Much Ado About "He" and "She"
According to an Independent.co.uk article, Oxford University students are told to use the (new?) gender sensitive pronoun "ze" instead of the traditional "he" and "she".
This is not a problem at all for Filipinos because we have long been used to this concept already. Unlike in the English language, our languages such as Filipino/Tagalog have been using gender sensitive singular third person pronouns such as "kanya" for "her" and "him" and "siya" for "he" or "her".
I guess that's the beauty of our local languages. It shows our ancestors might have had a better understanding of gender roles as reflected in language. This can also show that contrary to what many people think, our languages are not inferior to foreign languages such as English.
Come to think of it, this might even be the reason why Filipinos struggle with the prepositions "his", "her", "he" and "him" when speaking. Notice how Filipinos make this common mistake when speaking? It's probably because in our local languages our minds are spared from deciding which gender sensitive pronoun to use -- he or she? For us, it's an automatic "siya".
On the contrary, Filipinos struggle when we write or speak and we want to refer to a singular pronoun that refers to either a male or a female. The English language forces us with the only neutral options "they" or "them". We then have a problem of number -- they and them are plural forms, whereas our local languages have the convenient likes of "siya", "niya" and "kanya", which are all in the singular form.
We then find ourselves in classrooms correcting students with "he" everytime they meant "she" or vice versa. If your a teacher in the Philippines you will encounter this scenario almost every day.
So, awkard and weird as the introduction of "ze" is, to many Filipinos, it may not be a problem at all. We knew it all along.
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