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Alright so I've been thinking of making an animated map of the history of gender neutral pronouns in Europe (hexbear.net)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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How the f*uck do I find out what the third-person singular pronouns of ancient languages sounded like and what the f*uck do I do with sign languages

And perhaps easier for people here to answer: What are the gender-neutral or non-binary pronouns of your native languages? What are the histories of these pronouns? Even if it isn't a language of Europe it'd be interesting to hear about.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Turkish only has one 3rd person pronoun: O.

Man, woman, neither, dog, cat, table, door doesn't matter. In fact there are no genders or any articles in turkish grammar it's pretty neat. And thats kind of the history already, omitting some details about the male being the norm for human, since it's a grammatically nongendered language it never needed gendered pronouns.

German on the other hand I'm hoping someone else will speak to because I'd like to know as well.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

German was incidentally what inspired this project, because I had read here about various German neopronouns, of which the most interesting was hen (dat. hem gen. henser). German hen was loaned from Scandinavian hen, the first attestation of which was in Swedish in the 1960s when it was first proposed. Swedish in turn got hen from Finnish hän, which has always been a gender-neutral language. Hän itself originates as an irregular debuccalization (apparently a reduced form) of Proto-Finno-Ugric *sen from Proto-Uralic *se(n).

But German seems to have a lot of different pronouns currently competing for the top spot, another proposal is apparently loaning English they and "germanizing" it into dey (acc. demm, dat. denen, gen. derer; alternative inflections exist). There is also the sere-German proposal of using a portmanteau of sie and er, sier (acc. sien, dat. siem, gen. sieser; alternative inflections exist). And there are many many many other proposals.