她 牠 它 祂 when and why?

[calculatrix]

Hello,

I was googling the different flavours of 他.

In the Wiktionary entry for 她 I found: "Linguist Liu Bannong is credited with coining this use around the 1910s".

Does anybody know the reason or intention behind that? Was it a political one? Strengthen women's rights by giving them their own pronoun???

And what about the other tā's? Were they also artificially coined?

Are there more of them?

Years ago I read from Douglas Hofstadter, that he credited himself for creating ⿰男也 when studying Mandarin, but this one obviously did not make it into unicode.

[Lu]

On 5/17/2023 at 9:18 AM, calculatrix said:

Does anybody know the reason or intention behind that? Was it a political one? Strengthen women's rights by giving them their own pronoun???

Yes, that was pretty much the idea. Recognise the existence of women in society by coining a new pronoun especially for them.

[Luxi]

Liu Bannong (劉半農) was one of the main leaders of the May 4 Movement.

[Jim]

Half farmer, half champion of the oppressed.

[Dlezcano]

There is also 怹. I was told by a person from Hebei they use it sometimes like in the sentence 怹老人家 to show respect.

[anonymoose]

I don't follow the logic. Sounds like 劉半農 was implying that 女 are not 人.

[Lu]

On 5/18/2023 at 9:41 AM, anonymoose said:

Sounds like 劉半農 was implying that 女 are not 人.

That's the sad-ironic thing about this: that they meant this as making space for women, but if you think about it deeper, they actually marked women as the exception. And actually this is how Mandarin still works: people are men, women are women. See the difference between 作家 and 女作家, 记者 and 女记者 and many, many, many more. Or look at how women in a list get a （女） behind their name, but men usually don't get a （男）. Sometimes they do, but mostly not.

[anonymoose]

On 5/18/2023 at 9:36 AM, Lu said:

And actually this is how Mandarin still works: people are men, women are women.

True, but I’d say that’s cultural more than linguistic. There’s nothing inherently about the words 作家 and 记者 that mark them as men, and they can equally be used to refer to women. The issue is the default interpretation which is grounded in culture and certainly not unique to China or Chinese.

[Balthazar]

On 5/18/2023 at 10:36 AM, Lu said:

And actually this is how Mandarin still works: people are men, women are women

Isn't this an almost universal cultural thing though (as suggested by anonymoose above)? Seems like a one-sentence summary of de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" to me.

[Lu]

On 5/18/2023 at 1:20 PM, anonymoose said:

True, but I’d say that’s cultural more than linguistic. There’s nothing inherently about the words 作家 and 记者 that mark them as men, and they can equally be used to refer to women. The issue is the default interpretation which is grounded in culture and certainly not unique to China or Chinese.

On one hand you're right that on the face of it, 作家 can equally well be a woman or a man. But the meaning of a word is decided by the speakers of the language, and in usage, the speakers show that 作家 doesn't mean 'writer of any gender', it means 'male writer', and for female writers there is another word. Is this cultural: absolutely. The language and culture of a group of people influence one another.

 

On 5/18/2023 at 3:42 PM, Balthazar said:

Isn't this an almost universal cultural thing though (as suggested by anonymoose above)?

Yes it is (it certainly is a thing in Dutch). I was talking about Mandarin since that was the topic we were discussing.

[anonymoose]

On 5/18/2023 at 3:04 PM, Lu said:

But the meaning of a word is decided by the speakers of the language, and in usage, the speakers show that 作家 doesn't mean 'writer of any gender', it means 'male writer', and for female writers there is another word.

 

I absolutely don't disagree that a male writer would usually be referred to simply as a 作家, and it would be odd to say 男作家, whereas a female writer would commonly be referred to as a 女作家. However, I still think this is a cultural phenomenon where the default is taken to be male, and only a deviation from the default needs to be stated explicitly.

 

What I disagree with is that 作家 doesn't mean 'writer of any gender', it means 'male writer'.

 

Take the Baidu page on J. K. Rowling - the very first sentence is:

 

Quote

J.K.罗琳（J.K. Rowling），1965年7月31日出生于英国格温特郡，毕业于英国埃克塞特大学，英国作家。

 

Clearly 作家 not only can be but in practice is used to refer to female writers. (This was to first female author that came to mind and that I searched for - this wasn't a specially selected example.)

 

[Balthazar]

On 5/18/2023 at 4:04 PM, Lu said:

On 5/18/2023 at 3:42 PM, Balthazar said:

 

Yes it is (it certainly is a thing in Dutch). I was talking about Mandarin since that was the topic we were discussing.

 

Perhaps I misunderstood, when you wrote "this is how Mandarin still works" I read that as suggesting that Mandarin was somehow different from the majority of other languages, or the "global norm" so to speak.

[mouse]

I was under the impression that one of the motivations for distinguishing gender in pronouns was an attempt to make Chinese more European. Certainly that's what Wang Li said anyway.

[Lu]

On 5/18/2023 at 8:15 PM, anonymoose said:

I absolutely don't disagree that a male writer would usually be referred to simply as a 作家, and it would be odd to say 男作家, whereas a female writer would commonly be referred to as a 女作家. However, I still think this is a cultural phenomenon where the default is taken to be male, and only a deviation from the default needs to be stated explicitly.

 

What I disagree with is that 作家 doesn't mean 'writer of any gender', it means 'male writer'.

(...)

Clearly 作家 not only can be but in practice is used to refer to female writers. (This was to first female author that came to mind and that I searched for - this wasn't a specially selected example.)

I think generally, we agree: male writers are called 作家, and rarely if ever 男作家, while female writers are generally referred to as 女作家, even when their gender is not the point, and/or already completely clear from the context. Which means that when a Chinese person comes across the word 作家, if there is no other information (picture, pronoun, prior knowledge), the image they would usually have of this 作家 is a male person, since it would usually say 女作家 if it were a woman.

 

But you're right that me stating '作家 always means 'male writer'' is a bit too strong a statement. It's not a 100% thing, even if it is mostly true.