In contemporary english it is normal to refer to a singular person as “they”.
For example take this sentence where the gender is ambiguous: “If a person is hungry, then that person should eat food.” Say you want to replace “that person” with a pronoun. The old standard was to default to male “then he should eat”, that wasn’t politically correct so a newer approach was to use both pronouns “then he or she should eat”, but that is rather stuffy and most people would rather use the singular they “then they should eat” even though it is not proper english (although many style guides are starting to adopt it)
The “then they should eat” example is exactly how i was taught english 25 or so years ago (could be more, i’m pretty sure google was brand new at the time though).
There was no talk about it’s political correctness at the time and my teacher had lived in London for 15 years before moving back from England and becoming a teacher in my school.
Using “they” is completely grammatically correct, regardless of if people wish to accept that or not.
I also have hard time to get used to it, as my native language doesn´treally have terms for this…and I am sure I will automaticaly call that hero “she” without realising, not because I would wanna be malicios.
I wish I knew the answer. I was learning german, so I understand your struggle.
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because apparently “they” is a gender now or something
We have gender neutral group, but in english, that would be translated to “It”, which is appearantly not good for people.
Tho, we have that group not only for unanimated objects, but also babies and little kids. And also for a word “girl”. But word “woman” is in feminine group, not neutral.
True is, that we don´t really know, how to translate all sort of pronounces and LGBT terms (most of the terms are used here untranslated).
English speaking world should consider that, before getting offended or calling us “ignorant”, when we try to ask.
It was used by others, not in a first-person reference. No one refered to themselves as that until recently.
Let us not try to rewrite history. It hurts you more than it helps.
It absolutely was used as a pronoun. And using it in first person reference, is what you do with pronouns.
It isn’t weird for English for it to be used in this way.
It is weird for people to get upset over it for political reasons though.
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Too many bad seeds out there asking the same questions in a malicious manner.
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then you go do that!
yeah…
But we, usually, have two versions of a word. One fore female one for male. Like, in english it’s just “friend”, and it works regardless of gender of person that we are talking about. In polish it’s “przyjaciel” for male friend and “przyjaciółka” for female friend. There is no way to say it without putting a gender on it. And even if you don’t know the gender of that person, we use male version of the word.
That’s what I meant by that.
Well, my “tactic” here is that I am not thinking about how to translate those things to polish. It’s not like I need non-binary pronoun in my day to day life, as I don’t know any non-binary person. When I meet one, I’ll just ask them how they would prefer me to address them and move on. I don’t think it’s an issue.
Unfortunately, the gaming community has a poor history with accepting all people.
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Coming in two days later to point out to you that some of this is on you. Not all of it, but some of it. That’s because you have displayed a tendency to always assume hatred and bigotry when in fact ignorance is the more likely cause.
Like in this very thread where you ascribe bigotry and hatred to a French speaker for using ‘it’ when talking about a gender-neutral pronoun, when in reality French does not have an equivalent for ‘they’ that is not specifically ‘many’ or ‘multiple’, therefore ‘it’ is the only gender-neutral pronoun in the language.
That person even goes on to say they call a friend born female ‘he’ because that is what that person prefers, but you continue to assume hatred and bigotry.
You need to learn to be more gentle and find out people’s true intentions, because if you assume hatred and bigotry all the time, that’s what you’ll get. Then you get nasty with that person and use their justifiably defensive reaction to bolster your bigotry argument. It sounds like an exhausting way to live and think.
Same for my language.
Not intentionaly. But my mind mostly “works” in my native language and these things are just natural.
OK, I can see how this can be a problem… I trained myself to think in English when I speak English.
I think we did pinpoint why I don’t see that as a problem and you do.
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I also think in english when needed, but mixing those two in situations that I am not familiar with just happens. If my head can´t “translate it”, I tend to think in native language and pronounces are just confusing chapter.
Understandable.
Maybe you will get better at it with time? And if you won’t then it’s also ok.