Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Hesh and Herm -oh no wait: THEY!

Enough!

From now on, whenever I have to write "he/she", "him/her", "his/her" and "himself/herself" I'll use the bases "Hesh" and "Herm".

You know what...I'll also use those words even if I only have to say he or she alone...

Like in "Hesh gave me herm apple, because hesh didn't want to eat it hermself, but I gave it back to herm."

Let's see if I can get used to it. I hope I can, because this needs to change if English is to become more efficient. This sexual distinction causes a waste of time. That's an important thing because English is being so widely used already. Maybe I should inform Chomsky about my decision and ask what he thinks...hehehe...

Oh- just as I was about to post this I googled those and found this (it was stupid to think that I'm the first person who was bothered by this) :

Taking the gender out of language is no easy task

' The simplest solution to the problem of finding an epicene singular pronoun, linguists say, is already in the language -- use "they"..
...
English used to reserve "you" and "your" for plurals, and used "thou," "thy" and "thee" for the singular. But "thou" and the others dropped out, and "you" started pulling double duty. Eventually, "they" could, too, and "he or she" will be as old-fashioned as "thou".'

This one is from Wiki

That was unexpected... But I think it makes sense... It will certainly be hard to get used to and will be confusing for a while but I think in the end it really does make sense and it'll still be easier than "hesh-herm" :)

I'll give it a shot:

"They gave me their apple, because they didn't want to eat it themself, but I gave it back to them."

It's fun actually! It feels weird but I suppose that's temporary.

Hmm... I get a strange feeling... it's almost as if I'm considering to promote this usage, like by starting a Facebook group or sth. like that..! Maybe I should still ask Chomsky first though, before I go on getting people addicted to it, just to be cautious... Life just got a little more exciting, but it would be pretty hard to get the short-term-thinking, lazy people to accept such an idea. Many would rather shift the responsibility to the next generation, although the hard part is the first 2 weeks only...or 2 years... or something...

Language is the foundation of modern humanity, the fountain of thought. It's also the key to communication, and therefore cooperation and advancement. Although most of the languages are pretty useful already, there is no reasonable excuse to not to improve them.

P.S. Hopefully China won't become a real superpower and conquer the world, and hopefully they won't start making millions of high quality movies, games and sell them to the world, so that English has a better chance at becoming accepted as the world language.

Edit: What about "it"? Do I also say "they" instead? Get them? Naah, that would be too much...

UPDATE: Hmm... I don't think I can afford to stick to this decision at this point in my life, I'm having a lot of important conversations with people who won't be tolerant and patient enough for this kind of stuff... I'll make a more concentrated effort later when I think the time is right.
I can still continue it in this blog though...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am not sure that English is as widespread or useful as people claim. I would like to argue the case for Esperanto as the international language. It is a planned language which belongs to no one country or group of states.

Take a look at www.esperanto.net

Esperanto works! I've used it in speech and writing in a dozen countries over recent years.

What do you think?

sadunkal said...

I think I've heard about it but I'll look deeper into it now. Do you think Esperanto is more widespread than English? Or why aren't you sure about English's widespreadness?

I'm sure that it's better fit to be an international language than English, but there are other factors when it comes to being the international language. I learned English primarily by playing role playing games for example(Torment, Fallout...), and I doubt there'll be any games in the near future in Esperanto which can compete with current games produced for English speaking consumers. It's similar with Hollywood movies and the music industry, "Metallica" made a lot of teenagers learn English back then... Esperanto needs to be supported by those industries and governments if it's going to be the international language, it needs a gigantic PR campaign.

By the way, you're the first person to leave a real comment and I didn't notice it. The email notifications were disabled, I fixed it now.

But how did you discover my "secret" blog? Facebook?

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