[tor-project] Proposal for the people page: Pronouns

Nurmi, Juha juha.nurmi at ahmia.fi
Sun May 20 06:53:26 UTC 2018


On Sun, May 20, 2018 at 4:13 AM, John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:

> > I welcome feedback about any of the above suggestions.
>
> I have a suggestion.  Rather than rewrite the vocabulary of everybody
> else, how about becoming less touchy about what words people use
> regarding people whose chosen gender is not completely obvious?
>
>
I agree with John and let me explain why.

This conversation is concentrated to native English speakers.

For example, Uralic languages (with the most native speakers are Hungarian,
Finnish, and Estonian) lack of grammatical gender. Logically there is one
pronoun for both he and she; for example, hän in Finnish. As a result,
logic of language expressing gender is strange for Finnish speakers. This
causes Finnish people often mix, for instance, she/he and
actor/actress when they try to speak English. For them hän is always
correct and neutral!

As a native Finnish speaker my language codes my brain not to see
difference and the whole idea is untranslatable to my native language. As a
result, I often mix between she/he/hers/his/actor/actress etc. Indeed, I
have said something like "About my grandmonther, he is..." in English which
translates completely right to my language!

Most of the Tor user are not speaking English as their first language.

Regards,
Juha
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