34:35 PM
My personal experience agrees with your supposition.  When I learn a new language, I find myself thinking new things and in different ways, enabled by the language, which supports my belief that we think at least partly in language, rather then just worldless brain-activity.  This is why I find the PC SJW language fascists so offensive.  They're trying to change my mind by coercing my language, which is a disrespectful and deceitful way to approach it.  If you want to persuade me of something, I'm generally willing to talk - maybe I'll think you have a point.  But I will not go along with being manipulated in this fashion.

But if we accept that language influences thought, then you *already* have been manipulated -- by being indoctrinated by the language you were raised with.

People have a tendency to say that whatever language they were raised with is normal and natural -- and newer ways of speaking are wrong. But language is always being manipulated and changed. The way people spoke in 1970 is different than the way people spoke in 1920, which is different from how people spoke in 1820 or speak now in 2020. Whatever language you were raised with was the result of prior manipulations.

People who insist on older language rules (like generic "he") are using exactly the same tactic -- influence minds by controlling their language. Either old language or new language can be seen as manipulative -- but whether it's deceitful or disrespectful depends on how they approach it, I would say.

Quote from: Spinachcat on December 29, 2020, 07:07:57 PM"They" is fucking retarded.

I know. It's as bad as the moronic use of the singular "you." We should never have started that newfangled pronoun stuff when we had perfectly good words like "thee" and "thou."*

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on December 29, 2020, 05:09:23 PMPart of the reason I was unable to get through the recent SF novel Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie, was that her protagonist and narrator is established as speaking a language which has no gender pronouns, and for which (for some reason) the in-universe English translation convention is to use the feminine as the default. As a result, every time I tried to read the book, I kept tripping up on the fact the protagonist/narrator identifies every other character encountered as "she" or "her" in ways that I knew would not always be accurate, and so I got stuck every time trying to figure out if this character actually was female or not. Ultimately, I was never able to get through more than a chapter or two of the novel, both because I found this a fundamental block to understanding the story, but also because I simply could not shake off the feeling that the author was trying to say, "See, this is what it feels like when the 'generic default' of a language excludes you," and however important that lesson may be considered, I don't want to fight through it every chapter to enjoy a novel-length story.

I found the pronoun use odd. I guess I had an easier time than you adjusting. After a time I mostly gave up concerning myself about the gender of most of the characters. Usually knowing the gender wasn't necessary and the novel was relatively easy for me to follow without the additional information. I'd say the use was definitely intentional and for effect. (I think I read or heard  something by the author to that effect.) While I wouldn't want everything I read to be written that way, it didn't seem any more unusual than a few other speculative fiction stories I've read such as Poul Anderson's Fire Time where there were beings consisting of three separate species linked symbiotically. I seem to recall he did some odd things with pronouns for diads and for singular components.


* Would someone remind me, do we have a specific color we use for sarcasm?

Quote from: Bren on December 30, 2020, 05:16:04 PM
* Would someone remind me, do we have a specific color we use for sarcasm?

I use black myself.

Quote from: jhkim on December 30, 2020, 04:53:55 PM

Quote from: Mishihari on December 30, 2020, 04:34:35 PM
My personal experience agrees with your supposition.  When I learn a new language, I find myself thinking new things and in different ways, enabled by the language, which supports my belief that we think at least partly in language, rather then just worldless brain-activity.  This is why I find the PC SJW language fascists so offensive.  They're trying to change my mind by coercing my language, which is a disrespectful and deceitful way to approach it.  If you want to persuade me of something, I'm generally willing to talk - maybe I'll think you have a point.  But I will not go along with being manipulated in this fashion.

But if we accept that language influences thought, then you *already* have been manipulated -- by being indoctrinated by the language you were raised with.

There's a difference between being manipulated through your language and being influenced by it.  I see a strong, conscious, current effort by the left to manipulate our language to force people to think the way they do.  Looking back I don't see similar efforts, though it's certainly hard to be as sure about times that I didn't personally experience. As far as I can tell, it mostly just naturally evolved - I see no particular entity behind the changes.

Quote from: Mishihari on December 30, 2020, 05:40:29 PM

Quote from: jhkim on December 30, 2020, 04:53:55 PM
But if we accept that language influences thought, then you *already* have been manipulated -- by being indoctrinated by the language you were raised with.

There's a difference between being manipulated through your language and being influenced by it.  I see a strong, conscious, current effort by the left to manipulate our language to force people to think the way they do.  Looking back I don't see similar efforts, though it's certainly hard to be as sure about times that I didn't personally experience. As far as I can tell, it mostly just naturally evolved - I see no particular entity behind the changes.

Yeah, the rest of my post was commenting on this. I think this is pure bias. People always think that the way they grew up is the normal, natural way things are. And later changes are weird, unnatural manipulations.

In previous decades, there was still constant conflict over language. When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, there was constantly complaints over "politically correct" manipulations of language and the acceptance of "ebonics". But similar fights happened in previous decades, just not using the term "politically correct" since that usage only cropped up in the 1960s -- which itself is an example of how language changes. There were pushes to change language in First Wave Feminism in the 1920s, and in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, and ongoing throughout.

How we speak is always invented and manipulated - it is never natural.

It's been "he or she" as far back as I remember. I've always found it clumsy despite never knowing anything else.