Thursday, January 30, 2020

Spanish has a woke problem

Sex and the singular pronoun 
The folks at Merriam-Webster dictionaries named they as their 2019 word of the year, citing a dramatic increase in online lookups during the year. In some ways it was a strange choice. The word-of-the-year awards, given mostly by dictionary publishers and linguistic associations, usually go to recent neologisms that have become voguish. They is in a different category: It dates from Early Middle English in the 13th century, borrowed from Old Norse. Most of the uses that spurred its newfound notoriety date from the 1300s.
The “new” sense of they is as a singular pronoun. By a confluence of natural linguistic evolution and a couple of social-engineering campaigns, the word has been thrust into prominence in the last few years.
The evolutionary part has to do with the lack in English of a common-gender third-person singular pronoun. The problem often arises with indefinite pronouns: Everyone can think for himself. Herself? Themselves? Themself? If we stipulate, as 18th-century grammarians did, that the indefinite pronoun everyone is singular, what reflexive complement are we to use? In 1745, an English grammarian named Anne Fisher posited that the masculine singular pronoun includes the feminine. So for more than 250 years, speakers of Standard English satisfied themselves with Everyone can think for himself. Grammarians became resolute on the point.
But this solution never really sat well, especially toward the end of the 20th century. Feminists argued (rightly, I think) that the generic masculine pronoun was sexist. Hence “enlightened” speakers would utter, ploddingly, Everyone can think for himself or herself.

They can them can become ungendered in English, bu they are still ellos, and los, las in Spanish.  Further, the 'a and o' endings are often used to redefine an adjective. 

What if google translate got woke?  Insisted bots do not have gender. What if google translate did not get woke? Bots would run around thinking humans are two genders!

There is 'le, te and  me 'which ae ungendered. They are indirect. We can create 'a' form: 'A le, and a te:

To the ungendered possibly human thing(s)  is assigned the action, thus converting the indirects into directs. This gives google translate a path to wokeness. Another conversion is mismo.

'Le misme' becomes a direct and also subject pronouns, misme becoming the ungendered woke modifier replacement for self or selves.. Meaning 'Those possibly human ungendered things doing something'


Another possibility is just recognize 'le and te' as possible indirects or directs or subjects according to whether the speaker desires to appear woke.

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