Pronouns

You owe us some extra posts. You've missed so many lately you'll have to write some more than just Fridays. Because anyone can make time to write a small post, even if the whole day was spent doing something else. Because no one does something just one thing for literally the whole day. You don't spend all your awake time sewing, even if you had to get something quickly done.
So you gotta give us extra.

And then to my today's topic.
I started thinking about this when I started to wonder if I should write Nocturne actually in English. Cause right now, as you might know, or then not, I'm writing in Finnish, mostly because I admit that my Finnish vocabulary is way better than my English one. A person simply writes better and more complex and lively in their native language.
And yet, English seems to come easier. Everything just sounds better English. A lot of things sound really stupid in Finnish.
But the biggest problem in writing in English, at least to me in this case, is pronouns.

I actually think I might have had this conversation with you already before...

The pronouns in English language are stupid.

First, they have he and she separately.
Though in this case it's Finnish that is different, because in all the other languages I know enough to know this (meaning Anglo-Saxon and the language group that derives from Latin, meaning European languages) they have gender specific single third person pronouns. And some languages like French have that also in plural. Which you know, having studied French. And all words being masculine or feminine like in all the Latin-based languages, that's just a pain. At least in English the articles rules by pronunciation. And then there's the. Having to learn and remember which article you're supposed to use with which word with no logic other than someone has once decided takes a lot of energy and is quite frankly annoying. Coming from a language that doesn't have to deal with articles at all, that seems like pointless difficulty. Since Finnish isn't a difficult language or anything.
But I'm getting off topic. The problem I have with having gender specific pronouns is not only that it's pointless, but also it makes my writing in English that much harder. You know I have three wolves on my story, and you know the identity of two of them are known to the reader from quite the beginning. You also know you never find out the identity of the third wolf. (Well, you know it, but it's the you-passive. You know. I'm still counting on you never to tell anyone who it is, since you're the only person I've told who it is.)
And that is a problem, because it means I can't, even in the wolf-scenes, refer to my third wolf with a third person pronoun. It's not a huge problem, since that wolf is a first person narrator, but I have to be very careful with what the other two are talking.
And even if I didn't have this particular problem, it's still inconvenient to have gender-specific third person pronouns. What if you want to refer to someone who's gender you don't know, like the person driving the car in front of you? Or what ever. What do you say then?
Did you know, that the Swedish people have a few months ago taken officially into use a third, gender neutral pronoun with their hon and han? It's hen. Because, you know, Sweden is a great place when it comes to this kind of stuff.
You probably already knew that, though.

Secondly, English only has one they.
Which sounds ridiculous when you say it in English, and probably to any hypothetical native English-speaking people who accidentally stumble over our blog and read this far.
The point is this: English does not have a plural for it. Or, well, they do, but it's the same as for he and she. And this isn't just in my text. In Finnish, (not in spoken Finnish, that's completely different. I've understood the difference between written and spoken Finnish is unusually big compared to other languages. Which I can agree with, with what I know about languages) in Finnish it's completely different in a text whether you use ne or he. It tells about whether the person speaking (or writing, if it's not a dialogue in a story or something) thinks of the people they're speaking of as people or as things. Like the difference of calling a person it instead of her, except in plural.
This is a problem to me in this case, because having written Nocturne in Finnish so far I've developed a clear distinction in my head about which of the characters use which pronoun when talking about the wolves, and written into English it loses a significant amount of meaning when there is only one word to use for both.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll finish my rant about stupid English pronouns here, because my hands are freezing having to type, resting on top of the computer. With my old computer it wouldn't have been a problem, because it would've nicely warmed my fingers while typing, but this one doesn't heat enough to warm even when it's on my lap instead of the table. I'm taking that as a good thing, even though it means cold fingers.

I will hear from you on Friday.
Wouldn't mind also before that, though.

~matu