I am aware that 他 and 她 are pronounced the same, but written it is an issue. Is 他们 or 她们 appropriate at all?
I think defaulting to 他 should be okay. 她 was invented in the 20th century by reformers who thought Chinese should insert gender into their language so they could be more like europeans / maybe there was a women’s liberation aspect? Unclear but you can read more here and entire books have been written about it. Basically the Chinese language had no gender distinction in pronouns until 100 years ago. Taiwan took it further and also introduced 妳 too
thanks, this was really informative. I’ll keep this in mind and read about it
What’s that last one that Taiwan introduced?
A female version of 你, meaning “you”.
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I don’t think there’s a male radical? That should just be the person radical
the person radical is used to distinguish male ta (他) and female ta (她), but i cant think of any other time it’s used that way
that’s a danliren, which is not a male radical. It refers to people. And it has no connotation, can refer to men, women, non-binary, even animals or objects.
No it doesn’t.
Disclaimer: I don’t know jack shit about Taiwanese
Looks like a feminine version of “you”, since “you” is the left character of this 他 + the right character of this 妳 and the left character of this 妳 is the character for “female” (which is why 她 is “her” while “他” is “them”)
Sorry for all this I don’t have a Chinese keyboard on my laptop
Taiwanese doesn’t exist as a language, it is just traditional Mandarin Chinese, as the CPC modernized, refined, and greatly simplified Mandarin. The things you are pointing out essentially arise from attempting to add even more complexity into a very antiquated and complex writing system.
Oh for sure, I just had no idea what to call the character set with the addition complexity Taiwanese people tried to add lmao
I would also like to know this!
I am not sure if this is right but here’s one attempt at Hanzi I made
TA and TA们
I saw someone using 佢 for the neutral 3rd-person pronoun. It comes from Canto, where it is used regardless of gender.
In a colloquial situation, Chinese netizens often just write “ta”
write out the letters t and a?
also for 佢，would they still use ta for speaking? or use qu as the spoken word as well?
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ye
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IDK, prolly the former
thank you!
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No idea how legitimate this is, but I stumbled on this recently: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jpasden/51282243353/
