• he/him

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Science
@Science

German, the language my work and physical life happens in, really has no good and accepted solution for they/them pronouns. There are various attempts at neopronouns that seem to have similar chances of being widely adopted as mastodon has at becoming the replacement for twitter. Their application is not immediately obvious even to me, and I would not like to ask the many colleagues I have at work, some of whom are very fleeting contacts, to use quite experimental language that might just not stand the test of time. So my personal pronoun situation is: They/them in English, avoid using/tolerate "er" for simplicity in German.

They/Them has the advantage of not being neopronouns... those are oldpronouns. If an annoying douche complains, you can always point at Shakespeare or the bible and call them ignorant on top of being shit. Despite that, German schools do not teach about singular-they, and I have not managed to convince any of the teachers I work with to try it, at any age level (11-16). Most Germans will presumably believe that singular-they was invented like 5 years ago or something.

There's a they/them character in Overwatch now. The game is not interesting anymore, the pronouns are. Because this huge corporation has advertising copy that gets professionally translated. So I looked at what they wrote about the new character.

Here are two quotes:
EN: "you have already asked us so many questions about their backstory and personality"
DE: "ihr habt uns schon jede Menge Fragen zu Ventures Hintergrundgeschichte und Persönlichkeit gestellt"

EN: "First, we’re slightly shifting some of their burst damage [...]"
DE: "Erstens wandeln wir etwas vom _ Direktschaden [...]"

They just do the same thing I do. Avoid pronouns altogether. In German, the new hero has no pronouns. Where necessary, they restate (or re-position) the name in the sentence. In cases like the second example sentence, they rephrase it (in this case, from a possessive to a Dativ to not have to say the pronoun). Since Blizzard have never written a sentence like "Venture uses they/them pronouns", the translators were not forced to grapple with such a direct situation.

This works, but I would have really hoped that a giant corporation might have a more interesting solution than I have. By the way, it also has the very obvious effect that the German commenters just throughout call Venture a girl, while the English ones at least have a healthy mix of people who get it and bog-standard regressive jerks who only comment on the pronouns.


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in reply to @Science's post:

pretty similar situation in croatian. singular they is a thing, but most teachers probably don’t teach it. we also have the problem of most of our population being transphobic nits but that a different can of worms.

exact same situation in dutch. while i'm not they/them myself, it makes it harder to think about my they/them friends in my mind (because i think in dutch) sadly...

we only have a plural "zij" (i.e. "zij zijn" = "they are"), and we have "hen"/"hun" (which is also usually plural) which i think has the widest adoption among dutch non binary people, but i don't think it has widespread adoption either (similar to your issues getting german teachers to accept singular they)

"hen"/"hun" has two big issues i feel that's stopping widespread adoption:

  1. it feels weird to use singular because it used to be exclusively plural, imagine using "them" instead of singular "they" ("them are my friend")
  2. they're very.... boorish.... words to use to refer to a group of people (make you sound uncultured and rude, its like hillbilly speak...)

of course the answer is "just get over it" but i get why normies feel weird using it

my heart goes out to all they/thems out there living in countries with extremely gendered languages :(

(also it PISSES ME OFF that i still hear dutch people constantly say "he or she" instead of "they" when they speak english, like COME ONNNnnnn)

The most common thing I have seen for Irish is using the third person plural pronoun (siad/iad) as a sinular pronoun. I think it would be cool to try and resurrect the dead neuter pronoun from Old Irish (ed or ea) but also that’s not really my fight and I have no real sway in it (and don’t even speak the language very well).

ugh... yeah.. german sucks in that regard...

we write some code in janet-lang, so in order to not be confused about which or what janet we are talking about i told my colleagues to just call me "jay"

so far that worked alright

feels like i macgyvered a pronoun for myself right there XD