Can you make up a good non-gender-specific pronoun in English?

@daloon Aha, you are here now.

I don’t hassle people who use “they” and “their” and I use it. So one word is singular and plural, who cares? Since when was English ever consistent? (I’ve met so many people who say that English is fluid and constantly changing and all that, so what makes this change so different?) Singular “they” has been used since the 1400s.

I read something about the pronoun “ze, zis, zim, etc.” that was designed as a gender-neutral pronoun. Ask Simone_De_Beauvoir about it; she’s the one I heard it from.

In my language that I’m creating, there is a separate gender-neutral pronoun. Makes things a lot easier.

Ahh, where did I leave that fucking umbrella!

Many have tried. For nearly half a century, maybe longer, I have been seeing this issue debated and many contrivances proposed. All suggestions so far fall somewhere in the range between awkward and impossible or worthless.

My own feeling is that the natural evolution of language will take care of this and that in another century people will regard our hypersensitive political and linguistic distress over it as both primitive and ridiculous. Their solution will seem just as obvious to them as the invention of pockets in clothing does to us, even though in the Middle Ages there was no such thing.

I have both written and edited around this problem in countless texts. Personally I was always a traditionalist and accepted the extended meaning of the masculine pronoun because I was brought up to it. In latter years, really just meaning the past two or three, I have begun to use the plural pronoun (they, their, them) with a singular antecedent in informal writing, and I have not been struck dead for it. It still bothers me, but less and less all the time.

By contrast, I became comfortable with splitting infinitives more than twenty years ago. It was hard at first because I was a purist and thought that if I did it, people would think I didn’t know any better. I have more confidence now. I never do it unnecessarily, but I no longer go in for strangling sentences to get around them. This comes under the heading of knowing when to break the rules.

@jeffgoldblumsprivatefacilities Deepness took it.

I mostly use the first one, with a similar thinking to @DominicX‘s: so what if one word is both masculine and neutral?

its

Just use “su”, as is what’s used in Spanish.

Grumpyfish uses s/he online, which is a nice shorthand. Verbally, and in formal writing, it’s a tougher issue.

Why not say -The umbrella was left behind, if you can’t find the pronoun you want?

why not use its

I have known folks who like to use heshe and himher. Personally I tend to use they and their.

The solution I use is simply using “her” for every instance. Let the reader assume the pronoun is referring to a woman. We men have had dominance in English grammar for far too long.

Viva la feminism!

There are a few non-gendered pronouns that have been adopted by transgender communities as politically correct words to use when the gender of a person is unknown or ambiguous. Some people may also not identify as either gender (rejecting the “gender binary”) and choose to call themselves by gender neutral pronouns. The ones I am familiar with are “ze” and “hir” (pronounced like “here”).

For example:

Someone has left hir umbrella.
Oh no! Ze must be getting wet!

“Shitty”—“she” + “it” + “he.”

@ratboy Now that has possibilities!

@hannahsugs That sounds like a stereotypical French person :P

@ratboy That’s just perfect!

Back in the day…it was explained that “Someone left his umbrella behind” was correct because his referred to mankind, which is genderless. Therefore, his is acceptable for either male or female. It wasn’t until the late ‘70s that the his/her controversy came to play.

I’ve seen “hir” as a replacement for him/her.

@PandoraBoxx
i always thought of the word “mankind” as female

Yivo has no gender. Thus Yivo has proclaimed that instead of “he” or “she” we are to use the word “schklee”. And instead of “him” or “her”, we are to use “schklim” or “schkler”.

We have had this conversation before. I stand by what I said there: most of the time, you can get around this problem by pluralizing the antecedent.

The completely ambiguous antecedent, like the umbrella example, is relatively rare and here I would use the awkward but accurate his/her.

I’ve seen “hesh,” “s/h/it,” and other variants too, including adopting expressions from languages that don’t have this problem.

@nikipedia, yes, we have. I think this may have been the most recent. There was also this.

I tend to use “he or she” when I can’t get around it another way. If I were writing a longer, formal text, I would probably use he and she alternately when the antecedent is unspecified. I have been know to use “they” or “them” informally but I would not use it professionally unless I slipped up.

There is no elegant solution, except to rephrase the sentence, e.g. “Someone has left an umbrella; take it to lost and found.” A lawyer once told me that in law, “he” embraces “she”. I tell it exactly as he said it to me.

Here’s a chart with a bunch of different solutions. I tend to use the ze/hir one. I think that’s the one Simone prefers as well, if I remember correctly.

… and to think I used to call Spanish sexist!

You know what’s an even better question? In the movie Star Trek Generations, why did every man aboard the Enterprise have matching pointy sideburns??

To either inquiry, there is no good answer.

@Pol_is_aware – That’s easy. Current military regulations. The women are lucky not to have to do the same.

I say either suck it up and use ‘him’ or go with ‘it’.

There’s a B.F. Skinner “Walden Two”-style commune in Louisa County, VA, called Twin Oaks, or at least there was when i visited a friend’s Mom there in the mid-1970s. it had a sampler on the wall, saying:
—From each according to co’s abilities;
—To each according to co’s needs.
I suspect that it was meant to make one think of “communard’ or “co-operator” or something like that.
They had an interesting version of three-person chess.

“Co” was a non-gender specific pronoun that reared its ugly head in the 1970s for a while and then soon retreated whence it had come. I remember my cousin touting its use.

Using your example, someone has left AN umbrella.