Gender Neutral Pronouns: They're Here, Get Used To Them

grammatical gender is the concept found about a quarter of the world's languages but you can sort all nouns into male or female la or la in French the B or das in German the das is for neuter ins and a which is found with a few countries in Central Africa there are four grammatical genders human male human female element and Finland there are even occasional languages with more complicated systems than that now I'm a descriptivists linguist I am NOT meant to judge whether language features a good or bad I'm just meant to describe what they do but grammatical gender is just such a stupid concept I sort of hate myself for saying that but it is really silly so that's so that's a computer is it French a computer so it's male all computers are male and that's a bottle French really so it's female all bottles are female really should I dress it up in a frigging pink apron and give it a rolling pin as well descriptivism don't judge I'm exaggerating I am exaggerating but I genuinely have tried searching the literature for any advantages of grammatical gender there's only one vaguely convincing argument which is that it can help clear up ambiguities and speed up recognition of words by a small amount okay but 3/4 of the world's language has managed just fine without it and meanwhile grammatical gender causes a heck of a lot of problems first problem it affects the way you think one has to describe a key German speakers who classify key as male were likely to associate it with words such as hard heavy and jagged whereas Spanish speakers who classify key as female or more likely to say it was golden intricate and little that also says a lot about gender roles and society but my word that's something I am not qualified to talk about second problem it's really clunky job adverts in languages with a grammatical gender have to either use both terms or a half assed marker to clarify that they're asking for anyone what brings me to English English doesn't have grammatical gender it used to in Old English and we've still got a couple of words like blonde and blonde that change depending on gender but we don't for worry about filing everything into one box or another but what we do have is the third-person pronouns he she and it and that is a if I want to refer to you the viewer I have to use the pronoun he or she which is ludicrous for several reasons one its none will be three syllables and it sounds awful two there are folks who don't fit into or don't want to declare us either of those categories and if that surprises you you need to get out more since it is a bit dehumanizing there's really no suitable English pronoun to use except English does have a solution and lots of people are using it and a lot of the old stick-in-the-mud folks hate it the answer is they Facebook is using vague I signed up to Facebook before they started asking for gender I have never actually told them that I'm a guy so my friends see Tom Scott updated their profile picture and you know what that sounds absolutely fine to me it just seems normal now let's go depend on your dialect whether it sounds good to you but brace yourself because singular BAE is running very fast but you didn't even notice when I used it in the very first sentence of this video and it's got history even Shakespeare used it but yet because they sounds natural it gets around the problem of trying to force invented pronouns into English which let's be honest has never actually worked so there you go I've gone against my descriptive his training and said that one linguistic trait is better than another and you know what I'm okay with that because some people are they get over it

Channel: Tom Scott

Views: 4,313,511

Keywords: tom scott, tomscott, linguistics, language, gender, semantics, Pronominal Gender, gender neutral pronouns

Id: 46ehrFk-gLk

Length: 3min 48sec (228 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2013