Imagine there was a society in which blue eyed people are referred to with blee/bler pronouns, and green eyed people are referred to with glee/gler pronouns, and one day someone from that society saw a brown eyed person and had no idea whether to categorise them as blee/bler or glee/gler
Yeah it’s so weird when you think about how arbitrary separating pronouns by gender really is. I feel like it would make way more sense to have multiple ungendered ones that work similar to the way we have this and that to talk about two different inanimate objects
This and that are also pronouns, just not personal pronouns. Gendered personal pronouns are common across languages but far from universal.
Mandarin has just “tā”, though it’s distinguished in writing as 他/她/它, he/she/it. Chinese speakers often have trouble correctly using he/she in English - “my girlfriend, he is very attractive” is something I heard.
I also often end up choosing “he” or “she” just randomly unless I specifically pay attention to it, because Finnish doesn’t have that Indo-European peculiarity.
Also, I’ve seen so many young Finnish children get mad at their English teachers in school because until learning of the he/she distinction they had never had to bother tracking the gender of their conversation partner. It’s an extra burden that forces them to look at all their everyday life differently and they demand their teacher to remove that feature so that they don’t need to add that to their life.
