Re: Yo

On Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:15:31 GMT, Fred Springer
<fred.springer@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Interesting article in this week's New Scientist, about the emergence
among Baltimore teenagers of a non-gender-specific third person pronoun.
Here are some extracts from it:

Elaine Stotko...is a linguistics expert at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, Maryland She was fascinated when in 2004 a teacher in her
Linguistics for Teachers class asked, "Have you ever heard kids using
'yo' when they mean he or she?"

About half the teachers taking the course had also heard "yo" used in
this way, leading Stotko and Margaret Troyer (one of the teachers) to
research this development, which they have now documented in the
linguistics journal American Speech.

They found that from at least 2004 to the present day, middle-school and
high-school students in Baltimore have been using "yo" as a
gender-neutral personal pronoun in sentences such as: "Yo put his foot
up" and "Yo looks like a freak".

Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says the emergence of "yo" is
remarkable because it seems to be a spontaneous grass-roots phenomenon.
"Most of the gender-neutral pronouns are artificial coinages that are
then marketed - unsuccessfully - to users," he says.

Any aue readers come across this one? Incidentally, 'Yo put *his* foot
up' looks self-defeating in this context. Shouldn't it be 'yos'?

It's only self-defeating if it has the purpose of avoiding gender
specificity. Maybe it just happens to be neuter.
--
John
.

Relevant Pages

  • Yo
    ... Interesting article in this week's New Scientist, about the emergence among Baltimore teenagers of a non-gender-specific third person pronoun. ... Elaine Stotko...is a linguistics expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland She was fascinated when in 2004 a teacher in her Linguistics for Teachers class asked, "Have you ever heard kids using 'yo' when they mean he or she?" ... About half the teachers taking the course had also heard "yo" used in this way, leading Stotko and Margaret Troyer to research this development, which they have now documented in the linguistics journal American Speech. ... They found that from at least 2004 to the present day, middle-school and high-school students in Baltimore have been using "yo" as a gender-neutral personal pronoun in sentences such as: "Yo put his foot up" and "Yo looks like a freak". ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: Yo
    ... among Baltimore teenagers of a non-gender-specific third person pronoun. ... Linguistics for Teachers class asked, "Have you ever heard kids using ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: the case of the conjoined NP
    ... This is why English speaking children everywhere say 'Me and Sam went home' and the like, until parents or teachers demand that they say 'Sam and went home'. ... The point was that the pronoun was embedded in some sort of complex phrase that served as the subject NP. ... His proposed rule for English was that the subject forms were used only when the pronoun was the subject of a verb in the same domain. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Fascinating book ...
    ... > You're probably right about the pronoun thing, but I wonder if calling ... The word '先生' is used not only for teachers, but also for medical doctors, ... novel writers, etc. So if you mean 'teacher' by '先生', you'll say: ...
    (sci.lang.japan)
  • plural
    ... how you can tell in arabic:my teachers -mu&allimiyya? ... the rool for the adding of posses. ... pronoun for 1 sing. ...
    (sci.lang)