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Topic: Epicene pronoun

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	Gender-neutral pronoun - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Gender-neutral or epicene pronouns are pronouns that neither reveal nor imply the gender or the sex of a person or thing being referred to.
		The dialectal epicene pronoun a is a reduced form of the Old and Middle English masculine and feminine pronouns he and heo.
		The pronoun "athu", generally used for objects and animals (similar to "that" in English) and considered derogatory when used for a person, is sometimes used in slang and informal conversations in a humorous way.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Epicene_pronoun (1071 words)

	Riism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Use of the pronoun ri parallels usage in many of the languages of Africa and Asia, such as Swahili and Chinese, in which the third-person pronouns have no distinction between feminine and masculine.
		Since personal pronouns are most commonly used immediately before a verb, the pronoun ri would cause similar ambiguity: ri gardas (s/he keeps) vs. rigardas (looks), ri petas (s/he asks) vs. ripetas (repeats), etc. Critics making this objection often propose that the epicene pronoun should be gi, by analogy with the prefix ge-.
		Other critics argue that the alleged lack of an epicene pronoun is spurious, because Zamenhof himself specified that ĝi should be used when the sex of an individual is unknown, and that the idea that ĝi cannot be used for people is due to interference from English.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Riism (956 words)

	It (pronoun). Who is It (pronoun)? What is It (pronoun)? Where is It (pronoun)? Definition of It (pronoun). Meaning of ...
		It is a third-person neuter pronoun in the English language.
		In English, pronouns such as it and its have been used to refer to babies and pets, although with the passing of the Victorian era this usage has come to be considered too impersonal, with many usage advocates arguing that it demeans a conscious being to the status of a mere thing.
		This use of 'it' also got bad press when various regimes used it as a rhetorical device to try and dehumanise their enemies: implying that they were little better than animals.
	www.knowledgerush.com /kr/encyclopedia/It_(pronoun) (361 words)

	Book Encyclopedia - Web Library (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		Gender-neutral or epicene pronouns are pronouns that neither reveal nor imply sex or gender when referring to people, animals or things.
		However, at the time around May Fourth Movement, a new pronoun 她 (tā) has been invented to represent "she" and 他 is now often used as "he" only.
		Standard Esperanto has the third person pronouns ŝi, li, and ĝi for she, he, and it, respectively; however, some speakers use the neologism ri as a gender-neutral third person pronoun.
	www.bookencyclopedia.com /index.php?title=Gender-neutral_pronoun (551 words)

	Pronoun (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word that usually takes the place of a noun previously mentioned, such as "I", "me", "she", "it", and so on.
		Pronouns are one of the basic parts of speech, along with noun s, verb s, adjective s, and adverb s.
		The French possessive pronouns (mon, ma, mes, ton, ta, tes, son, sa, ses, notre, notre, nos, votre, votre, vos, leur, leur, leurs) are technically adjectives because they decline into masculine, feminine and plural forms and further agree with their heads (not their antecedents).
	www.information-and-answers.com /resource-Pronoun.html (1026 words)

	Pronoun Morphology
		Pronouns are the simplest of NPs in that they take neither determiners nor adjective modifiers.
		Pronouns in ámman îar are divided into personal, possessive, demonstrative, and impersonal pronouns.
		Pronouns are subject to a split-case morphology because of animacy considerations.
	www.graywizard.net /Conlinguistics/amman_iar/ai_pronouns.htm (631 words)

	Barbelith Underground > Head Shop > Genderless/Gender-neutral pronouns, "he", "she", "them" and "they", and ...
		Otherwise...I'm not sure if you mean that an epicene pronoun should not be used to describe a person who might at different times be male or female "If the passenger is too cold, ze can adjust the air heater with the control to their left", or should not be used at all.
		Which is not to say that the epicene pronoun is a logical evolution of language, only that the same objections have probably been raised to every attempt to make language more inclusive, successful or unsuccessful, wise or misguided.
		Or that an epicene pronoun is a necessity (that epicene pronoun could, of course, be "they", but see the footnotes page or much of this thread for a summary of the problems both of singular and of plural "they").
	www.barbelith.com /underground/topic.php?id=9710&start=120 (7336 words)

	§ 4. epicene pronouns. 5. Gender. The American Heritage Book of English Usage. 1996
		That pronoun is a—not the article a, but a reduced form of the Middle English third person pronouns he, which referred to a male, and heo, which was used for a female.
		These pronouns, which derive from Old English, came to be nearly indistinguishable when pronounced, and in some dialects they were reduced to a short syllable, spelled ha or a.
		Pronouns are one of the most basic components of a language, and most speakers appear to have little interest in adopting invented ones.
	www.bartleby.com /64/C005/004.html (638 words)

	Spivak pronoun. Who is Spivak pronoun? What is Spivak pronoun? Where is Spivak pronoun? Definition of Spivak pronoun. ...
		The Spivak pronouns are new terms proposed to serve as gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronouns in English (see gender-neutral pronouns).
		These neologisms are used by some people who feel that there are problems with gender-specific pronouns because they imply sex and/or gender (see non-sexist language).
		This pronoun set was originated by Michael Spivak, a mathematician-educator who used them in a number of books.
	www.knowledgerush.com /kr/encyclopedia/Spivak_pronoun (238 words)

	Gender-neutral pronoun
		In non-sexist language, gender-neutral or epicene pronouns neither reveal nor imply sex or gender when referring to people, animals or things.
		Common solutions include singular they, the generic male, he or she, using he and she in alternate passages, and rewording sentences [1].
		\nStandard Esperanto has the third person pronouns ŝi, li, and ĝi for she, he, and it, respectively; however, some users use the neologism ri as a gender-neutral third person pronoun.
	encyclopedia.codeboy.net /wikipedia/g/ge/gender_neutral_pronoun.html (376 words)

	João Sedycias: Inglês Expressão Escrita 4 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		The case of a pronoun used as the subject of a finite verb (as I in I wrote the letter) or as a predicate nominative (as we in It is we who have made the mistake).
		The case of a pronoun used as the object of a verb or preposition.
		Pronouns in the possessive case are often considered adjectives.
	home.yawl.com.br /hp/sedycias/expressao11.htm (3816 words)

	ee is for eepicene
		Those who believe that "he" remains a gender-neutral pronoun and should be used in all cases where the subject's gender is not specifically known to be female.
		But as the alt.usage.english FAQ points out, "[d]iscussions about gender-neutral pronouns tend to go round and round and never reach a conclusion." So instead of arguing about what epicene pronouns should be used, let's do a quick historical survey.
		Finally, no discussion of epicene pronouns would be complete without Joel Weiss' facetious contribution to the topic: "h'orsh'it." I suppose it's a good thing such suggestions are made, if only to keep us GFP advocates from taking ourselves too seriously.
	www.kith.org /logos/words/lower2/eepicene.html (749 words)

	Reforming English Grammar
		The simple solution would be to introduce a third pronoun, for example, 'se', which would mean 'he or she': If anyone is in doubt, se should consult se's textbook.
		Such a pronoun is called an epicene pronoun, referring to either gender, just as 'they' does.
		An innumerate pronoun, say 'hin', would be one referring to either one person or several persons: If a person or persons are a party in a lawsuit, hin (=he, she or they) may be called either the plaintiff or the plaintiffs or the defendant or the defendants.
	www.useless-knowledge.com /1234/apr/article029.html (938 words)

	GNP FAQ - History
		If new gender-neutral pronouns are not adopted, i'm sure that singular "they" will still be a point of contention for centuries to come.
		Besides the centuries-old instinctive use of "their", people have been formally concerned about the gendered pronoun problem since at least 1795, and have been coining new pronouns for about the last century and a half.
		The pronouns "sie, hir, hirs, hirself" seem to have been the most widely adopted, found mainly in Usenet groups involving romantic relationships, and the alternative forms "zie, zir, zirs, zirself" also have a following.
	www.aetherlumina.com /gnp/history.html (1582 words)

	March 2001 - The Epicene Pronoun: can one gender fit all? (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		that could be used as the third-person-singular gender-neutral pronouns (epicene pronouns).
		Although the transition from he and she to they has not been accepted universally, the fact is that most of us say they in its gender-neutral singular sense all the time, without even thinking about it.
		Synthetic pronouns draw attention to themselves and slow readers down—it’s the slash that does it (by the same token, avoid and/or: almost all the time either and or or is sufficient).
	142.206.72.66 /2001/03/s0700_e.htm (816 words)

	Laitinen
		Epicene pronouns in English, or roughly the personal pronouns in sentences (a-b) below, in indefinite anaphora have attracted comments from various fields of research in the past few decades (e.g.
		The studies have approached epicenes and indefinite anaphora from various angles, but the common denominator has often been the social aspect in pronominal realisation.
		To support the approach, corpora will be used to evince the relationship between the antecedents and personal pronouns as a realisation of genderless and non-specific entities.
	www.linguistics.ucsb.edu /faculty/bucholtz/conference/laitinen.html (298 words)

	GENDER-NEUTRAL PRONOUN FACTS AND INFORMATION
		The Sapir-Whorf_Hypothesis is often interpreted by non-linguists to mean that people will be less sexist if they don't distinguish gender in pronouns or other aspects of speech.
		However, around the time of the May_Fourth_Movement, a new written form 她 of the pronoun was created to specifically represent "she", and 他 is now often restricted to meaning "he".
		Of the simple personal pronouns, first and second person singular "ich" and "du" ("I" and "you"(sgl.)) are gender-neutral, while third person sigular personal pronouns are gender specific ("er", "sie" and "es" meaning "he", "she" and "it").
	www.southcountryequity.com /Gender-neutral_pronoun (1012 words)

	Long story; short pier: Sexing the pronoun.
		Epicene pronouns were briefly in the news a couple of years back when Mike Newdow, the guy behind a Pledge of Allegiance lawsuit, used his 15 minutes of fame to flog them instead of freedom of religion.
		And there’s plenty of languages that have gender-neutral or unspecifically gendered pronouns on this planet, and their use doesn’t seem to have done much to prevent sexism and woolly-headedness.—I mostly like playing with the ideas.
		A lot of proposed epicene pronouns look so wacky that I doubt that their creators ever gave them a test run.
	www.longstoryshortpier.com /vaults/2004/03/01/sexing_the_pronoun (2366 words)

	LINGUIST List 4.595: Last Posting: Gender Markedness
		Note that, in each of the examples so far, although the pronoun's antecendent may be grammatically singular it refers either to a set of undefined but possibly large cardinality or to an individual as merely a representative member of such a set.
		Bet she's female.') In short, the reason i can't use 'they' as an epicene pronoun is that it is acceptable to me in only some but not all of the environments in which i find such a pronoun desirable.
		Some of them are disturbed by the adoption as an epicene form of what looks, from their background, like a blatant masculine pronoun.
	www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de /linguist/issues/4/4-595.html (1110 words)

	Ceilidh ... Re: 3rd person singular (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		But, as you can see by looking at this summary of a linguistic study on the epicene pronoun while there are those who do disagree with your teacher, the issue is contentious, and is caught up, sadly, in political and cultural debates as well as lingustic debates.
		Michael Quinion's World Wide Words site offers a summary of the various ways to deal with gender-neutral pronouns, and it includes using 'they' or 'their', but only in informal writing and speech, which, he says, is currently the most common practice.
		Currently, the accepted practice in formal writing is to not use they or their as an epicene pronoun.
	www.colostate.edu /Dept/WC/ceilidh/wcenter/8152363aCfO-3688-756-90.htm (918 words)

	Merriam-Webster Online (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		But today we look at a much older linguistic phenomenon: the struggle for an epicene pronoun.
		Epicene pronoun names the gender-neutral singular pronoun that can be used in reference to indefinite pronouns like "anyone" or "someone." Remember s/he?
		Baron's collection of proposed epicene pronouns ranges from "hiser" to "heesh" to "shis" and "shim." One of his would-be neologists suggested English speakers do as the Ata do, and use "kin" in place of all pronouns.
	www.m-w.com /cgi-bin/wftwarch.pl?021903 (240 words)

	Mark Hughes: Epicene Pronouns
		I chose "Xe" out of the many proposals because it's the most obvious to people in a technical context who are used to seeing X as a metasyntactic variable.
		Everywhere I need one pronoun, write "he or she", which is three times longer than necessary.
		I'd give both neuters and androgynes their own prounoun sets, and also have a set for general "the reader is left to draw own conclusions" statements, where there is probably a gender, but you just don't happen to know it, or it doesn't matter.
	kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu /~kamikaze/doc/epicene.html (2979 words)

	The Epicene Pronouns (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		pronouns to this simplified version of the masculine paradigm.
		The pronouns are used to refer to a "triune" species, the Didonians, but only halfheartedly; he is used as well.
		There are no common gender pronouns in Vulcan.
	www2.english.uiuc.edu /baron/essays/epicene.htm (1821 words)

	my weblog » 2004 » March » 01 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		From there we move on to Dennis Baron’s “The Epicene Pronouns: A Chronology of the Word that Failed.” We have, it seems, abandoned the vagueness about our dismissal.
		The epicene pronouns, after all, still privilege gender (and sex): the person in question is assumed to partake of both.
		Saying “penn” in the game to refer to a hermaphroditic character got to be second nature rather quickly; unlike a lot of the aforementioned attempts at epicenery, it’s put together with an ear towards speaking: based on one rather than he/she, it runs penn, penn, penn’s, pennself.
	www.kipmanley.com /longstory/vaults/2004/03/01 (1023 words)

	LINGUIST List 4.513: Neologistic Pronouns (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		The assumption behind the coining of a neologism is that there is a category in English of 'epicene,' which is through some odd quirk in the language miss- ing a pronoun.
		That's the problem with prescriptive use of epicene HE --it makes everything referred to seem male--and it is also the reason why no neologism can work.
		The meaning of the proposed pronoun (i.e., this is a person but of unclear gender) is not a significant semantic category the way say genericity, say, or plurality, might be.
	www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de /linguist/issues/4/4-513.html (214 words)

	Barbelith Underground > Head Shop > Genderless/Gender-neutral pronouns, "he", "she", "them" and "they", and ...
		It occurs to me that this might be a decent launch-pad for a discussion at a slightly higher level of the same questions.
		So...perhaps a decent launch-pad might be the consideration that it was established, but not really addressed, that if the use of genderless or gender-inclusive pronouns was in some way "wrong", so was the use of the pronoun "they".
		And I think you are being unfair to Fridge by using phrases like "the pronoun my mates use." I'm sure you know what he's saying is more complex than that.
	www.barbelith.com /topic.php?id=9710&start=120 (2626 words)

	Untitled (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		In the old days, way back when I was in school (I'm talking about the 80s, here), there was a simple way to refer to a "generic" person: by using the gender-neutral pronoun "he" or "him" (also called the epicene pronoun).
		It was an "understood" pronoun, meaning that, although it read "he" or "him," we understand it to mean a person of either sex.
		Although I am female, I am not offended by the generic pronouns "he" or "him" (in fact, if you are someone who is offended by these terms, please e-mail me so I can be sure the English language is not being padded in vain).
	www.suite101.com /print_article.cfm/8707/51805 (439 words)

	languagehat.com: EPICENE PRONOUNS.
		Those epicene pronouns seem to be popular among Furries fsr.
		Going with one or the other, and being consistent, seems to be the current fad, but choosing the masculine or the feminine appears to be depend rather heavily on the field in which you're working and your level of disdain for so-called political correctness.
		To write about them you have to either tie yourself in knots to avoid pronouns or guess (even at the height of its acceptance, I don't think the "generic he" could really be taken as nonspecific in such a situation).
	www.languagehat.com /archives/001183.php (3081 words)

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