A Treatise on two new Archetypes

Make it stop! That is not a word, and I refuse to acknowledge it beyond pointing out how much I hate it.

I apologize for the minor thread hacking here, but had to comment on this.

Originally, "he" was gender neutral. An individual of unknown gender was automatically referred to as "he" until it was proven that the individual was female. This is because in English the feminine is a marked state, a variation of the overall norm. Which is why "Man" is considered a reference to the whole of humanity, not just the male half.

Recently, however, we have forgotten that "he" was ever gender neutral and it has become thoroughly the masculine gender. As a result, we have no gender neutral pronoun any longer, resulting in the awkward phrase "he or she" and such written constructions as "(s)he" and "he/she", or randomly switching pronouns, as some game companies do, which can result in the same example referring to the same generic, unstated individual as both she and he.

This is unlikely to be corrected anytime soon as evidenced by the fact that we still use a 26 letter alphabet for a language that has 30 or 40 different individual sounds, including 13 seperate vowels which are represented by only 5 symbols, 6 if you include "y". To make matters worse, some of our letters merely copy the sounds of other letters, such as the "c", our worthless gift from certain latinate-speaking conquerors, which can only seem to copy either a "k" or an "s", only producing a unique sound when in combination with "h".

Add to this the fact that we use spelling rules that predate modern English by more than six hundred years, including spelling meant to reproduce sounds which are no longer part of the language ("gh") and/or are no longer spoken outloud (silent letters such as "k" in "know") and it becomes no question why the English language is so confusing to second-language speakers.

I suspect this is largely caused by your language lacking gender for nouns. The only gender expression that the English language has comes from personal pronouns, which REALLY makes it a pain to write stories from the mouth of a female character when I have a male screen name. In my language, all nouns have a gender based on their suffix, be they animate or inanimate, and adjectives change their own suffix to reflect the gender of the noun. As such, the gender of pronouns is inherited from the noun they reference. For instance, the noun "character" is male, so I would naturally say "he, the character" without actually implying the gender of the character himself or herself (sic). Now, certain nouns have multiple genders, such as "hero" vs. "heroine," but many, like "principal" do not, so it is common practice to refer to the male noun as a general rule of thumb and to the female noun only as an exception.

Then again, that makes for some funny gender grammar with foreign words which are inherently one gender, but because of suffix end up as another. Particularly funny is the word "ninja," because in my language it has a female suffix, so you will often hear "she, the ninja," despite the ninja in question being clearly male on-screen.

It's not as confusing as you think. Pronouncing things correctly is, of course, always difficult for foreign speakers, and you can never really escape from your accent when you weren't born speaking English, but it's not quite that confusing. It has a few awkward rules of spelling and grammar, but most of those can be learned through simple practice and a little knowledge.

To contrast, my language is almost entirely phonetic. Each letter represents a single sound as it is spoken in the word and does not change based on its proximity with other words. The transition from text to speech is almost completely direct. You'd think that'd make the language easier to spell and read, but you'd be wrong. Even if the sounds themselves do not change, the nature of how speech flows causes you to change them, anyway, or at the very least pronounce them ambiguously. English has this problem, as well, with things like "their/they're/there," but is not unique in this. Even direct letter-to-sound transitions can be sinisterly unclear, meaning you pretty much have to remember how words are spelled anyway.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

From his description, almost certainly a Romance language. Probably Spanish or possibly French.

This.

I don't know if it is his mother tongue, but he has mentioned from time to time that he lives in Bulgaria.