| Change log entry 51521 | |
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| Processed by: | ycandau (2013-11-10 23:19:02 GMT) |
| Comment: |
<< review queue entry 46429 - submitted by 'monigeria' >> http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4576 What is most striking about this article is that it politely uses TA (note the absence of tonal marking) as a gender neutral pronoun so that the author and editor don’t have to write tā 他 ("he") or tā 她 ("she"). Of course, tā 它 ("it") would be gender neutral, but like "it" in English, is considered dehumanizing. Setting aside the fact that all three forms have the same pronunciation in Modern Standard Mandarin and that their development as a means to distinguish masculine, feminine, and neuter is a fairly recent phenomenon, the use of Roman letters in an otherwise plain Mandarin character text, and an official newspaper, at that, is remarkable. Moreover, one wonders why they don’t use English conventions of miniscule and majuscule (and Pinyin, for that matter), but instead just go with TA no matter where the word occurs in a sentence. Writing "TA" would make most English speakers think that it’s an acronym of some sort. On the other hand, the author and editor may have thought that it looked more natural to write "TA" instead of "ta / Ta", since most Roman letter terms in Chinese writing are indeed acronyms consisting entirely of capitals, and they may also have thought that "TA" looks more like a square-shaped Chinese character than "ta" or "Ta". it is kind of everywhere like they said..... comments also linked to this article: http://food.cntv.cn/program/zhoukan/qingrenjie/ Editor: much ado about nothing. Do we need s/he in an English dict? Do we write articles about the ingenuity of the anglo-saxon mind? Wonder why they don't use IPA? Or why this slash is not a backslash? |
| Diff: |
# TA TA [ta1] /he or she/ |