Skip to main content
Meta Stack Exchange

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

15
  • 74
    International feedback is essential if there's anything related to pronouns in it. More than two-thirds of the languages used on SE (French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian) have a feature called "grammatical gender", while Japanese pronouns are very different from English ones. It's very easy to accidentally write a code of conduct that requires non-grammatical or insulting writing in another language. Commented Oct 6, 2019 at 22:04
  • 1
    This. This has been a question I kept meaning to ask during this whole hullabaloo. Thanks for bring it up. Commented Oct 7, 2019 at 1:51
  • @Mark maybe a bit off-topic, but how are Japanese pronouns so very different? I see the usual ones: 私・私達 (I/we), あなた (you), 彼 (he), 彼女 (her), 彼ら (them). The usage conventions might be different (omitting most instances of first person or second person pronouns, for example). (Unless you're talking about gendered first person like 僕・俺, etc.) Commented Oct 7, 2019 at 2:37
  • 11
    @muru, the usage conventions are rather different: not only can you drop pronouns in many situations, you switch pronouns based on the relative status of the speaker and the audience, and on the desired level of formality and/or contempt, not to mention dialectical differences. Commented Oct 7, 2019 at 3:00
  • 8
    @Mark So what your saying is that pronouns in Japanese can actually be offensive. Commented Oct 7, 2019 at 6:51
  • 2
    Just an idle thought about cultural and language differences: I'm pretty sure that native Japanese speakers aren't offended by being referred as 彼女 (if not misgengered, of course), which is literally translates as 'he-woman'. While some foreign Japanese speakers may probably find it offending that the "base" pronoun is "he", while "her" has a "woman" part added almost as an afterthought. Commented Oct 7, 2019 at 13:14
  • 2
    Whatever is enforced about pronouns should be extended to names and adjectives when writing in Spanish, where they are usually gendered. The problem is that they don't have a neutral form. Well the grammatically masculine form used to be considered appropriate for neutral style but that seems to be no longer the case. Commented Oct 7, 2019 at 19:06
  • @Yaant, I'm pretty sure that native Japanese speakers would be offended if that's the wrong pronoun for the level of formality involved. Japanese pronouns can be translated into English as "I/you/he/she/it/they" (with some loss of meaning), but blindly translating English pronouns into Japanese is likely to be ungrammatical, offensive, or both. Commented Oct 8, 2019 at 1:27
  • @fredsbend: That's not just Japanese. Both French and German have polite forms for pronouns (vous/Sie). From what I understand, not using those forms when it's called for can be reason for dismissal in Germany. Commented Oct 8, 2019 at 10:56
  • 1
    No, they're also pronouns. Unlike he/she/they, vous/Sie are second-person pronouns - like the English "you". All the gory details: T-V distinction. The equivalent of "Mister" would be "Monsieur/Herr", but none of those are pronouns, they're honorifics. Commented Oct 8, 2019 at 15:23
  • @Goyo in English the masculine used to be "inclusive" non-gendered style (as in "mankind" means women too) but this seems to be forced out of favour these days. Commented Oct 8, 2019 at 17:59
  • 7
    @gbjbaanb, "mankind", like most English-language words that include "man", comes from the Old English "mann", which was gender-neutral. The masculine "vir" has nearly vanished from the language, surviving only in words like "werewolf"; the feminine "wif" survives as "woman" ("wif-mann", female human). Commented Oct 9, 2019 at 0:22
  • I think that, if the new CoC includes anything specifically about pronouns, it would be quite easy to make it language-neutral. The rule could simply look like this: When using gendered pronouns about another person, use ones that in your language are correct in regards to that person's stated gender. I've noticed that people often overcomplicate matters of gendered pronouns, which creates more problems than it solves. Commented Oct 9, 2019 at 16:37
  • @Meeep rus language doesn't have neutral pronouns at all. We have "оно", which literally could be translated as "it". And that's it. Commented Oct 9, 2019 at 16:38
  • 2
    @Suvitruf I'm Polish, and it's similar here. With my rule suggestion, a Russian (or Polish) speaker would simply use pronouns normally, like they normally do in Russia (or Poland). If someone says he is male, use the male pronoun. If someone says she is female, use the female pronoun. In any other case, write in a way that people typically write when gender is unknown/unclear. Basically, my rule suggestion says that you should speak the way you normally do in your language. Commented Oct 9, 2019 at 16:45