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   of nothing (apropos@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Friday, 04-Apr-2025 11:07:29 JST of nothing
   Robert Heinlein had some Venusian aliens who had a cultural taboo about being seen while eating. Even when briefly tasting something, the polite thing to do was to turn away from other people to do so. A simple, amusing reflection of human taboos.
   
   But nowhere in science fiction is there a taboo like the modern one about using language that suggests that humans come in male and female, and that these form a breeding pair, and actually that this is the norm for the animal kingdom. Nowhere in science fiction are there Type A and Type B in the character creator, or 'theyglish', or circumlocutions like
   >In the beginning, God created a person. And then to give that person a significant other to start a polycule with, God created another person.
   What could even be this dumb? Perhaps an alien species with a cultural taboo about distinguishing light from darkness.
   >In the beginning, God separated different intensities of shadow - though all remained equal. And God said "let there be BOTH darkness AND light"
   where it's a severe faux pas to ask if it shouldn't be "light and darkness". You have to change the order or it's light supremacism, OK?
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     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Friday, 04-Apr-2025 11:08:13 JST pistolero

     in reply to
     @apropos
     
     >In the beginning, God created a person. And then to give that person a significant other to start a polycule with, God created another person.
     
     Is this...you wrote this, right? You didn't take this from some actual translation effort that someone undertook?
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     of nothing (apropos@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Friday, 04-Apr-2025 11:13:00 JST of nothing

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     >having a pleasant conversation at dinner
     >the power goes out
     >the room is plunged intro darkness
     >a little boy complains, "mommy, I can't see, it's TOO DARK"
     >the boy is quickly shushed
     >there is awkward laughter
     >conversation continues as is nothing is wrong at all
     >a man loudly remarks that he likes how the room looks now, actually, perhaps a little more than a few minutes ago, although there's not much different really, it's all the same isn't it?
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     of nothing (apropos@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Friday, 04-Apr-2025 11:14:26 JST of nothing

     in reply to

     • pistolero
     @p There's a lot of carefully sex-ambiguous language in CJK translations that's somewhat similar to it, but I wrote that, and I haven't seen someone mangle the Bible like that.
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     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Friday, 04-Apr-2025 11:17:50 JST pistolero

     in reply to
     @apropos
     
     > There's a lot of carefully sex-ambiguous language in CJK translations that's somewhat similar to it,
     
     Well, yeah, as an artifact, not Bowdlerization, right? It's been a minute but I don't think you could do a gender-neutral translation of "God saw that it wasn't good for man to be alone" and the subsequent bits.
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     of nothing (apropos@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Friday, 04-Apr-2025 12:01:29 JST of nothing

     in reply to

     • pistolero
     @p not an honest translation, but there have been edits like the Jefferson Bible. I think a gender-neutral Bible could happen.
     The CJK motivations can vary:
     a. it's an honest attempt to preserve some deliberately ambiguity that's easy in the original but awkward in English. A shadowy figure arrives and observes the protagonist, and even though in the next chapter it's revealed that the shadowy figure is a woman, you wouldn't know until then and the translator doesn't want to spoil that with a bunch of pronouns.
     b. it's a formulaic preservation of incidental ambiguity. The shadowy figure is a young woman talking to the protagonist and not disguising her voice in any way, so the protagonist should immediately know her sex, but the original language doesn't make it clear for a few paragraphs
     c. the translator is delighted to use a bunch of 'they' pronouns and the original language can't be blamed for it. This can be the case with sexless beings like spirits, or a pet cat where nobody cares about its sex, or some gender-bending character like the angel from Interspeces Reviewers who is regarded as a man by everyone in the story, but referred to in narration as 'they' because the translator has some extra information.
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     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Friday, 04-Apr-2025 12:04:47 JST pistolero

     in reply to
     @apropos
     
     > a. it's an honest attempt to preserve some deliberately ambiguity that's easy in the original but awkward in English.
     
     Yeah, I figure, like, translators sometimes use other translations as a reference, but the English translation probably doesn't figure in beyond that.
     
     > or a pet cat
     
     Never mentioned in the Bible. No cats in there. (Egypt was all fans of cats, they couldn't. So there are lions and tigers but no pet cats.)