Queer Language and E-Primitive

Regenerative Culture Language & Oral Tradition
#10

Se, ze and zir are the most “conventional” nuetral pronouns, but lots of people just come up with their own, like squee, and squir.

I’m not sure if I understand you question, so let me know if I’m totally missing the mark…
There is the issue of how folks place validity on certain expressions of gender through language.
An obvious way that people do this is by using the term “real woman”. This implies that trans women are fake, not very nice of course.
A more subtle term used within my community is “bio”, sort for biological, added on to the front of gender. For example “bio-guy” as opposed to “trans-guy”. I personaly don’t use this distinction for a few reasons, the main one being that we are all biological, right? I mean if I’m not biological, what am I? Science carries a ridiculous amount of weight in our culture. I think “biological” means “valid” to a lot of people, and “trans” is an interesting theory to be dissected in debate.
I use “trans”, and “non-trans”, lots of folks dismiss it as cumbersome, but it uses exactly the same number of syllables as “bio”.
That seems to be a huge problem with changing the language we have grown accustom to. Of course it seems cumbersome and forced, learning something new usually is. It begins to be natural, but not many people are driven to give it a shot.

#11

Of course, in Ojibwe, pronouns focus on personhood/non-personhood, rather than gender.

#12

Aagh, I knew that. It’s been a while!

Wa is the indicator for the subject of a sentence. So “O-nominomo-wa” is like saying “drinks” where “drinks” are the new topic at hand, stressing the topicality of ordering drinks… more like “drinks (exclamation point!)” … “Time to order some drinks!” would be the non-literal meaning. It works, within Japanese culture. In America it would be rude for the server to go up to the table and say, “Time to order drinks now.” But it’s not that way for restaurant manners in Japan. Interruptions (server --> customer and vice-versa) are the norm. (It drove me up the wall sometimes.)

Anyway… ahem … off topic.

I think that in a small, tight-knit community, pronouns w/r/t gender would be less problematic. People could pick their own preferred way of being referenced and it wouldn’t be quite as awkward or difficult for others to remember which pronouns each person has chosen. In a way, it would go along with remembering their name.

#13

Mandarin works the same way. You use “ta” for singular third person and “ta-ren” for plural. Context overcomes the ambiguities.

I prefer using the plural as well. It doesn’t concern itself with gender, and has found a lot of usage in colloquial english as a gender-neutral option. And I agree that it feels the most natural.

#14

I didn’t really want to start a thread on whether or not folks like gender-neutral language invention or not, but I see that it inspires some folks, so, groovy.

I originally went this direction not just because of binary he/she issues, but to get rid of IT.

I hate IT. IT kills. IT destroys relationships and lives.

I shy away from ‘they and them’ uses because they don’t necessarily encourage one to stop using ‘it’. ‘It works’, ‘make it’, ‘I love it’, ‘deal with it’, will probably still hang around, along with conceptualizations of nonhumans as ‘it’.

Unless someone can figure out how to make it stick. Anyone? Anyway, I see e-primitive as growing in this direction: NO MORE of ‘IT’!

I don’t see any life-affirming use whatsoever in the presence of ‘it’.

#15

What do you say may “encourage one to stop using ‘it’,” Willem or anybody? I’d like to know and don’t really no where to begin. Please share…nevermind…

I must have read over this my first time around. Well, with that say anybody got anymore ways that encourage getting rid of ‘it’? Please share. Thanks.

#16

I agree, ‘It’ should only exist in a game of tag : )

#17

Ah, well, I use IT as my pronoun of choice, for me it is the only option that speaks to me. IT is for monstrosities, IT is unknown, uncomfortable, terrifying. That is how I was feeling about my gender before I started using IT. I was so fucking depressed, and after 8 years of struggling for a basic level of comfort within my community, I embraced that “freakish” side of myself through the use of IT. What at first had been masochistic and self hating actually ended up being extremely positive for me.
We use IT for animals, the Earth, plants, monsters, and many other things that I feel close to. This is objectifying and unfortunate, sure, but as of now, and within todays use of the english language, it can also be positive in my life.
I do understand the desire to escape IT. If E-prime is ever widely spoken, I would be all about changing my pronouns to something else even if they did not ring the same way IT, and Thing do with me. While going through life in civilization, with people that have never heard of E-prime, IT is the only option I have had available to me that has allowed me to maintain my sanity.

#18

Hi again,

So today as I walked my dogs I thought about pronouns. I have an offering.

ki

. . . in place of it, her, he, him, she. I derived “ki” from “chi,” th Chinese word for th energy inherent in all things. “Ki” sounds like “key”.

Calling something (or someone) “ki” labels it (or she or he) not as a thing, animal, or person, but as a pattern of energy, a process. “Ki” applies to all things, all life forms, all abstract non-things (ideas & such). It means we’d no longer call these “things,” but rather “ki,” patterns of energy, vibrations.

“Ki” potentially solves th “it” problem as well as th “gender neutral” problem. “Ki” doesn’t distinguish between person, animal, thing, non-thing, nor between male or female. When we want to make such distinctions, for special cases, we can make some compound words like “ki-she”, “ki-he”, “ki-human” (or maybe just “ki, th human”), but by default, we’d leave “ki” as “ki”.

I like that “ki” sounds like “key.” It seems an apt metaphor; how would our world change if people unconsciously considered th “things” & “people” in their lives “keys” to previously unopened doors & new experiences?

I came up with some examples of ways that “ki” might fill in for conventional pronouns. Altho th examples focus on th word “ki”, I think it sounds better & makes more sense not to empahsize “ki,” just as you wouldn’t emphasize “it”. Use th same tone of voice in both sentences, but notice how your feeling toward th thing/animal/person changes.

it:

Look at it. - Look at ki.
It pleases me. - Ki pleases me.
Where can I find it? - Where can I find ki?
Just think about it. - Just think about ki.
It rains. - Ki rains.

she/he/him/her:
She/he looks friendly. - Ki looks friendly.
Go to him. - Go to ki.
Give her this message. - Give ki this message.
I love your dog, what do you call it/she/he? - . . . what do you call ki?

its/his/her/hers:
Put it in its correct place. - Put ki in ki’s correct place.
Have you seen his sweater? - Have you seen ki’s sweater?
Tell me her name. - Tell me ki’s name.
She considers it hers. - Ki considers it ki’s.

itself/herself/himself:
It completes itself. - Ki completes kiself.
She did it herself. - Ki did it kiself.
What does he think about himself? - What does ki think about kiself?

everything/everyone/everybody:
Everything looks perfect. - Everyki looks perfect.
Did you say hi to everyone? - Did you say hi to everyki?

thing/person/animal:
Tell me about this thing/person/animal. - Tell me about this ki.

& if we want to go all th way, perhaps to sublime absurdity, we can replace all pronouns with “ki”! Thus, our languaging wouldn’t distinguish between “I” & “you”. Talk about creating a more tolerant universe by promoting empathy. . . .

#19

P.S. I know my last post is exactly what you where not interested in discussing Willem. I’m not trying to start a discussion about my pronoun choice. I am actually very much unintrested in that. I just had to say my piece on my love of using IT and Thing for my personal pronouns. In my case, I would go as far as saying that it has indeed been life affirming.

#20

Nodal nim, that is the best new idea I’ve heard about this issue in a long time. Awesome.

#21

Amazing. That really blows my mind and inspires me. I still hate english-it, but I love your monstrous, terrifying IT! Like Uncle It from the Adam’s Family, or the Swamp Thing.

You know, in a way, this really reveals that English does exactly what it means to…the word “it” DOESN’T mean INANIMATE, as the textbooks claim. It means UNKNOWN, unfathomable, INHUMAN.

It allows us to ‘dismiss’ these things comfortably. I think you’ve done much the same thing as feminists reclaiming ‘bitch’ or similar endeavors though their success varies. Yours seems to have worked on your own terms.

I guess I looked for this kind of insight, that you’ve shown me, when I started this thread. I feel like the people (human and non-) that our culture stigmatizes and marginalizes bear the secret EXIT sign, whether they know it or not. If a culture has abandoned you already, how much work do you really have to abandon your culture?

Not much.

Unfortunately my culture loves me, saddled me with all its hopes and ideologies, sees in my white male english-speakingness the shape of domination to come. I don’t feel guilty about this, it just means I always have an out. I can capitulate at any time, rejoin the flock, plug back into the matrix. ITs don’t have this choice. They have a gun pointed to their head, whether they say yes, or no, to its requests, this culture will still pull the trigger.

RANT RANT RANT RANT! Maybe I should post this over in Jana/yarrow’s grief and praise thread. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

#22

Ha ha. Can you believe we wrote these two sentences at exactly the same time?

:slight_smile:

#23

FUN!!!

#24

I kinda like the idea of user created language : )

edit: actually I really like it, you don’t get to discuss these things at ‘school’ it’s just kind of fed to you. Your world is shaped for you, instead of you shaping your world.

#25

Ai’m a little offended at peoples’ prejudice against the word ‘it’. Old English was a gendered language that consisted of masculine, feminine and neutral. “It” was simply the neutral gender of singular 3rd person pronouns and was said in reference to any neutral gender noun. A related incidence is why “man” can refer to the two leged people: “man” was the Old English word for the two legeds, but it happened to be masculine gender (prolly because of gender bias) so the main meaning switched to an adult male when gender was gotten rid of. Ai say we just eliminate the distinction made between animate and inanimate beings and call everyone “it”.

Or we could go with my earlier constructed pronoun “hey”. (pronunciation in parentheses)
he - him - his -his
she - her - her - hers
hey - hem - hir - hirs
(hei - hem - heer - heerz)
pl. : they - them - their - theirs

Its almost the same as the Middle English version of they and them, but altered to fit with the modern pattern.

#26

Offended? Wow, it doesn’t take much, does it? :slight_smile:

To take you literally, calling everyone ‘it’ poses a challenge for me, as currently my mind reads ‘it’ as ‘nonliving, nonperson’. Rather than use that on everything, I’d rather just abandon it. Whatever its roots, it means what it means to me, right now, today.

Looking in context, I see you may not mean that literally. In that sense, I think several folks have suggested just that: one pronoun for all beings, whether ‘ki’ or your ‘hey’ or whatever. Chinuk Wawa uses ‘yaka’ and ‘klaska’ for all singular and plural third-persons. Sign language uses a pointing thumb or finger, if I remember right.

#27

oooh, i like the idea of throwing ki into everyday language (even if not substituting for “it” all the time). ki feels like an apt choice. when i lived in japan and was learning japanese, i loved learning about how ki embodies not a static state but a feeling or modality… the equivalent to asking “How are you doing?” is “Genki desu ka?” Gen-ki (元気) means something like “original spirit.” Likewise, the word for weather is Ten-ki (天気), which means something like “heaven’s spirit” (or we could take it to mean the ‘mood of the air’). I don’t know if this explanation helps, but I always found ki fascinating, and I’m glad to see ki appear here.

#28

I have several friends gay and lesbian friends in college, one of whom reads much on transgender issues.

The usage of gender-neutral pronouns becomes a bit contentious depending on who you ask, but a wide-spread and common form of such pronouns are Ze for the active and Hir for the possessive. When spoken they are pronounced like “Zee” and “Here”. These are not the only ones, “s/he” is also popular but hard to speak. The previous two are the nouns of choice as endorsed by transgender author Leslie Feinberg.

A good sentence example was explained by the character Alice on “The L Word”:

“So you could say ‘Ze said ze didn’t like my dress, so I told hir to go fuck hirself’”.

Oh and “he-she” is considered naive and under NO circumstances do you EVER say “it”.

Now I’m bad enough with gender pronouns as it is, so it might take me a while to incorporate that AND E-Prime :slight_smile:

#29

[quote=“Willem, post:23, topic:610”][quote author=Nodal Nim link=topic=653.msg7643#msg7643 date=1200691193]

Calling something (or someone) “ki” labels it (or she or he) not as a thing, animal, or person, but as a pattern of energy, a process. “Ki” applies to all things, all life forms, all abstract non-things (ideas & such). It means we’d no longer call these “things,” but rather “ki,” patterns of energy, vibrations.
[/quote]

FUN!!![/quote]

Yeah I like this too :slight_smile: