1065: Neutral Pronouns for People (in German) Nov 8, 2017

It would not be considered grammatical and could easily be taken as offensive if someone where to use the pronoun 'it' in lieu of either 'he' or 'she', but this is not entirely to do with the impersonality of 'it' per se, and more to do with English conventions. People accept when babies or animals are referred to as 'it', and also can use 'that' instead of 'who' with certain sentence-structures, but none of that matters as much as the fact that in other languages like German or even Old English, plenty of words that relate to people, particularly women in those cases, are in the neutral gender, and can take the pronoun that would translate into 'it'. In the original German for Rapunzel from the Grimm's Fairy Tales for example, it reads „Rapunzel ward das schöste Kinde unter der Sonne. Als es zwölf Jahre alt war, schloß es die Zauberin in einen Turm...“ meaning "Rapunzel became the most beautiful child (neuter) under the sun. When it was twelve years old, the sorceress locked it up in a tower" despite the fact that Rapunzel is a girl. As such, those English translations would not be acceptable, but it shows that one way how trends relating to gender in nouns and pronominals are fairly arbitrary.