mific replied to your post “We still
Oct. 18th, 2018 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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mific replied to your post “We still haven’t had a frost but there was some…”
The underling could just use their title, like “Captain”. Or Sir is more neutral. In Due South Fraser et at call their female Inspector “sir”.
walburgablack replied to your post “We still haven’t had a frost but there was some…”
so the thing is some languages traditionally allow for gender-neutral 2nd and 3rd person singular. In Bengali, for instance, you *can’t* use pronouns and verbs to indicate gender.
I was thinking of just using titles. And I had also thought about deciding that in this culture “ma’am” would be the more gender-neutral title; it’s a far-future kind of solarpunk setting after all. But I had decided that wouldn’t be universal. And modern English-language readers would react more to a misgendering with “ma’am” than they would with “sir”. I might just not specify what the correct gender-neutral title would be.
I haven’t done any linguistic worldbuilding for this novel. Many of the characters who I figure should have names are named things like [MERCHANT] and [WAGON DRIVER 1], and the cities are named [CITY], [OTHERCITY], and [CAPITAL], so. Maybe the language is gender-neutral. (The idea of completely un-gendered pronouns is surprisingly confusing to me! I’ve been enjoying not needing to use the character’s name or title much because there are no other eys in this novel; if I go with ‘they’ instead I’m gonna have to tighten that up and be more specific that I’m talking about just one person– but I won’t have to deal with readers who’ve never encountered spivak pronouns before.)
I dunno, I’m just chewing it all over. I gotta decide what flavor of agender this person is, most likely, and what their position really is and what it signifies. I just figured I’d start chewing on it with some intent, y’know? Making the witless stranger say “ma’am” to make clear that it’s a misgendering problem and not an issue of misattributed rank means, at least apparently, that the character reads to the ignorant as female; from the time I wrote it I’ve started having problems not using female pronouns for em! It’s funny how much that affected me. I wrote it as “sir” but changed it right away and immediately after that, started having problems!
(Your picture was not posted)
mific replied to your post “We still haven’t had a frost but there was some…”
The underling could just use their title, like “Captain”. Or Sir is more neutral. In Due South Fraser et at call their female Inspector “sir”.
walburgablack replied to your post “We still haven’t had a frost but there was some…”
so the thing is some languages traditionally allow for gender-neutral 2nd and 3rd person singular. In Bengali, for instance, you *can’t* use pronouns and verbs to indicate gender.
I was thinking of just using titles. And I had also thought about deciding that in this culture “ma’am” would be the more gender-neutral title; it’s a far-future kind of solarpunk setting after all. But I had decided that wouldn’t be universal. And modern English-language readers would react more to a misgendering with “ma’am” than they would with “sir”. I might just not specify what the correct gender-neutral title would be.
I haven’t done any linguistic worldbuilding for this novel. Many of the characters who I figure should have names are named things like [MERCHANT] and [WAGON DRIVER 1], and the cities are named [CITY], [OTHERCITY], and [CAPITAL], so. Maybe the language is gender-neutral. (The idea of completely un-gendered pronouns is surprisingly confusing to me! I’ve been enjoying not needing to use the character’s name or title much because there are no other eys in this novel; if I go with ‘they’ instead I’m gonna have to tighten that up and be more specific that I’m talking about just one person– but I won’t have to deal with readers who’ve never encountered spivak pronouns before.)
I dunno, I’m just chewing it all over. I gotta decide what flavor of agender this person is, most likely, and what their position really is and what it signifies. I just figured I’d start chewing on it with some intent, y’know? Making the witless stranger say “ma’am” to make clear that it’s a misgendering problem and not an issue of misattributed rank means, at least apparently, that the character reads to the ignorant as female; from the time I wrote it I’ve started having problems not using female pronouns for em! It’s funny how much that affected me. I wrote it as “sir” but changed it right away and immediately after that, started having problems!
(Your picture was not posted)
