Due to the increased acceptance of non-conforming identities, it's become more prevalent to either ask for pronouns, tell them to a person you meet, or have them somewhere visible in things like gameshows.

That's quite as silly to me as this whole "what gender is this washing machine" nonsense is to English-speaking people.

Here in Finland, we don't have gendered language. Even with third person pronouns, we usually default to "it" instead of "him/her/they". Except for pets. They always get the proper pronoun "hän". It's just respectful.

So yeah, just like the English wonder why they have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in France, I too, as a Finn, wonder why I have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in English.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Yeah I don't see anyone accepting being called "it" in English; that's how you refer to farm animals bound for slaughter or undesirable ethnicities you're going to exterminate.

[–] Dasus@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Why would anyone ever want to try using "it" for people in English unless they're purposefully trying to demean someone.. ?

Sorry, I wasn't trying to say that's what English should do. I was describing what Finnish does.

I'm pointing out that lots of languages have less gender distinctions than English, so English calling French out on gendered nouns is rather silly.

My point is that despite Finland having a perfectly good third person singular for people, we usually use the even more general one, which is just for anything. Except when talking to and about pets, because then somehow everyone uses less colloquial language.

While English has a perfectly good second person singular, but doesn't even use it anymore.

You can't have more third person singulars before you finish your second person singulars, that's the rule. Now open up!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou

[–] ahnesampo@sopuli.xyz 2 points 8 months ago

My point is that despite Finland having a perfectly good third person singular for people we usually use the even more general one

The reason for that is because “se” as strictly a “thing” pronoun is artificial “book language”. When standard literary Finnish was being developed in the 19th century, its inventors wanted to have a person/thing distinction in pronouns like the “civilized” languages had, so they arbitrarily assigned “hän” as a person pronoun and “se” as a thing pronoun. That distinction is artificial, and has never stuck in spoken Finnish.

Originally there was a difference between “hän” and “se”, but it was grammatical: se was the general third person pronoun, hän referred back to the speaker (logophoric pronoun). Compare:

Antti sanoi, että se tulee. (Antti said that someone else will come.)
Antti sanoi, että hän tulee. (Antti said that he himself will come.)

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