Language Log quotes a recent paper:
In the spring of 2004, a number of middle and high school teachers enrolled in a graduate linguistics class for teachers noted that their students at certain city schools were using yo in place of he or she. The authors collected spontaneous occurrences of the pronoun and then designed several writing activities and sentence judgment tasks. The tasks were administered to more than 200 students in two unrelated schools in Baltimore. It was clear from the results that students in these two schools use yo as a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun, primarily in subject position.
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One reason I blogged this is because I have a handout on gender neutral language… I don’t really assign it to students on a general basis, but it’s nice to have it if I need to refer a student to it. When I get the chance, I’ll update it with this example.
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/writing/style/gender.html
I had created that handout with the hopes of starting a discussion, but all the women in the class just rolled their eyes and said they felt the whole thing was an issue for their parents’ generation. I was a little surprised by that. (This was in the late 90s.)
I´m probably less concerned about the gender equity issues involved in the pronoun development than I should be. I try to be careful myself in talking about groups like ¨students.¨ But I know it sounds awkward. Here in Mexico, of course, the language really can´t do without using the masculine form as the generic (administrators here will say ¨bienvenida¨ to welcome Judith, but ¨bienvenido(s)¨ to welcome me or a mixed group of directors). In Chinese, on the other hand, the opposite is true in the spoken language. ¨Ta¨ refers to he, she, it (and him, her, his) without distinction. The characters for he, she, and it, however, are distinct.
Confusing ”b” and ”d”
Confusing ”b” and ”d” (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Hold your hands like this, and imagine an “e” in between them, and you’ve got the word “bed”.My five-year-old daughter was having so much trouble telling the difference between her ”b” and ”d”…