alt text: a tweet within a tweet. “coworker asked me my pronouns and I said ‘they/them but I’m at work right now so it’s whatever’ and then she came up to me later and said ‘this is you’” (showing a tweet that says) i’m probably nonbinary but i have a job so idrc about that rn

    • beetsnuami@slrpnk.net
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      5 months ago

      There‘s a reasonable proposal for „en“, so you can just use that

      The german language is not bound by the laws of some institute, you can just use whatever you like!*

      * Not applicable in schools in saxony, bavaria, schleswig-holstein, and saxony-anhalt.

      • Ziglin@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I’ve seen dey/dem which I find just doesn’t sound natural. I generally say “die Person” for gender neutral speech.

      • itslilith
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        5 months ago

        “ze” is more like “the”, no? I’ve seen “dey” been used sometimes, but it’s not common at all

        • samus12345@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          “Ze” would be pronounced like “tsay.” “Zie” would be closer to “the”, sounding like “tsee.”

          • joranvar@feddit.nl
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            5 months ago

            Probably understood that in the wrong direction. Ze (eng. phon.) would be spelled more like “sie” (ger. phon.) and would sound like “the” with a German accent. They would become either dey (eng. phon.) or zey (eng. phon.), spelled like “deej” or “seej” (ger. phon.), or even without the y (or j) at the end.

            I think. I’m neither native German or English.

            • samus12345@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              I wrote “ze” and "zie"from a German phonetic perspective. “Tsay” and “tsee” are the English ones.

    • prole@beehaw.org
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      5 months ago

      I like how Japanese does it (at least based on a likely oversimplistic explanation by someone who makes 4+ hour video reviews of games like Pac-Man [yes, Tim Rogers]).

      From what I understand, every time a person refers to themselves or someone else, they choose which pronoun to use to fit the situation. That is to say, their social stature compared to the other person’s, their age compared to the other person’s, the general circumstances, etc. Similar to how their honorifics work (suffixes like -kun, -san, -sama, etc.).

      So for example, while there is a specific pronoun that is typically used to refer to a young female, if there is a young girl in a situation where she’s trying to make herself feel stronger and older (I’m picturing an internal monologue here to hype herself up I guess. I’m too brain broken to not imagine all of this going down in a JRPG), she might refer to herself using the pronoun typically used by grown men.

      Again, I don’t know Japanese, so I can’t give specific examples, and I could even be completely wrong, but maybe someone who knows the language can elaborate on (i.e. correct) what I said. I found it to be a very interesting way to go about it.