an fear breac

"There's been a flurry of news articles and weblog posts over the past few days about the development of a new gender-neutral pronoun in Baltimore."

So begins an entry posted in the University of Pennsylvania Language Log  by Mark Liberman on January 7, 2008.

It appears that a number of students in Baltimore have been using the word "yo" as a gender-neutral pronoun, i.e. the word "yo" is being used in place of "he" and "she".  Mark Liberman's log entry is quite comprehensive, so I'll write no more about the story here.

I must say, I wasn't particularly enamoured with the word when I first heard it, however I can say that it's grown on me slightly in the meantime. I still have some reservations about the use of "yo". It would be nice if a new gender-neutral pronoun could be "language-neutral" as well, i.e. could be incorporated into many languages with equal facility in each language. However, linguistic innovation does not proceed via "committee design" and if a new personal pronoun has somehow conjured itself up spontaneously, "out of the ether" as it were, it is very significant indeed. I am in dire need of a gender-neutral pronoun, so maybe I'll adopt it on this web-site and see how it goes: -

The tantric guru is more a transmitter than a teacher.
Yo's method of teaching is very subtle and refined.