Yo as gender-neutral pronoun

N

nomadologist

Guest
Huh...Why are people in the article trying to claim "yo" sounds "crass and disrespectful"? Its obvious origins are in the first-person pronoun "I" ("Yo") from Spanish.
 
M

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
nomadologist said:
Huh...Why are people in the article trying to claim "yo" sounds "crass and disrespectful"? Its obvious origins are in the first-person pronoun "I" ("Yo") from Spanish.
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I think it's a class thing. That really made me laugh though - "no, you can't have that word entering common usage, it's UGLY'. Aesthetics police!
 
E

Eric

Mr Moraigero
This is very cool.

nomadologist said:
Huh...Why are people in the article trying to claim "yo" sounds "crass and disrespectful"? Its obvious origins are in the first-person pronoun "I" ("Yo") from Spanish.
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It seems that the reason is that the people who use this themselves feel it sounds disrespectful. E.g. if you refer to the teacher as `yo' other students may say `she's not a yo', etc. (as reported on language log) Nice example of language changing from whatever its original roots were. also it is not so clear to me that the obvious origins of this pronoun are in Spanish 1P `yo', it seems likely also that they could have come from the vocative yo as in `yo wassup!!'

language log also reports that this form is now altered in baltimore and has become a masculine pronoun; the feminine is apparently `shorty'

nice facts.
 
M

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Eric said:
This is very cool.
It seems that the reason is that the people who use this themselves feel it sounds disrespectful. E.g. if you refer to the teacher as `yo' other students may say `she's not a yo', etc. (as reported on language log) Nice example of language changing from whatever its original roots were. also it is not so clear to me that the obvious origins of this pronoun are in Spanish 1P `yo', it seems likely also that they could have come from the vocative yo as in `yo wassup!!'

language log also reports that this form is now altered in baltimore and has become a masculine pronoun; the feminine is apparently `shorty'

nice facts.
Click to expand...

That's a shame that it's changing already, I had real utopian desires for it! But we'll wait n see, thanks for the language log tip, didn't know about it, that's got RSSed immediately, and I'm sure I'll be schlepping round the links for weeks, pukka linguist sites! Hurrah!

Can anyone in eduation get hold of the original PDF? It's here

http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/82/3/262.pdf
 
N

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Tim Leary tried to introduce 's/he' as a gender neutral pronoun. Obviously it wasn't going to catch on in spoken language because it sounds stupid. 'Yo' might work, the backlash could be due to conventional resistance to referring to people as 'it'.
 
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subvert47

subvert47

I don't fight, I run away
noel emits said:
Tim Leary tried to introduce 's/he' as a gender neutral pronoun. Obviously it wasn't going to catch on in spoken language because it sounds stupid.
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I always use s/he in writing – didn't know it came from Leary though

there's also:

"ze" — for "he", "she", or "other"
"hir" — a possessive pronoun for "ze"
"per" — another neutral possessive pronoun (from Marge Piercy) - I like this one

I suppose "ze" is more flexible:

"s/he" is either/or: "she" or "he" — it might include "both", but it leaves out "neither"
whereas "ze" makes no assumption about gender whatsoever

:)
 
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N

nomadologist

Guest
Eric said:
This is very cool.



It seems that the reason is that the people who use this themselves feel it sounds disrespectful. E.g. if you refer to the teacher as `yo' other students may say `she's not a yo', etc. (as reported on language log) Nice example of language changing from whatever its original roots were. also it is not so clear to me that the obvious origins of this pronoun are in Spanish 1P `yo', it seems likely also that they could have come from the vocative yo as in `yo wassup!!'

language log also reports that this form is now altered in baltimore and has become a masculine pronoun; the feminine is apparently `shorty'

nice facts.
Click to expand...

huh, i guess you're right about possible origins if "shorty" is going to be considered somehow a feminine form...interesting...also i don't know if baltimore has a very big hispanic population--anyone know?

i haven't heard this on tv or in music yet so i wonder how widespread it is or whether it will catch on...
 
S

stelfox

Beast of Burden
From what I remember of official statistics Baltimore is somewhere around about 65 percent black, 30 percent white and has a pretty negligible, but growing, Latino population. It's far from "obvious" that the root of this word would be Spanish. If you had ever been there, you'd be unlikely to say this.

From what I understood when I was there and thanks to my obsession with The Wire, from what I can gather "yo" appears to be a kind of multi-purpose word: a call for attention (Yo! let's go get some food.); a full point on a sentence (I'm going to get some food, yo."); an appeal for agreement ("Let's go get some food, yo?". also, if you've watched any of The Wire, you have heard Carver, Herc and Kima referring to the hoppers and street kids as "Yos". That would explain the "Teacher isn't a yo" thing. It's a regional verbal tic in many ways, indicative of class status and all kinds of things. In this sense it could totally work as a non-gendered pronoun, but I'm not surprised this hasn't lasted because it's quite a masculine-sounding term
 
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STN

STN

sou'wester
Not really fully on point, but some West African languages have no gendered pronoun, so when learning English, people just use them interchangeably - 'have you seen Sarah?', 'yes, he's gone back to the house' or whatever.
 
D

droid

Guest
STN said:
Not really fully on point, but some West African languages have no gendered pronoun, so when learning English, people just use them interchangeably - 'have you seen Sarah?', 'yes, he's gone back to the house' or whatever.
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This is very common in Jamaica as well. 'Him' when referring to 'her'.
 
N

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
stelfox said:
From what I understood when I was there and thanks to my obsession with The Wire, from what I can gather "yo" appears to be a kind of multi-purpose word: a call for attention (Yo! let's go get some food.); a full point on a sentence (I'm going to get some food, yo."); an appeal for agreement ("Let's go get some food, yo?". also, if you've watched any of The Wire, you have heard Carver, Herc and Kima referring to the hoppers and street kids as "Yos". That would explain the "Teacher isn't a yo" thing.
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In all those cases it's a bit like a general acknowledgment of another, or a request for a response from another.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Out of the Indo-European languages, English is in a small minority* that don't have gendered nouns (never mind pronouns) - in the Romance languages, inanimate objects are either 'he' or 'she', while it's even more complicate in German as they can be 'he', 'she' or 'it'. It's one of many features of the language that we've lost over the centuries.

*Afrikaans is another, apparently
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
stelfox said:
From what I remember of official statistics Baltimore is somewhere around about 65 percent black, 30 percent white and has a pretty negligible, but growing, Latino population. It's far from "obvious" that the root of this word would be Spanish. If you had ever been there, you'd be unlikely to say this.

From what I understood when I was there and thanks to my obsession with The Wire, from what I can gather "yo" appears to be a kind of multi-purpose word: a call for attention (Yo! let's go get some food.); a full point on a sentence (I'm going to get some food, yo."); an appeal for agreement ("Let's go get some food, yo?". also, if you've watched any of The Wire, you have heard Carver, Herc and Kima referring to the hoppers and street kids as "Yos". That would explain the "Teacher isn't a yo" thing. It's a regional verbal tic in many ways, indicative of class status and all kinds of things. In this sense it could totally work as a non-gendered pronoun, but I'm not surprised this hasn't lasted because it's quite a masculine-sounding term
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I've been to Baltimore, more than once, and never heard any difference between the way people there use "yo" (the first several uses you list are extremely common all over the U.S.) Of course I haven't been there in the past couple of years. But many many new uses of urban slang in the U.S. *are* thanks to burgeoning latino populations and borrowed slang from spanish-speakers, so it wasn't an entirely strange guess to make about its origins as a pronoun.
 
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