Uhhhh meow? @thelittlestmac - Tumblr Blog

dsmsix

june 2nd?? what the fuck. what’s next? june 3rd? a 4th of june? give me a fucking break.

fake-news-and-headlines

antidotefortheawkward-art

Thoughts on the gendering of Chinese pronouns

took-hold-of-nothing

For anyone who want to know more!!! 佢 = 亻巨（keoi5）亻means 人 person

She/He/They (singular) = 佢 They(plural) = 佢哋 E.g. She is right = 佢喺啱嘅 They(plural) are right = 佢哋喺啱嘅

Her/His/their = 佢嘅 E.g. Her book = 佢嘅書 Their (plural) book = 佢哋嘅書

Her/Him/Them = 佢 E.g. It’s Her! = 喺佢呀！ It’s them(plural)! = 喺佢哋呀！

oh we also use 佢 for It too E.g. It looks beautiful (about, like idk, a cake or a bug) = 佢睇落好靚

ace-pervert

FREE SOUTHERN CHINA!

nightbringer24

… really? Was this really the fault of white people?

noblepeasant

No, I really doubt it was. This wasn’t some imposition by Western authorities. It was, in fact, the creation of Chinese poet Liu Bannong, who was in fact an anti-imperialist, and a linguist who studied in France and England.

Better still, the character used, 她, was not created by Liu Bannong. It already existed. It meant “older sister” or “madame”, basically a respectful term of address towards women who were older than you. Liu Bannong just kind of repurposed it to mean “she”.

So to put this into terms a Westerner might understand, imagine if an American went to France and learned the word rendezvous. When he comes home, he starts using this word, except he spells it “rondyvoo”. That word becomes fairly popular. 100 years later, some teenager makes a comic going “oh, those horrible French imperialists forcing their language on us! Oh, the bitterness of colonisation!” That’s basically what OP is doing by making this comic.

bprinny

Chinese had words for “mother” and “father” for centuries, I’m pretty sure they had the concept of “male” and “female” at some point

noblepeasant

Aye, and there’s the sticking point. China is a country that is very acutely aware of male and female. They used to break girl’s bones in their feet to make them walk a way they like. China has had such a female infanticide problem that there are 30 million more men than women.

But what OP is complaining about seems a weird thing: they’re complaining about pronouns. Not about gender roles. Not about the way women are treated. Not even disrespectful pronouns. Just that gendered pronouns exist. And they blame this on those gosh-darn white people, despite the pronoun being made by a Chinese person.

It is the most pathetic, most petty, most meaningless thing I think I have ever seen anyone complain about, and the po-faced seriousness and the dramatic metaphors they used to represent it (seeing the word “She” is like coughing up blood, apparently) would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.

antelopian

don’t blame a terrible and fascist form of government mistreating their own people, obviously the solution is to be racist towards people who don’t live in that country and scapegoat them for the Chinese government’s crimes

noblepeasant

To give the CCP some credit, the gendered pronoun thing was introduced by an anti-Qing poet long before the CCP was even a thing.

The female infanticide, though, that was absolutely exacerbated by the CCP’s one child policy.