Another sinograph for Unicode — the third-person gender-neutral pronoun

No sooner had I posted about a block of 11,328 proposed Small Seal characters dating back roughly two millennia being incorporated in UNICODE than a single spanking new sinograph surfaced and was urgently put forward for inclusion, and it is causing a bit of a ruckus.  That is the third-person gender-neutral pronoun X也, which is pronounced the same as all the other characters for supposedly gendered Sinitic third-person pronouns, viz., tā (see below for their graphic forms).

N.B.:  The proposed neograph under dicussion is provisionally being written as X也, but bear in mind that, as I have pointed out countless times, all sinographs, by the exigencies / inherent nature of the script, whether they have 1 stroke or 64 / n strokes, must be squeezed inside the same size box as all other sinographs.  In other words, X也 perforce — once the typographers get it worked out — will eventually have to fit inside exactly the same space as 也 and biáng  (you can get an authentic plate of these belt-like Shaanxi noodles at Xi'an Sizzling Woks, 40th & Chestnut in University City next to Penn [opens at 11:30 AM, closed on Tuesdays]).  There are many Language Log posts about diverse aspects of this jabberwockyish character.  Just look it up under "biang" 

The default character for the third-person pronoun was 他 (colloquial usage that emerged beginning around the 3rd century AD).  In and of itself, 他 (and the morpheme / lexeme it is supposed to signify) is not gendered.  It is just semantophore 亻("human") + phonophore 也 (Old Sinitic *laːlʔ).  By medieval times (around 600 AD), it had come to be pronounced roughly tha, and in the developing topolects after that, except for slight differences in tone and vowel quality, it was roughly the same.  Though 他 was of extremely high frequency, tenth among all the tens of thousands of extant sinographs, people simply used it naturally as a makeshift for all spoken third-person pronouns.  They didn't pay much / any attention to the gender of the third-person being referenced — until inflected languages and Western discourse began to exert a significant influence in the Sinosphere.

The other gendered third-person pronouns — 她 ("she"), 它 ("it"), 牠 (animal), 祂 (god / sprit / deity) — were all pronounced the same as 他 ("he") — grammatically had the same usage.

X也 reminds me of LatinX, although the big controversy surrounding the latter is how to pronounce the final letter, whereas the chief controversy over X也 is the unseemly appearance of having an alphabetical letter wedded to a sinograph ("doesn't look right").  Furthermore, in X也, the X has no phonetic function.  It exists only to indicate that this character does not indicate a male, female, neuter, animal, or spiritual being.  It denotes unadulterated transness. 

When the trans community in the Sinosphere became sufficiently exercised over their linguistic identity, they started to use "TA" for the third-person gender-neutral pronoun.  That worked on an ad hoc, informal basis for a number of years, but then some people grew discontented over having an alphabetical word embedded at the heart of the language.  Never mind that, as Mark Hansell, Liu Yongquan, and others have shown unmistakably, the Roman alphabet has already become an indissoluble part of the Chinese writing system (cf. Rōmaji in the Japanese writing system).

Well, X也 has already been accepted into Unicode and has been given a codepoint, but it has yet to be determined how it will be input into digital devices.

In conclusion, X也 is the non-binary, generic third-person pronoun, and it is pronounced the same as 他 ("he"), 她 ("she"), 它 ("it"), 牠 (animal), 祂 (god / sprit / deity); to wit, as the renowned Chinese linguist Y.R. Chao would have it, X也 is "unsayable" in such a way that it conveys the semantics it is designed to convey.

 

Selected readings

• "Seal Script in Unicode" (1/15/26)
• "The Englishization of Chinese enters a new phase" (8/8/24)
• "Nerd, geek, PK: Creeping Romanization (and Englishization), part 2" (3/5/13)
• "The Westernization of Chinese" (9/6/12)
• Mark Hansell, "The Sino-Alphabet: The Assimilation of Roman Letters into the Chinese Writing System," Sino-Platonic Papers, 45 (May, 1994), 1-28 (pdf)
• "Creeping Romanization in Chinese" (8/30/12)
• "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 3" (11/25/18) — includes a very long (but not complete) list of previous Language Log posts on Romanization, Englishization, digraphia and diglossia, biscriptalism and multiscriptalism, bilingualism and multilingualism
• "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 4" (12/15/18) — it's really happening, believe you me
• "Official digraphia" (9/13/18) — no, it's already happened; with long list of pertinent readings
• "The actuality of emerging digraphia" (3/10/19)
• "Language is not script and script is not language" (1/23/22)
• "Language is not script and script is not language, part 2" (7/10/22)
• "How many more Chinese characters are needed?" (10/25/16)
• "Language vs. script" (11/21/16)
• "Grids galore" (11/19/23)

See other posts under "Archive for Diglossia and digraphia".

[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]