Is there a table of gender-neutral pronouns in other languages? I've been asked about it a few times by translators and, sadly, me sitting here at my laptop Wikipedia-ing shit is not going to enlighten a native speaker.
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Replying to @sadydoyle
The third-person pronoun in Chinese, "ta", is, in speech, gender-neutral and in fact the same for people and non-people (i.e. "he", "she", and "it" are all pronounced the same in Mandarin)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @sadydoyle
The word is *written* differently depending on whether it's "he", "she" or "it", but that's a relatively recent historical change that was introduced because of contact with the West and needing the distinction to conveniently translate Western texts
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Replying to @arthur_affect @sadydoyle
Okay but are audiences gonna actually accept 他 as gender-neutral in a written work? people sometimes argue that "he" is gender-neutral in English too
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My experience is Mandarin speakers have a lot of trouble keeping track of "he" and "she" in English because it's just not a factor in how they think of pronouns
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