Fourth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

btw feel free to suggest/nominate post titles

Post about fandom! Or whatever! Whether it's a rave about some obscure series, or an essay dissecting every last reason why some internet-famous author should rethink their career, someone will probably read it at some point! We also just chat about life.

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

Comments

Re: How's life?

[(Anonymous)]

Went to an upscale chocolate store in Chinatown today. Residents of my city might know which one I'm referring to from that description.

The art on the wall had a blurb introducing the artist as someone who used she/they pronouns; the Chinese translation provided below translated she/they as 她/她们.

I'm absolutely beyond myself with laughter. 她 is an explicitly gendered female pronoun in Chinese; it uses the 女 radical, meaning 'woman,' and was invented in the 1900s expressly because Chinese lacked gendered third-person pronouns. 们 is a suffix you attach to 'human' words to pluralize them - for example, you might add 们 to 孩子 'child' to make 孩子们 'children.' In other words, their translation of a 'singular gender-neutral pronoun' is both explicitly gendered and explicitly plural.

I don't even think this was a machine translation, either. I think someone simply did not understand.

Re: How's life?

[(Anonymous)]

SHE WITH EXTRA SHES

Re: How's life?

[(Anonymous)]

Sa

(Thanks for sharing; made me snuffle-laugh)

Re: How's life?

[(Anonymous)]

When you try to be woke but Chinese just isn't having it

Re: How's life?

[(Anonymous)]

I saw an idiot on the internet today declaring their pronouns proudly and then trying to give examples of pronouns in another language. What he actually gave were possessive pronouns, and instead of varying the gender of the person owning the object, he varied the gender of the object, mixing plural and singular forms incoherently to boot. I corrected him and he accused me of being an American because anyone actually from this country would be happy to see someone "learning" the language.

It was especially hilarious because it's a language with gendered plural pronouns ... a group of all women receives the female they, but 100 women and 1 man are referred to with the male they. It's horrifically sexist but I can make the devil's advocate argument that it represents what happens to women's spaces if you let in one man....

Re: How's life?

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah I now wonder if conventions like that could also work for women's protection. Gives you a warning there's at least 1 man in the group. Ugh.