SheldonJul 12, 2023

I finally watched Everything Everywhere All at Once and there was one scene at the beginning that perfectly captures a snippet of life in a Chinese-American immigrant household.

It's the pronoun scene. The main character keeps referring to her daughter's girlfriend as "he" and gets visibly frustrated when the daughter corrects her that Becky is a "she."

First, the bilingual dialogue is spot on! It happens so fast that it's hard to keep up with the subtitles, but if you understand Mandarin, you probably laughed at the exchange.

You might notice that Chinese immigrants are terrible at #pronouns. This is because in spoken Chinese, there is only one generic pronoun, "ta" which translates to "that person"

Any child of Chinese immigrants knows the embarrassment of correcting their parents in front of their friends when they keep calling male friends she and female ones he. It only recently occurred to me why this is.

I love this scene for bringing this to the fore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr4kJuZGQPI

Everything Everywhere All At Once, pronoun scene

YouTube
Show threadSheldon

Now, there is a twist to this pronoun story and it's more fun if you experience it for yourself.

Go to Google Translate and type in "him" in an English to Simplified Chinese translation and press the audio button to hear the word spoken.

https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=zh-CN&text=him%0A&op=translate

Now change it to "she".

Keep going, change it to "it".

Whaaaat?

So there actually are gendered pronouns in Chinese. They're written differently, but are pronounced exactly the same! Is that wild or what?

No wonder why native Chinese speakers get completely flummoxed by pronouns. Look at where they're coming from.

That Abbott and Costello "Who's on First" skit ain't got nothin on Chinese speakers and their struggles just trying to refer to the person next to them.

Do you mean him? Ta!
Or her? Ta!
It? Ta!

This quirk may apply to other East Asian languages too, but I can only speak Mandarin (and not very well).

#pronouns #funny

Jul 12, 2023 at 1:20amWeb
Show threaddonkey herder, fowl friendJul 12, 2023
@sysop408 as a non-binary person, I kinda love this! “Seen Pat lately?” “yeah, that person just left for lunch.” Perfect!
Show threadSheldonJul 12, 2023
@donkeyherder here I was all embarrassed that my parents and none of my aunts and uncles could never get this he and she thing correct, but little did I know they were just decades ahead of their time.
Show threadDavidJul 12, 2023
@sysop408 Wikipedia claims originally in Chinese there was no distinction between the male/female singular pronoun. But this distinction was created during the process of Westernization.
Show thread步丈九州不想六月四日在广场上面对坦克           Jul 12, 2023
@david1 @sysop408 Yes, it's true, and there were two ways of creating a she in Chinese, 她(ta) and 伊(yi). Finally the former survived through history, may be because we Chinese are poor dealing with these things, the former didn't force people change orally.
Show threadSheldonJul 12, 2023

@buzhangjiuzhou @david1

Thanks! I did not even know about 伊(yi) nor have I even heard anyone in my family say that before, but I'm primarily an English speaker so people try to keep their vocabulary simple when talking to me in Chinese.

Show thread步丈九州不想六月四日在广场上面对坦克           Jul 12, 2023

@sysop408 @david1 伊yi is only used by people several decades ago(1910-1950), e.g. 鲁迅LuXun used it many times in his article.

By the way, 伊yi is used in dialect of south China before, but I don't know is it with gender information, may be, or not, as I am from the north part of China lol,

Show threadRaphaelJul 12, 2023
@sysop408 In my ideal language, there would be one pronoun always referring to the first person, thing, or animal mentioned in a sentence, paragraph, or short text or conversation, one pronoun always referring to the second person, thing, or animal mentioned in a sentence, paragraph, or short text or conversation, one pronoun always referring to the third person, thing, or animal mentioned in a sentence, paragraph, or short text or conversation, and so on.
Show threadInterstellar Enigma 星際之謎Jul 12, 2023

@sysop408
In Chinese, we often rely on the context to determine whether to use "he," "she," or "it".

However, most of the time, we're too lazy to bother, so we just... ah, whatever!

Show threadJuan VillelaJul 12, 2023

@sysop408 Interesting! It is the complete opposite in Spanish, where everything is gendered. Things are gendered.

There is "el", masculine. And "la", feminine. There's also "ella" for feminine, that's used when referencing a living being.

But that is why you have El Niño and La Niña. And which pronoun you use is based on the end of the noun. For the example above, "o" is masculine, and "a" feminine.

This sort of thing trips up everyone when learning Spanish for the first time, understandably.

Show thread Mélani (Melanie) Bjornsdottir (she, ŝi)Jun 22, 2024
@fourjuaneight @sysop408 genders ur gender
Show threadtuban_muzuruJun 23, 2024

@fourjuaneight @sysop408

There are enough exceptions to that "o" and "a" business to warrant some study.

La mano. Dame la manita.

El día: Buenos días

Show threadkccqzyJun 24, 2024

@sysop408 I've been waiting to get my hands on this book: A Cultural History of the Chinese Character “Ta (She)” reviewed here: https://www.harvard-yenching.org/research/cultural-history-of-the-chinese-character-ta/

The review states that until the 1870s neither spoken Mandarin nor written Chinese had any differentiation between the male and female forms of the pronoun. This distinction arrived only because of interaction with western culture, and as one may expect at that period China was learning and assimilating everything western. IIRC Even the idea of punctuation was introduced to the Chinese language at that time.

"她”字的文化史—女性新代词的发明与认同研究 - Harvard-Yenching Institute

Huang Xingtao 黄兴涛 Fuzhou: Fujian jiaoyu chubanshe, 2009 Reviewed by Zhang Yun (PhD candidate, The University of Hong Kong; HYI Visiting Fellow) Early-twentieth-century China witnessed a surge of invented or reformulated terms and concepts that reinterpreted long-standing gender norms or principles in various ways. Contested neologisms, such as “nüjie女界(women’s world/women),” “nü yingxiong女英雄(female hero),” “guomin zhi […]

Harvard-Yenching Institute
Show threadSheldonJun 24, 2024
@kccqzy I'd love to hear your impressions after you do. I can't read Chinese and even if I could, I wouldn't have time for it for a long time. :(