No - please do not use "it" as a catch-all pronoun for an unknown person. "It" is generally a dehumanizing term for a transgender person - though a minority use it as a pronoun (in those cases, go for it).
I’m not asking if they’re interchangeable. Just if “it” differs from “they” in some way in the above context where it sounds like that’s the individual’s preferred pronoun?
Yes, calling someone “it” has been a ridiculously offensive thing to do in my life experience.
It would be such a shame if groups that pride themselves on inclusivity had a socially acceptable reason to exclude lower-class and neurodivergent people...
It's really not that hard to keep a mental lookup table for each person and their custom pronouns and declensions.
Another pretty elegant solution I've found if there's too much confusion amongst our team is to suggest people switch to learning Hungarian which doesn't have gendered pronouns. A few years of intense study is a small price to pay so that we can avoid the catastrophic mistakes of accidentally calling someone who's not in the room the wrong gender
Unfortunately I tried that. After 3 years of Hungarian classes, I had a peer that demanded I speak to them in Klingon because they identified as hypermasculine. Now I have to start over again.
No, it's fine as is. I think you have は and が backwards but neither of them imply ドイツ語 is "doing something" even though it's the subject of the sentence. It's a pro-drop language so meanings that don't make sense are just excluded.
I was split between で or は, forgot all about が. Funnily enough I think omitting the particle altogether would have made more sense.
Edit: After further reading は seems to work fine. In this case I think both work but が places greater emphasis on the german language being the thing not understood. で however was totally incorrect :P. But due to the tacit nature of informal Japanese I think the context already informed the reader who doesn't understand what.
が marks the subject, and the subject of わかる is the thing that's being understood, not the thing that's doing the understanding.
(Maybe you meant subject in the non-grammatical way? It's confusing.)
Either way, は is fine in this sentence to the best of my understanding.
It marks ドイツ語 as the subject, and thus the thing being understood.
Bullshit. Why is a word that explicitly removes all identity connotations randomly dehumanization? Its one of the most neutral ways of indicating another, In the same way that "comrade" is.
> explicitly removes all identity connotations randomly dehumanization
It's not randomly dehumanization, the neuter gender that the pronoun system preserves has always communicated inanimacy (read: nonhuman-ness) against the masc/fem animate genders. Etymologically, this distinction has been more primitive than the masc/fem distinction. One feature of the neuter gender is the use of the object form in languages that distinguish it from the subject form, hence he/him, she/her, but it/it.
I sympathize with questioning but this is pretty harsh. The explanation is fairly simple. “It” is how we refer to most inanimate objects and “subhuman” creatures in the English language. Debates on how appropriate it is to be addressed in this way or desire to be addressed in this way aside, it’s certainly not random or a stretch to imagine why some might be uneasy with the idea if they feel it somehow associates the person with the aforementioned categories.
