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How should the pronoun "ou" be pronounced?
Like "oh" 14%  14%  [ 1 ]
Like "ooh" 57%  57%  [ 4 ]
Other (please specify in your post) 29%  29%  [ 2 ]
Total votes : 7

beneficii
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21 Aug 2016, 4:14 am

As luck would have ou, English has long flirted with gender-neutral pronouns. Ou's reported that in the 14th century, there was a dialectal pronoun still used today written "ou", which took the place of "he", "she", and "it", all of them. Of course, conservatives will think re-introducing this pronoun would be tantamount to worshiping the devil ouself.

I'd be happy to see anyone else try and take a crack at this pronoun in ou post.


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21 Aug 2016, 7:30 am

It is "you" without the "Y", so it should sound like "ooh".


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21 Aug 2016, 9:16 pm

i think it should be pronounced like "ow", because it hurts my ears :lol:


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21 Aug 2016, 9:29 pm

I've never heard of "ou". People generally use "they" as a singular gender-neutral pronoun, even though it's usually plural. I personally don't see anything wrong with using "it" as a gender neutral pronoun, but everyone seems to think of it as objectification when used to refer to a person.



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21 Aug 2016, 10:09 pm

Chaucerian era word - Wight - originally described a living human being, that'd be fun to reinstate.



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22 Aug 2016, 12:27 pm

Like "oo"----rhymes with too.













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23 Aug 2016, 2:56 pm

Never heard of "ou" before.

It its a truncated version of "you" then it would be "oo" (rhymes with "boo").

But if its a truncated version of "thou" then it would be "ow".

Either way it would not even make sense as a word because both "you" and "thou" are second person pronouns.

A gender neutral equivalent to the two third person singular pronouns "he" and "she" would be "ee" ,or "ea" (just the long 'e' sound).



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25 Aug 2016, 11:37 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
Never heard of "ou" before.

It its a truncated version of "you" then it would be "oo" (rhymes with "boo").

But if its a truncated version of "thou" then it would be "ow".

:lol: I was thinking either those or like the French word eau. I don't really mean to offend, but I don't get why we need 1000 pronouns. It confuses me to no end and these made up ones confuse me even more. I could never remember who's a ze/zer/zim or whatever.


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26 Aug 2016, 4:22 am

The_Dark_Citadel wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
Never heard of "ou" before.

It its a truncated version of "you" then it would be "oo" (rhymes with "boo").

But if its a truncated version of "thou" then it would be "ow".

:lol: I was thinking either those or like the French word eau. I don't really mean to offend, but I don't get why we need 1000 pronouns. It confuses me to no end and these made up ones confuse me even more. I could never remember who's a ze/zer/zim or whatever.


Where it's used, "ou" replaces he, she, and it, so it takes us from 3 3rd person singular pronouns down to 1.


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