Are animals not sexed in the Chinese language? (Maybe only in cases like hen and rooster, where they are distinct visually and economically?)
Just seems weird to refer to a talking animal as "it" in this translation
@Betty nope, they're all the equivalent of "it". though it's pronounced "ta" (the same way he and she are said - though those are also written differently) there's a specific way to write the pronoun that puts animals in the same category as inanimate objects - 它
gendered animals (as in hen and rooster) will have "male" and "female" appended to it - "male chicken" 公鸡 "female chicken" 母鸡. if the original text only said "chicken" 鸡 there wouldn't be any way of knowing if op meant male or female
@Betty save for context clues - e.g., mentioning a comb, or the chicken's ability to lay eggs. so "it" would be the most accurate translation if the original text had "it" 它. even if there were context clues, but the animal were referred to as "it" 它, i personally might still lean toward translating as "it" for faithfulness, as it implies the pov character's perspective on the animal/animals
@yesterdaychild so even in cases where an animal's sex is obvious and relevant, it is still the correct pronoun, but also this distinction is only made in writing, ie "look at that dog, it's pregnant."?
@Betty short answer is yes
the thing is the side radical for 他 (he) is literally called 人字旁 (side radical for describing humans), so it is a bit categorically odd to call, say, a dog a 他 when that implies human
fyi we use radicals to indicate what category the word is in. there are side radicals for things made of wood, stone, metal, water; clothes, thread-like items; boats; movement etc. there are also top radicals for plant matter, places that are covered, places that are enclosed etc.
@Betty fun fact - deities get their own pronoun - also pronounced ta, but written 祂. the side radical indicates something spiritual if i'm not wrong
@yesterdaychild Okay, now I'm very curious which one Sun Wukong gets.
@Betty answered this in the correct thread, this is a side point now
fwiw i searched articles on dog breeding and had to hunt before i found a few that actually referred to the animals with 3rd person pronouns. there were entire articles about "should i have a male or female dog" that entirely never used the 3rd person pronoun. which is kind of true of chinese that oftentimes the subject doesn't need to be part of the sentence
@yesterdaychild Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is some kind of weird English language hangup I have about how pronouns and personhood and gender are all intertwined in one big mess, such that you get people giving ships a gender as part of how highly they value them?
I have the impression though, that in Chinese there's a general trend towards minimalism, and not cluttering up the sentence if everyone knows what's being talked about?
@Betty @yesterdaychild yeah I really think english genders things based on how much you have an emotional attachment to it, as if you're conferring personhood via gender? pets get genders, wild animals don't unless they're cute enough; cars get gender if you're a car lover but don't if you aren't; ships traditionally all get gender but in practice people who don't care about ships mostly don't bother. I find myself instinctively trying to use gendered pronouns for birds, because I care about birds so much! even though I don't like gendered pronouns! It's wild.
@soph_sol @yesterdaychild Yeah, and I think this is some of why some boomers find singular they so hard: it seems inherently disrespectful!
@Betty @yesterdaychild yeah I really think that must be a part of it!
@soph_sol @yesterdaychild I got wound up in this because there's a talking cat in Evil As Humans, and I'm like ??? no gender? But it talk??? But like, what do I know, maybe ta (它) is the cat's preferred pronoun.
I mean, it's clearly murderbot's.
@Betty @soph_sol this is deviating wildly but fwiw, i sometimes joke that my preferred pronouns are "she/it" because "it" kind of describes the feeling of blobby being-ness that i have inside. (it's a joke in that i don't actually expect people to call me that though)
i also kind of feel like babies under 1 are "it"s (although i would never say this in front of their parents). it's like when they're that tiny, should they get the weight of she or he?
these are my personal opinions!
@yesterdaychild @Betty @soph_sol there are definitely cultures where babies under a certain age get inanimate pronouns! you even see it sometimes in older english texts (and heldover in stock phrases like “is it a girl or a boy?”)
@Satsuma @yesterdaychild @Betty I do think it makes a lot of sense for a language/culture to use "it" pronouns for very young babies! they haven't learned how to do gender yet, so they don't really have one yet!
@yesterdaychild @soph_sol @Satsuma @Betty in German, you definitely use ‘it’ in a sentence where you’ve established that the noun you’re referring to is ‘the baby’ (das Baby, neuter). “Das Baby ist launisch, hat es genug geschlafen?” (The baby is cranky, has it slept enough?)
If you’re referring to the baby by its name, though, you would use gendered pronouns.
@yesterdaychild @soph_sol @Satsuma @Betty (interestingly, this also goes for ‘the girl’, because the word for girl is a diminutive (Mädchen) and those are always neuter.)
@villainousfriend @yesterdaychild @soph_sol @Satsuma @Betty Yes, but the big difference is that all German nouns have a fixed grammatical gender. You couldn‘t keep the Chinese "it" in a translation when you‘re talking about a bear (Bär, der; maskulin) but if something suggested that it‘s female, you could make it into die Bärin or if it’s a young and cute bear das Bärchen.
@soph_sol @yesterdaychild @Betty personally I would never refer to a person with it unless they’d explicitly requested it, but I’m not bothered by its application to animals generally—even ones with more obvious sex markers like chickens