Comment on Firefox is fine. The people running it are not
cygnus@lemmy.ca 1 week agoNot really. Mandarin for example has different characters for “he” and “she”, but they are homophones so you can’t tell who’s who in spoken language. Hungarian doesn’t have gendered pronouns and Finnish doesn’t either (actually, now that I think of it, that may be where you borrowed yours - isn’t it “hen” too?)
lime@feddit.nu 1 week ago
i’m not really talking about the grammar, but about the cultural meanings of the words. there may be implied gender in a mode of speaking even in a language without gendered pronouns. my grandmother would always assume people i was talking about were male if i didn’t use a gendered pronoun (like i would be talking about a colleague telling me something funny) because that’s the “cultural default” still.
and i actually don’t know where we got “hen” from. i do know that it was not originally meant to be an actual gender-neutral pronoun, but as a placeholder where gender is unknown or unimportant. it was created to replace the more cumbersome “han/hon” in legal texts, and not meant to use to refer to specific people. but we do that anyway because it helps adoption.
looking it up it does seem to be taken from finnish! i learned something.