Today's recommended reading. "How Chinese ruined a perfectly good gender-neutral pronoun" A fascinating historical tidbit by @andrewbatson h/t @david__moser andrewbatson.com/2023/03/22/…

How Chinese ruined a perfectly good gender-neutral pronoun

One of most distinctive mistakes that native speakers of Chinese make when speaking English is to mix up the gender of the third-person singular pronoun. It is not uncommon for an otherwise fairly …

andrewbatson.com
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The century-later sequel to this story is the creation of new gender-neutral written representations of tā, like X也.
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It’s ⿰㐅也: hc.jsecs.org/irg/ws2021/app/…也
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The link isn’t working for me. It’s interesting how this is being encoded. The original intent of the character form was clearly to use the Latin letter “x” in its algebraic sense (cf. “Latinx”). Now that “x” has been transformed into a graphically similar sinograph component.
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hc.jsecs.org/irg/ws2021/app/… This was made deliberately. While the character emerged as X也, Unicode currently does not allow CJKV characters which decompose into non-CJKV components such as digits, Latin letters, kana. So picking 㐅 was a way to fast-track the inclusion…

Mar 30, 2023 · 9:17 PM UTC

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…into the Extension I already as opposed to the potential revamp of the whole CJK Unified Ideograph definition that would allow things like Keiō University characters.
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