Re: He/She

["Janet K. Christian" <janetc -at- AUSTIN -dot- APPLE -dot- COM>]

>John Renish <John -dot- Renish -at- CONNER -dot- COM> wrote-->
>> So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to come up with a new
>> sex-neutral pronoun (including all the necessary cases) that everybody will
>> quickly embrace.

>============
>=*=   Beverly Parks -- bparks -at- huachuca-emh1 -dot- army -dot- mil wrote-->
>Hmmm...
>I have several suggestions:

>   Male   Female   Neutral1        Neutral2        Neutral3

>   he     she      ze  [long e]    ze  [long e]    te  [long e]
>   him    her      zeh [short e]   zin [short i]   tey [long a]
>   his    hers     zes [short e]   zis [short i]   tes [short e]


I was thinking about this during my morning commute and also came up with
the idea Beverly expressed as Neutral3. I like the "te" forms for a couple
of reasons -- pretty much the same ones Beverly expressed. They are
completely neutral while still evoking the mental connection of "they."
Just like "Ms." reminded people of "Miss" and Mrs." -- even those who
didn't know about the "new word" could still figure out the meaning. Many
of them probably assumed it was a typo. The same thing would occur with
te/tey/tes. They would be interpreted and assumed to be simple typos by
those who aren't "in the know."

Now if we can just do something about putting the punctuation inside the
quotation marks...

Janet