• Erika2rsis@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    With Chinese the situation is well that in spoken language, the pronouns aren’t gendered, but in written language, they are. This was as a European influence, I believe.

    All of these are third-person pronouns read as “tā” in Standard Chinese:

    • 他 - masculine, originally/occasionally gender-neutral human; human radical
    • 她 - feminine; woman radical
    • 牠 - animate non-human, Traditional usage; cow radical
    • 它 - inanimate; animate non-human in Simplified usage; historically general
    • 祂 - divine, primarily Abrahamic usage; spirit radical
    • TA - gender-neutral, also used in other letter case forms
    • X也 - gender-neutral, handwritten form has no Unicode support