Pronouns in physics
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Madeleine Ngo, "Penn's physics department has started listing gender pronouns on its website", The Daily Pennsylvanian 9/26/2018:
Penn's Physics and Astronomy Department now lists gender pronouns on its website for some of its student, faculty, and staff members in an effort to combat stigma, encourage respectful communication, and promote the department's inclusivity.
The Diversity and Inclusion in Physics group initiated the project last semester with graduate students at the helm. In April, students and members of the department were emailed and given the option to submit their pronouns to be publicly shared on the website.
The department has been updating its website to include the responses. Physics and Astronomy Administrative Coordinator Glenn Fechner, who manages the department’s website, collected people’s pronouns and added them to each individual biography.
The article quotes one of the grad students behind the effort to the effect that "52 members of the department have their pronouns listed on the site" — I found 39 (13 she/her/her, 23 he/him/his, 3 they/them/their) but I probably missed some, perhaps due to not searching for the right pronoun choices. Participants include some of the senior faculty, like Randy Kamien and Andrea Liu, as well as more junior faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduate majors. The three who chose they/them/their include two grad students and one undergraduate.
Related efforts focused on students and staff at American colleges and universities have been around for several years. This is the first program to modify a department's website that I've heard of, but commenters will perhaps tell us about others.
I also wonder about the situation at institutions whose basic languages are French, Spanish, German, Swedish, and so on.
Keith said,
September 28, 2018 @ 6:51 am
I don't have any examples of institutions publishing such pronoun lists, but for French, it would differ in that there would not be possessive pronounce along the "his/her/their" model.
In French, the possessive follows the gender of the object being possessed. I'm not sure I have the right technical vocabulary to describe this, so I'll give a couple of examples.
A man (masculine) is the owner of a sheep (masculine): "l'homme et son mouton"; here, the possessive "son" is in the masculine form to agree with the masculine gender of "mouton".
A man (masculine) is the owner of a goat (feminine): "l'homme et sa chèvre"; here, the possessive "sa" is in the feminine form to agree with the feminine gender of "chèvre".
Likewise, "la femme et son mouton" and "la femme et sa chèvre".
Kai von Fintel said,
September 28, 2018 @ 7:14 am
It's pretty common now at MIT. Official name tags have a pronoun field. People's bios often include the info. Mine does: http://linguistics.mit.edu/user/fintel/
[(myl) I've seen "pronoun" fields increasingly in email signature blocks, on name tags, and so on. Official "bio" pages are less common — yours seems to be the only one in the MIT Linguistics Dept. that now has a pronoun specification — and what interested me about the Penn Physics Department initiative is that it's a systematic and officially-sanctioned attempt to encourage members to add this information.]
Frédéric Grosshans said,
September 28, 2018 @ 7:33 am
I guess such things are possible in English because the gender is only marginal in English grammar, so there is only a set of three pronouns to specify. Something similar in French would need to specify how to apply a non-binary grammatical gender on many adjectives or nouns. An analogy in English would be if the heir of the British throne would describe themself as they/them/their. Would they be the future king? The future queen? This problem is quite marginal in English, to the point of being irrelevant. But in French, it applies to almost all nouns in written form, and a big part of them in spoken French. “A baker” in English can be of any gender, while, in French, they have to be «un boulanger» or «une boulangère». In writing, one can also have «un⋅e boulanger⋅ère».
If one want to specify a third option, one has to change a significant part of the language grammar, and this grammar is quite irregular.
[(myl) The treatment in French of gendered words for professions, roles, etc. is a different but related question — see "Écriture inclusive", 10/9/2017, for some discussion. I've seen increasing usage of "écriture inclusive" in French-language academic discourse in the last year or two. But I haven't seen discussion of the question of possible personal choice of pronouns there yet (though this is probably due to my limited contact with that world). One obvious difficulty is the fact that French lacks any obvious equivalent to English singular "they", so that an epicene 3rd-person pronoun would have to be an invented one. And the various invented pronouns in English have not made as much impact as singular "they" has.]
jih said,
September 28, 2018 @ 8:10 am
In Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, etc, the issue is beyond pronouns and I cannot think of any way to deal with it. If you describe yourself or anyone else using an adjective, most of the time you need to identify the referent as either male or female.
Take "I am tired" in Spanish. You can say either "estoy cansado" (which conveys the information "I am tired and I am male" or "estoy cansada ("I am tired and I am female"). There is no gender-neutral option.
Using plurals does not solve the problem, because plural adjectives are also gender marked.
[(myl) Again, see Écriture inclusive for a proposed (and increasingly widely adopted) solution in writing. It's less clear to me what range of solutions is being explored in spoken language.]
jih said,
September 28, 2018 @ 8:40 am
@myl
Sure, in writing you can do it. For the Spanish example I gave above you can write
estoy cansad@ or estoy cansadx
The problem is a "langue parlée inclusive"
Jerry Friedman said,
September 28, 2018 @ 9:32 am
It's interesting that they didn't choose the less obtrusive method of having the bios in third person and using the appropriate pronouns. I guess there is something pleasant about first-person descriptions of research interests, and stating the pronouns explicitly means you don't have some descriptions in first person and some in third. (If they all are first-person; I only looked at Randall Kamien's and Andrea Liu's.) And having the pronoun choice right under the name tells it to people who don't make it to the research interests.
Tim said,
September 28, 2018 @ 9:34 am
I have just started learning Spanish – am I right that "estoy" implies permanence – always have been and always will be – which opens up a whole new set of trans and gender fluidity issues?
JJM said,
September 28, 2018 @ 9:45 am
"One obvious difficulty is the fact that French lacks any obvious equivalent to English singular "they", so that an epicene 3rd-person pronoun would have to be an invented one."
Any invented epicene 3rd-person pronoun in French would still have to be either masculine or feminine.
D.O. said,
September 28, 2018 @ 10:40 am
Yes, écriture inclusive may solve the problem of unwanted gender definitiveness. But only between two legacy genders. The multitude of pronoun possibilities in (some modern varieties of) English is the result of the attempts to escape the legacy genders altogether. That's what I think other commenters are getting at.
Philip Taylor said,
September 28, 2018 @ 10:43 am
"The three who chose they/them/their include two grad students and one undergraduate". Can "three" include "two" and "one" ? Might it be less confusing to write that the three were rather than included, the latter suggesting (to me, at least) that there were others who were not specifically mentioned.
Gruen said,
September 28, 2018 @ 10:52 am
Not to pick on D.O. too much, but is "legacy genders" the current term for the two genders of yesteryear? Are they deprecated to be phased out by the release of Genders 6.0?
Chas Belov said,
September 28, 2018 @ 11:15 am
This writer finds it odd to refer to themself in the third person. They use he/him/his when referring to themself as an individual and they/them/their when referring to professional matters. They decided that the act of writing this comment is a technical act and therefore non-gendered.
Chas Belov finds it odd to refer to himself in the third person. He uses he/him/his when referring to themself as an individual and they/them/their when referring to professional matters. He decided that the act of making this comment is a personal act and therefore gendered.
Actually, while I do not consider myself gender-fluid, I find myself using "they/them/their" more and more to replace gendered pronouns in everyday speech, especially to refer to people in the third person who have not personally told me their preferred pronoun.
Chas Belov said,
September 28, 2018 @ 11:16 am
Sorry, I have a heavy send finger.
I also find myself saying people's names multiple times in a sentence rather than committing to a pronoun at all.
Chas Belov said,
September 28, 2018 @ 11:21 am
Ack, corrected version of the above comments:
This writer finds it odd to refer to themself in the third person. They use he/him/his when referring to themself as an individual and they/them/their when referring to professional matters. They decided that the act of writing this comment is a technical act and therefore non-gendered.
Chas Belov finds it odd to refer to himself in the third person. He uses he/him/his when referring to himself as an individual and they/them/their when referring to professional matters. He decided that the act of making this comment is a personal act and therefore gendered.
Actually, while I do not consider myself gender-fluid, I find myself using "they/them/their" more and more to replace gendered pronouns in everyday speech, especially to refer to people in the third person who have not personally told me their preferred pronoun.
Chas Belov said,
I also find myself saying people's names multiple times in a sentence rather than committing to a pronoun at all.
Finally, I do occasionally slip into using he or she without an explicit confirmation of someone's preferred pronoun and feel a twinge of awkwardness while doing so. (That is, I feel the "he" or "she" coming out, feel awkward, and say it anyway because I have committed to saying it.
jih said,
September 28, 2018 @ 11:33 am
To continue,
These are the options for inclusive spoken Spanish that I am aware of:
First, whenever I have a conversation on this topic, someone suggests creating a third, gender neutral ending for adjectives, e.g. estoy cansade 'I am tired (unmarked for speaker's gender)'. This might work, but I have never seen it used in actual speech.
Secondly, I remember reading an interview (in the New York Times?) a few years back where a bilingual Spanish/English American artist with a nonbinary gender identity was quoted saying that when they speak Spanish they try to slur the final syllable of the relevant adjectives, determiners, etc. I think this may work if you know English (or Catalan, etc). For monolingual Spanish speakers saying, e.g. estoy cansadə with a final schwa could be difficult.
Finally, in theory, an option could be to use only one of the two grammatical genders in all instances, so that effectively the language would get rid of grammatical gender agreement altogether. The fact that grammatical gender has the two distinct usages of signaling the gender of speaker, addressee and other human referents and of marking agreement with nouns (which is orthogonal to the problem being discussed here) makes this a problematic solution (but cf Papiamento, a creole language whose lexicon comes mostly from Spanish but lacks grammatical gender).
Ellen K. said,
September 28, 2018 @ 12:14 pm
It occurs to me that, among other thing, listing pronouns can be helpful for blind persons using the website. Even for binary people names don't always indicate gender (or, when they do, not for all readers). And blind people can't go by a picture.
D.O. said,
September 28, 2018 @ 12:29 pm
Gruen, I made it up. Or in more ponderously sounding terms I created an ad hoc compound. I am pretty sure they are not going anywhere.
Michael Watts said,
September 28, 2018 @ 1:15 pm
I'm pretty sure this has been asked before, but why are we calling his / her / their / my / your "pronouns" in the first place? Those forms cannot appear where the syntax calls for a noun (except "her", which is identical to the objective pronoun) — they are determiners.
D.O. said,
September 28, 2018 @ 1:24 pm
Father's watch/his watch, no?
Bob Michael said,
September 28, 2018 @ 2:14 pm
Are there any languages that don't use pronouns at all? For example, that consistently use proper names, or relationship descriptors (father), deictics or other descriptors (the elder, the taller)?
Jerry Friedman said,
September 28, 2018 @ 2:15 pm
Tim: I have just started learning Spanish – am I right that "estoy" implies permanence – always have been and always will be – which opens up a whole new set of trans and gender fluidity issues?
It's the other way around. "Soy" implies permanence. Not that I always get those right.
I suspect that gender-fluid Spanish speakers find "estar" convenient, but I don't know.
Michael Watts said,
September 28, 2018 @ 3:39 pm
If you substitute the putative pronoun "his" in for "father" in "father's watch", you get "his's watch".
Philip Taylor said,
September 28, 2018 @ 4:10 pm
Bob Michael : ("Are there any languages that don't use pronouns at all? For example, that consistently use proper names, or relationship descriptors (father), deictics or other descriptors (the elder, the taller)")
I cannot swear that Vietnamese does not use pronouns at all, but when I hear my wife speaking Vietnamese she invariably refers to herself by name rather than the VIetnamese equivalent of "I" or me, if such exists.
Ricardo said,
September 28, 2018 @ 9:42 pm
I'm with @Yoandri Dominguez on this one. If not dumb, then it is kind of sad that everything has to be formalized and institutionalized and the members of the department don't feel they can count on people's good sense and good faith.
Allan from Iowa said,
September 28, 2018 @ 11:12 pm
Substitute the genitive case pronoun "his" for the genitive case noun "father's".
Vilinthril said,
September 29, 2018 @ 2:38 am
I'm astonished that quite a few people don't seem to get the point.
If only the people who have “surprising” wishes for how they want to be addressed put that info in their bio, on their website, …, then the minority who are trans, inter, or otherwise queer are singled out and othered. The point of stating your pronouns even if you identify as female-obviously-passing-as-female is to allow queer people not to be othered by having to state their pronouns.
Bart said,
September 29, 2018 @ 6:41 am
@ Philip Taylor, Bob Michael
Indonesian has these two features:
1 Pronouns are not gendered (eg ‘dia’ means both ‘he’ and ‘she’),
2 Pronouns are used much less than in English. Proper names or titles are often used instead. The equivalent of ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ is less common than, eg, ‘Does Guji want a cup of tea?’ or ‘Does Uncle want a cup of tea?’
I suspect many related languages have these features too.
Peter Grubtal said,
September 29, 2018 @ 9:24 am
After hearing so many so many injunctions against prescriptive grammar, we will have to get used to being instructed on how to use ones language.
David Marjanović said,
September 29, 2018 @ 12:42 pm
Japanese-type politeness systems work like that: apparently all the things that look like personal pronouns at first glance are really titles or other category terms.
mg said,
September 29, 2018 @ 2:21 pm
@Bob Michael – I don't know about not having pronouns, but Chinese pronouns are gender-neutral. I don't speak Chinese but figured this out because a lot of my work colleagues are Chinese and routinely make mistakes when using he/she to refer to people whose genders they obviously know – something that I hadn't heard people make if their native language was European, Slavic, or Semitic.
Philip Taylor said,
September 29, 2018 @ 4:30 pm
David M. (Japanese pronouns) — I first learned (a very little) Japanese when watching the film Shogun, in which the pilot used the phrase Watashi wa John Blackthorne. I assumed that "watashi wa" meant "I am", but on reading your comment I am now less sure — how should one translate watashi wa if not "I am" ? (Where it is the "I" that is in question rather than the "am", 'though of course I may have misunderstood both elements).
Gabriel Holbrow said,
September 29, 2018 @ 5:44 pm
To Mr. Taylor (that's your preferred title, right?): Setting aside that Shogun author James Clavell is not the most reliable authority on Japanese language, the "watashi" in your example phrase does translate to "I". (There is no equivalent to "am" though, since the phase is missing a verb at the end, presumably an implied copula. The "wa" is a particle that marks "watashi" as the topic of the phrase.)
But I am with David Marjanović on this one. That "watashi" is more like a first-person-refering noun than it is like a pronoun. There are several other (more than a dozen? I am not sure) options for first-person-refering nouns, all with different connotations of formality and relative politeness, and of course always the option to drop the topic all together as sufficiently implied by the context.
Peter Grubtal said,
September 30, 2018 @ 3:04 am
On Japanese pronouns:
A Japanese guy once published a novel and then informed the (Japanese) world that there was a special point about the text: nobody noticed anything unusual about it; then he told them: not a single pronoun was used in the book.
Anecdotes aside, the point being pronouns are used very differently (if at all) in Japanese.
I would guess the utterance "watashi wa Peter.." is not typically Japanese.
As Gabriel Holbrow implied, utterances in Japanese are very context dependent, and can seem extremely elliptical to English speakers, giving rise to the stories about the ambiguity of the language.
The answer to the question "did your brother like the book?" could be "sukimashita!" , i.e. just
"liked" literally translated, no subject or object pronoun. I think that's standard Japanese, although I abandoned study of the language years ago.
Philip Taylor said,
September 30, 2018 @ 7:42 am
Gabriel H — thank you. Just for the record, I have no preferred title, and you are more than welcome to refer to me as "Philip", "Mr Taylor", "PT", or any other variant that seems appropriate at the time. Returning to pronouns in Vietnamese, I asked my wife about these today and they do exist, although <given name&;gt;, "anh" or "em" are far more commonly used than the Vietnamese equivalent of "I". What I also learned from her today is that there are two forms of the Vietnamese equivalents of "he" and "him", one used to indicate respect and one used to convey the lack thereof.
Michael LaRocca said,
September 30, 2018 @ 3:05 pm
I'm glad Ye West doesn't work in the field of physics, because I have no idea what pronoun ye'd want me to use.
richardelguru said,
October 1, 2018 @ 7:44 am
I believe that most leptons prefer 'they/them/their', as do quarks. Bosons, of course insist on 'he/him/his'.
Michèle Sharik said,
October 1, 2018 @ 3:58 pm
@Vilinthril said: "I'm astonished that quite a few people don't seem to get the point."
Thank you! It's about not othering people.
@mg said: "a lot of my work colleagues are Chinese and routinely make mistakes when using he/she to refer to people whose genders they obviously know – something that I hadn't heard people make if their native language was European, Slavic, or Semitic."
I have a Finnish friend who seems to mix up he/she, too. Are pronouns not common in Finnish? (I don't know.)
Tim Rowe said,
October 1, 2018 @ 4:56 pm
Finnish pronouns are gender-neutral (as are spoken Chinese pronouns, of course). Earlier this year I went to a talk on the problems that gives translators…
Anand said,
October 1, 2018 @ 10:26 pm
Bengali's third person pronoun ও ("o") is also non-gendered.
What I've wondered about these pronoun declarations is: why is there a need to provide more than one? Doesn't "he/him/his" follow from simply "he"?
Are there cases where the dative or possessive would be chosen from a different gender than the nominative?
Ran Ari-Gur said,
October 1, 2018 @ 11:18 pm
@Anand: Since they list the preferred pronouns without an explicit label, something like "he/him/his" is much clearer than bare "he", just as something like "(123) 555-7890" is clearer than "1235557890".
Also, since the purpose of listing pronouns even when they seem obvious is to normalize listing them even when they might not be, it makes sense to always write all three forms, rather than only doing so when the forms might be familiar.
Ellen K. said,
October 2, 2018 @ 7:39 pm
Why, then, not the full 4 forms?
he/him/his/his
she/her/her/hers
they/them/their/theirs
Allan from Iowa said,
October 2, 2018 @ 8:23 pm
4 forms are not enough. There may be people who have strong opinions on they/them/their/theirs/themselves versus they/them/their/theirs/themself.
Brett said,
October 2, 2018 @ 9:23 pm
I am, in the abstract, in favor of this kind of inclusiveness. However, I am a bit concerned that worrying about issues like personal pronouns may distract people from the much bigger problems in STEM fields (especially physics and mathematics, my own disciplines) with underrepresentation of women and minorities.
Ricardo said,
October 3, 2018 @ 6:08 pm
@Michèle Sharik, Vilinthril
This may be beside the point but I always find the use of 'other' as a verb silly. Its meaning seems vague, abstract, almost theoretical, that it betrays in the user a preoccupation with a fashionable concept rather than a genuine problem at hand. If one means, 'to aleinate', 'to marginalize', 'to discriminate against', why not just use those words instead.
Vilinthril said,
October 4, 2018 @ 2:28 am
I'm not really interested in derailing this discussion into one on language change. I like verbing. Verbing weirds language.