Re: [tor-project] Proposal for the people page: Pronouns

["Nurmi, Juha" <juha.nurmi@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, May 20, 2018 at 4:13 AM, John Gilmore <gnu@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I welcome feedback about any of the above suggestions.

I have a suggestion.  Rather than rewrite the vocabulary of everybody
else, how about becoming less touchy about what words people use
regarding people whose chosen gender is not completely obvious?

I agree with John and let me explain why.

This conversation is concentrated to native English speakers.

For example, Uralic languages (with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian) lack of grammatical gender. Logically there is one pronoun for both he and she; for example, hän in Finnish. As a result, logic of language expressing gender is strange for Finnish speakers. This causes Finnish people often mix, for instance, she/he and actor/actress when they try to speak English. For them hän is always correct and neutral!

As a native Finnish speaker my language codes my brain not to see difference and the whole idea is untranslatable to my native language. As a result, I often mix between she/he/hers/his/actor/actress etc. Indeed, I have said something like "About my grandmonther, he is..." in English which translates completely right to my language!

Most of the Tor user are not speaking English as their first language.

Regards,

Juha

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