Lois’s answer to “If you were writing the Vorkosigan books for the first time in 2022, do you think you'd still choos…” > Likes and Comments
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It is made clear in the books that the herms themselves *chose* that pronoun at some point.
I wonder if a neutral term like "it" is "jarring" because in English we only refer to inanimate things as neutral and people are gendered male or female. In many other languages everything is gendered. Instead of neutral "the, a,an" articles that English uses, Spanish changes articles for 'feminine' and 'masculine' for all nouns, as does French, Italian, ect. German uses 3 genders for their articles, masculine, feminine, and neutral. So I wonder if a translation of "it" in German would seem more like the intended neutral person, and less like a person being dehumanized to an object.
Which leads me to wonder... I have always though English was ahead of the game on not seeing everything as a dichotomy of masculine and feminine due to the lack of gendered articles. It seemed inherintly less sexist to me. But what if German speakers, or other similar languages, who gender things, but include neutral genders, are actually set up to more smoothly transition to speaking in a way that doesn't require noting what a person's genetalia is expected to look like in every reference. Which is the only real informational difference between using "he/she". Would already having a common neutral concept make it easier, or would the habit of gendering everything make it more difficult to imagine you could live without that constant gendering? (please pardon all the typos)
Although using 'it' to refer to people is unconventional and takes some getting used to, there's nothing actually wrong with it. If you want a singular neutral pronoun, that's exactly what it is.
The 'repurposing' of 'they' jars on me worse than the use of 'it', because 'they' is a plural pronoun and I expect it to be plural. Yes, I know that 'they' has been occasionally misused as a singular pronoun for centuries, but so what? People have doing all kinds of other horrible things to the language for centuries, but we still regard them as incorrect: "You should of done that", for example.
I look on it as just normal language change. "You" used to be exclusively plural, too, before it moved into the grammatical space formerly occupied by "thou/thee." Do you count that as a "horrible thing"?
The idea of updating books is interesting. It's quite commonly done with non-fiction, but not commonly with fiction, probably for various reasons. If you did update a novel, I think I can guarantee that some people would prefer the original and some the revised version. (And some people would buy both, thus generating extra sales, I suppose.)
I know that there's the original (cut) version of Heinlein's "Stranger in a strange land" and also the later uncut version. There seem to be multiple slightly different versions of Bester's "Tiger! Tiger!" (a.k.a. "The stars my destination"—inferior title).
I think a story is an artifact of a person's moment in the universe. It contains the essence of the writer, their time in history, and their personal interpretations of their own existence while translating a tale so others can also translate according to their own moment within the universe. Time capsules, for sure. You open it up and the scent is released. I wonder if an artifact story smells like an old library or maybe an attic.
Margaret: Yes, I also regret the singular use of 'you', although I suppose it's too late by now to mount a campaign on behalf of 'thou'. The more general a pronoun becomes, the less useful it is. Now that 'you' can mean one, two, or twenty people, we sometimes have to use extra words to clarify what we mean by it: "I mean all of you", or "Just you, David".
An important part of our nature is that we change. Which is a paradox of immortality, as whoever has my body in a decade, much less a millennium, won't be me.
I started technical writing over 35 years ago; the technical writing community has been using 'they' instead of the far more unpleasant 'he/she' for at least that long.
I also started technical writing over 35 years ago, and in my experience there's never any need to use 'he/she' or singular 'they'. Users or customers in general are plural; if talking directly to the reader, the correct pronoun is 'you'. (In theory I'd prefer 'thou', but that would look eccentric.)
I agree with 'you' - but occasionally I need to refer to someone who is not the user, but is definitely not a group of people.
Anne, I see that my company's style guide agrees with you in preferring singular 'they' to 'he or she', but I've never encountered the need for either. My personal preference, if such a thing were needed, would be 'he or she'. (In theory, 'it' should be sufficient, but it's unconventional and people resist it.)
P.S. In a technical writing context, there are so many inanimate objects under discussion that it would be confusing to use 'it' to refer to people. Somewhat more feasible in a novel.
Your books were the product of the times in which they were written. They don't need to be 'updated'. Someone might want to re-write Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, or .... Your language was kind, and timely, and of itself. Your "alter-verse" has its own rules, and so people should honor those rules. Thank you, for so many years of enjoyment of your 'alter-verse.'
@CatBookMom ..."They don't need to be 'updated'... Your "alter-verse" has its own rules, and so people should honor those rules. Thank you, for so many years of enjoyment of your 'alter-verse.'"...
Yes! Damn the man! Save the Empire!!
Jonathan Palfrey wrote, "The more general a pronoun becomes, the less useful it is." And yet there exist entire languages that have a single third-person pronoun, and somehow they still manage to communicate. :) There's the solution: translate the novels to Hungarian, and you will not need to worry about hermaphrodite pronouns ever again. Everyone is simply ő, whether male, female, both, or neither. Though I suppose the ba could be "a/az", i.e. the inanimate pronoun-like-thing. (It's not really a pronoun, more like an article. Sorta.)
Martha: Yes, people do manage to communicate somehow, despite the defects of whatever language they happen to be using. But I think communication would be eased if the languages we use were less defective.
It's possible to do without all kinds of things in a language. English does without noun gender. Chinese, I've heard, does without verb tense. Swedish verbs don't change with person or number.
I just wonder how this element was translated into languages like French where everything (even an inanimate object) has a male or female gender?
Bel Thorne is one of my favorite characters. I love how it evolved organically into larger roles as though demanding a bigger part because it had more to say. In a way, the dismissiveness of 'it' helped that evolution.
@Jonathan Palfrey, Diane Duane has done several rounds of updates to her Young Wizards series. One of the most notable changes was when she updated her understanding of autism and changed a major character to be more like readers' lived experience. (One of these days I'm going to get through the rewrite and see exactly what was changed, but there's so much else out there to read....)
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Margaret
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Feb 02, 2022 10:46AM
It is made clear in the books that the herms themselves *chose* that pronoun at some point.
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I wonder if a neutral term like "it" is "jarring" because in English we only refer to inanimate things as neutral and people are gendered male or female. In many other languages everything is gendered. Instead of neutral "the, a,an" articles that English uses, Spanish changes articles for 'feminine' and 'masculine' for all nouns, as does French, Italian, ect. German uses 3 genders for their articles, masculine, feminine, and neutral. So I wonder if a translation of "it" in German would seem more like the intended neutral person, and less like a person being dehumanized to an object. Which leads me to wonder... I have always though English was ahead of the game on not seeing everything as a dichotomy of masculine and feminine due to the lack of gendered articles. It seemed inherintly less sexist to me. But what if German speakers, or other similar languages, who gender things, but include neutral genders, are actually set up to more smoothly transition to speaking in a way that doesn't require noting what a person's genetalia is expected to look like in every reference. Which is the only real informational difference between using "he/she". Would already having a common neutral concept make it easier, or would the habit of gendering everything make it more difficult to imagine you could live without that constant gendering? (please pardon all the typos)
Although using 'it' to refer to people is unconventional and takes some getting used to, there's nothing actually wrong with it. If you want a singular neutral pronoun, that's exactly what it is.The 'repurposing' of 'they' jars on me worse than the use of 'it', because 'they' is a plural pronoun and I expect it to be plural. Yes, I know that 'they' has been occasionally misused as a singular pronoun for centuries, but so what? People have doing all kinds of other horrible things to the language for centuries, but we still regard them as incorrect: "You should of done that", for example.
I look on it as just normal language change. "You" used to be exclusively plural, too, before it moved into the grammatical space formerly occupied by "thou/thee." Do you count that as a "horrible thing"?
The idea of updating books is interesting. It's quite commonly done with non-fiction, but not commonly with fiction, probably for various reasons. If you did update a novel, I think I can guarantee that some people would prefer the original and some the revised version. (And some people would buy both, thus generating extra sales, I suppose.)I know that there's the original (cut) version of Heinlein's "Stranger in a strange land" and also the later uncut version. There seem to be multiple slightly different versions of Bester's "Tiger! Tiger!" (a.k.a. "The stars my destination"—inferior title).
I think a story is an artifact of a person's moment in the universe. It contains the essence of the writer, their time in history, and their personal interpretations of their own existence while translating a tale so others can also translate according to their own moment within the universe. Time capsules, for sure. You open it up and the scent is released. I wonder if an artifact story smells like an old library or maybe an attic.
Margaret: Yes, I also regret the singular use of 'you', although I suppose it's too late by now to mount a campaign on behalf of 'thou'. The more general a pronoun becomes, the less useful it is. Now that 'you' can mean one, two, or twenty people, we sometimes have to use extra words to clarify what we mean by it: "I mean all of you", or "Just you, David".
An important part of our nature is that we change. Which is a paradox of immortality, as whoever has my body in a decade, much less a millennium, won't be me.
I started technical writing over 35 years ago; the technical writing community has been using 'they' instead of the far more unpleasant 'he/she' for at least that long.
I also started technical writing over 35 years ago, and in my experience there's never any need to use 'he/she' or singular 'they'. Users or customers in general are plural; if talking directly to the reader, the correct pronoun is 'you'. (In theory I'd prefer 'thou', but that would look eccentric.)
I agree with 'you' - but occasionally I need to refer to someone who is not the user, but is definitely not a group of people.
Anne, I see that my company's style guide agrees with you in preferring singular 'they' to 'he or she', but I've never encountered the need for either. My personal preference, if such a thing were needed, would be 'he or she'. (In theory, 'it' should be sufficient, but it's unconventional and people resist it.)
P.S. In a technical writing context, there are so many inanimate objects under discussion that it would be confusing to use 'it' to refer to people. Somewhat more feasible in a novel.
Your books were the product of the times in which they were written. They don't need to be 'updated'. Someone might want to re-write Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, or .... Your language was kind, and timely, and of itself. Your "alter-verse" has its own rules, and so people should honor those rules. Thank you, for so many years of enjoyment of your 'alter-verse.'
@CatBookMom ..."They don't need to be 'updated'... Your "alter-verse" has its own rules, and so people should honor those rules. Thank you, for so many years of enjoyment of your 'alter-verse.'"...Yes! Damn the man! Save the Empire!!
Jonathan Palfrey wrote, "The more general a pronoun becomes, the less useful it is." And yet there exist entire languages that have a single third-person pronoun, and somehow they still manage to communicate. :) There's the solution: translate the novels to Hungarian, and you will not need to worry about hermaphrodite pronouns ever again. Everyone is simply ő, whether male, female, both, or neither. Though I suppose the ba could be "a/az", i.e. the inanimate pronoun-like-thing. (It's not really a pronoun, more like an article. Sorta.)
Martha: Yes, people do manage to communicate somehow, despite the defects of whatever language they happen to be using. But I think communication would be eased if the languages we use were less defective.It's possible to do without all kinds of things in a language. English does without noun gender. Chinese, I've heard, does without verb tense. Swedish verbs don't change with person or number.
I just wonder how this element was translated into languages like French where everything (even an inanimate object) has a male or female gender?
Bel Thorne is one of my favorite characters. I love how it evolved organically into larger roles as though demanding a bigger part because it had more to say. In a way, the dismissiveness of 'it' helped that evolution.
@Jonathan Palfrey, Diane Duane has done several rounds of updates to her Young Wizards series. One of the most notable changes was when she updated her understanding of autism and changed a major character to be more like readers' lived experience. (One of these days I'm going to get through the rewrite and see exactly what was changed, but there's so much else out there to read....)
