Tag Archives: new pronoun

A GENDER-NEUTRAL PRONOUN IN FRENCH?

Ai propose to you, dear reader, «ale» – plural form being «ales».

The word derives from the prefix allo-. These two syllables are affixed to the words for the categories of stuff that are other from, apart from, and/or aloof from the categories of stuff that are considered most important by the dominant sources of metanarrative production in our society (what ai like to call “the dessemp”, based on the acronym DSMP).

For example, Québec’s allophones, who are not perceived as those with the most agency or the most responsibility in the conflict between the Province of Québec’s official French unilingualism, on the one hand, and the threat of «le bilinguisme grimpant» and/or English-language hegemony, on the other. Then there’s the word «allosexuelle», a French translation of “queer” that never really caught on. It sounds a bit clinical, for sure, and it’s pretty obvious why it couldn’t compete with that sexy single-syllable anglicism that has swept the world (or at least a large number of European languages). Right now, though, in this paragraph here, ai’d like us all to appreciate «allosexuelle» for what it is. Ai think it implies a certain vastness, one as diverse and far-reaching as the human animal’s propensity for creativity, experimentation, desire, and resourcefulness. It’s not infinite, but for limited subjectivities like ourselves, it is effectively so. (EDIT: while the main thrust of this paragraph remains relevant, research done for a later post revealed some important information about the word «allosexuelle» which is probably worth looking into).

My motivation here, for the record, is that ai want to have a French word that ai, myself, can feel comfortable using to refer to the people in my life who, in English, prefer to use they as a personal pronoun. Ai don’t feel comfortable using «il», ai don’t like the gendered «lui» (as opposed to the non-gendered «lui» that you can also use for someone who is otherwise an «elle» – such is the intricacy of proper French grammar), and ai don’t like the needlessly ugly and binary-affirming «ille». It doesn’t seem like any of the other gender-neutral pronouns ai’ve seen (all of which come from this blog post, incidentally) have caught on very much, and ai don’t like any of them anyway.

The sort of go-to in Montréal, at least among the small number of people that ai’ve ever had this conversation with, is to use «ille», which you may notice ai just shit-talked in the last paragraph.

Ai came up with «ale» because «ille» is terribly inadequate as a when-in-doubt pronoun. To be clear, if someone told me to use «ille» when referring to them, ai would do so, just as ai have used “e”, “ze”, and even “it” in English when people have told me that such or such is the pronoun that so or so uses. But in English, if ai’m uncertain about someone’s preferred pronoun and ai can’t just find out easily, ai’m going to use “they”. It seems to me that «ille» isn’t appropriate for this same function, though, because of a few reasons. First, «ille» sounds pretty much the same as the masculine pronoun in French unless you really stress the final letter-ee [e, E] and get another syllable out of it, like you might do for certain chants or songs. That sounds a bit weird in regular speech, though, and it’s still going to sound pretty much the same as «il». Second, the orthography of «ille» is simply a cross between «il» and «elle». There is an implication here that the person to whom this pronoun refers is simply between masculinity and femininity, rather than completely beyond the two of them. It is entirely possible that the person in question does feel “in between the two” (or feels like an embodiment of the two, or whatever other subjective experience they might have of their gender), but it’s also possible that they don’t, and frankly, ai am rather unlikely to know for sure. Once again, it’s subjective!

Ai like to think, though, that «ale», in contrast to «ille», is closer to «hen», the Swedish gender-neutral pronoun that has been generating a lot of controversy in some circles as of late. Like «hen», «ale» has a different vowel sound than its masculine and feminine counterparts (which, in Swedish, are «han» and «hon» respectively), but the word has the same consonant structure, so it doesn’t look completely out of place alongside the other two. In French, of course, the orthography is also a bit different between the masculine and feminine pronouns, with «il» having two letters and «elle» coming in at four. «Ale» has three letters. There is a risk, of course, that it will look like it is “in between” masculinity and femininity because of this, an apparent compromise that ai don’t like about «ille» and something ai want to avoid. But hopefully ai’m reading too much into it, and no one else will care! The purpose of the three letters is to render it different enough in form from both of the predominating pronouns, not necessarily to be “in between”.

So the final thing here is finding a word that corresponds to «ale» for those situations where «lui» is not epicene. In this case, ai am not sure if ai should propose another word formation in order to differentiate «ale» even further from the predominating pronouns (using, for example, «aule»?) or if it’d be better to go with the standard that is set by «elle». It’s basically a question of whether «lui-même» (“himself”) and «elle-même» (“herself), and all other situations of this kind, will be joined with the obvious «ale-même», or with the alternative «aule-même». Considering that ai can’t actually speak French properly, ai doubt it’ll be much of a problem for me, but there should be a standard, and considering that ai can’t decide between the two, ai am going to unilaterally propose that both are appropriate!

Of course, the introduction of a gender-neutral pronoun doesn’t resolve the problem of adjectives which, in French, can have either of two genders, masculine or feminine. Short of making a new version of each adjective that corresponds to a third grammatical gender, which is an absolutely daunting task, the only solution seems to be for people who use neither masculine nor feminine pronouns to simply pick an adjectival form they feel more comfortable with. In many cases, the adjectival forms are not going to matter too much, at least when spoken, because the difference in pronunciation is very subtle. It is going to be more difficult in cases where the masculine and feminine versions of the same word are markedly different from one another in both pronunciation and orthography, as with the words «beau» and «belle».

Today, many English-speaking anarchists ask for and offer pronouns when in the midst of introductions. Ai think this cultural practice is good and useful, and ai think it would be nice if this practice could be imported to French-speaking anarchist scenes too. In French, though, due to this matter of gendered adjectives – something that, at least as far as ai can see it, can’t be torn down or reformed without a total negation of the French language itself – introductions may sometimes need to include the question «Et c’est quoi ta forme adjectivale préférée?» after name and pronoun come up. This may not be necessary if a person has already told you that their preferred pronoun is «elle» or «il», but for someone who uses «ale» (or whatever other gender-neutral pronoun, since there’s no guarantee that the one a cis boy anglo came up with is the one that will eventually actually catch on), it is definitely pertinent information.

Of course, asking for adjectival forms in English might not be a bad idea either, at least if you live in a city where the French language predominates. Ai might be anglo, and you might be anglo, and so you might think that ai don’t need a preferred adjectival form since we’ll be speaking to each other in English, but there’s a chance that ai’m going to have a conversation about you (using adjectives!) with a francophone later. If ai don’t have know what to do, ai’m going to be staring at my phone, trying to tell someone that you are “determined” or something (in French, either «déterminé» or «déterminée»), not knowing whether ai should add that extra letter-ee to my text or not, and generally freaking the fuck out.

(This has actually happened, although “freaking the fuck out” is a bit of an exaggeration.)

So here’s my proposal, once again, in a nutshell. Unless another French gender-neutral pronoun has been specified as appropriate (for example, «ille», which some people do prefer), use «ale» when referring to people for whom you would use the singular “they” (or any other gender-neutral pronoun) if you were speaking in English. Use «ale» when referring to someone whose gender identity you do not know, in the same way as you would use “they”. Bring the practice of asking for pronouns to the other solitude, and when necessary, ask for adjectival forms as well. Expect some confusion, but do it anyway, because it’s a good thing to do.

In any case, whatever you choose to do yourself, you’ll now know what I’m talking about if you ever hear me say «ale».

“AI” – AN ALTERNATIVE FIRST-PERSON PERSONAL PRONOUN IN ENGLISH

Years ago, on an English-language primitivist internet forum ai would occasionally lurk, there was a user who never used the standard capital letter-ai [i, I] for their first-person personal pronoun. Instead, they wrote out “ai”. This word followed standard capitalization rules, only getting capitalized at the beginning of sentences. In other words, it was pretty much the same as «je», the first-person personal pronoun in French.

This user intrigued me. In fact, for some time after, on and off from 2009 to 2011 or so, ai used the same form for my own first-person personal pronoun – and ai have decided that ai am going to use this form again for this blog.

As a lurker on that forum, who never even signed up for an account, ai never had a conversation with that original user about the logic behind their use of this pronoun. The thing that interested me, and that still interests me, may not have anything to do with their logic. It’s also entirely possible that, unlike myself, that user didn’t understand “ai” to have an identical pronunciation to “I”. They might have thought it was pronounced like ay or something. For me, though, it seems clear that “ai” is supposed to be pronounced in the same way as those two letters would be in the English transliteration of Japanese or Chinese words – as a homonym to “eye” and “I”. This means that the phrases “I ate a sandwich” and “ai ate a sandwich” are homophonic when spoken, even if the orthography is slightly different.

Ai am a fan of this orthographic shift, and this is because, on a symbolic level, ai really don’t like the standard form of the first-person personal pronoun in English, the capital letter-ai. First off, it looks phallic to me. It also looks like a tower – a structure that is cut off from the surrounding world, that alienates whoever is on top of it from the rest of what’s going on around. These are throwaway criticisms, of course, but it also strikes me as strange that it is one of only two words in the English language that consists of a single letter, and that, unlike the other word in that category, “a”, it is always capitalized.

While this can certainly be explained as simply a spelling convention that is used, it is also undeniable that, in many (most?) European languages, the capitalization of certain words can be understood to convey greater importance to the things those words describe in comparison to other words. There is certainly a reason why, in anarchist, radical left, and onkwehón:we sovereigntist circles, writers and propagandists will often conspicuously capitalize certain words (like “Black”, “Indigenous”, even “Anarchism” sometimes) and just as conspicuously choose not to capitalize certain other words (like “canada”, “the u.s.”, “european”, “marxist”). Ai would argue that the first-person personal pronoun’s consistent capitalization in English has the effect of symbolically valorizing the individual, and ai think it is worth changing for precisely that reason, especially if there is another option available to us.

Please note: ai’m not arguing that we need to switch over to “ai” because the current form has some kind of powerful psychological effect on the unconscious mind of all anglophones. The problem is symbolic, and that is it. Ai can imagine others thinking of me as a similar sort of conspiracist who believes that this spelling convention was set long ago by decided partisans of egocentric patriarchy, and that ai think they are socializing us, brainwashing us, to be like them through their orthographic evil – something that ai personally must stop! So that would be funny, but really, it’s simply a matter of the orthography conflicting with my values in pretty much the same way as the existence of an avenue Christophe-Colomb in my city conflicts with my values.

What ai mean is this: ai don’t think it matters much, but ai’d still rather that the situation be different. It’s not that the status quo – in either the case of the first-person personal pronoun being a capital letter-ai or the case of avenue Christophe-Colomb simply existing – directly does anything to reinforce things that are bad in this society. That said, ai do think that changing the situation, or trying to, might have a positive effect in terms of calling attention to a problem.

That positive effect might be very small, but hey, it would at least make me feel better! And perhaps some other people too.

There needs to be a viable alternative to the previously existing standard, though. In the case of avenue Christophe-Colomb, it’s easy: just name it “avenue de l’Île Tortue”, or even something less explicitly anti-colonial, since pretty much anything would be better than what it is now. With the first-person personal pronoun in English, though, what are we supposed to do? This is the place of “ai”.

Of course, there are other possibilities. Kuwasi Balagoon, for example, makes a conscious effort of not capitalizing his first-person personal pronoun in at least some of his writing. Ai think, though, that most people will read an uncapitalized letter-ai in a sentence like “Before becoming a clandestine revolutionary i was a tenant organizer…” as simply being a mistake. This is why ai like “ai”. When ai use “ai” as a pronoun, and especially when ai do so very consistently, it’s pretty obvious that ai have consciously and decidedly added a letter-ae [a, A] to the word, something which is more noticeable than the mere absence of capitalization in Balagoon’s writing.

There is, in fact, another benefit to using “ai” that has little to do with anything political. In text messages and emails and what-have-you, you sometimes CAPITALIZE a word in order put emphasis on it. This is because you often don’t have the option of italicizing words to place emphasis in these situations. Unfortunately, it is pretty much impossible to emphasize a single capitalized letter-ai in this way; you need to do other things, such as placing asterisks on either side of it. Example: “Well, what *I* think is that we should throw popcorn at them.”

With “ai”, though, it IS possible to place emphasis on the first-person personal pronoun with simply capital letters. Like: “He might have had tea with a bear, but AI once fucking wrestled a rainbow.”

Ai stopped using “ai” a few years ago because it was sometimes difficult to remember whether ai was emailing a person in a “professional capacity” or emailing a friend, and so ai would often get it mixed up. For obvious reasons, ai didn’t want to use “ai” with some stranger from whom ai was trying to get work, and as a result, this represented something of a problem. Ai also just stopped caring, and in fact, had already passed through my phase of writing out words like “persynal”, “womyn”, “wimmin”, and other things of the sort. But now, for this blog, ai am bringing it back – largely because ai still actually like it.

Ai am pretty certain that very few people, if any, will adopt the style of using “ai” as their own based on any of these reasons, but that would be okay by me. What ai have presented thus far are just the reasons that ai like using this style, and there should be space for me to use the style that ai like – even if it doesn’t fit others’ dictates of what constitutes proper English orthography – without having the content of what ai am saying be dismissed. Here, ai am asking that, even if you find this style immediately ugly, you don’t dismiss me based on that alone – and ai am also saying that the same good grace should be extended to those who pronounce words somewhat incorrectly, commit unknowing spelling errors, use certain terms in ways that are unfamiliar to us or simply different from the ways we use them, and whatever else that doesn’t actually make the words of such people any less comprehensible.

A great deal of this blog will make arguments that, indeed, people other than myself should do whatever ridiculous thing ai am arguing for. A great deal of this blog will deal with problems of language that, at least in my estimation, are important for all of us. But ai am also engaging in this project because ai want to do so, because ai like language, because ai like having fun with language. That includes writing things in the way ai want to write them, and not necessarily the way that it is most conducive to being understood – though ai think it shouldn’t be very hard to understand, from context, what “ai” means even if you don’t read this post. It’s not necessarily the approach ai’d take for a flyer to be handed out on the street, but it’s the approach ai’m going to take here.