Is there a gender-neutral pronoun for people in Latin?

Question

Sometimes it is preferable to leave a person's gender undisclosed and some people do not fall into the usual two gender categories. This requires some adaptations in languages that indicate gender in nouns or pronouns. In English one can use the plural "they" in the singular so as to avoid choosing between "he" and "she". In Swedish a new neutral pronoun "hen" has been introduced in addition to the masculine "han" and the feminine "hon".

I would like to know if there is a neutral choice in Latin. Using neuter (e.g. id instead of is or ea) is one option, but it makes the person in question sound inanimate. In case of a person of unknown gender Latin uses masculine, but this is not really a good option for this purpose: If I speak about a specific person, then using a masculine pronoun indicates that the person is male, whereas I wanted to make no statement about their gender.

Which Latin pronoun(s) could I use to refer to people of unspecified gender? If you suggest a new pronoun, where has it been used and how can I decline it? (I am not asking you to come up with new pronouns. I am asking if there are attested pronoun suggestions for this purpose in the Latin literature.) If you suggest using neuter pronouns for people in this case, can you provide use examples to show that this has really been done before?

Let me stress that I am looking for pronouns in the case of a specific person. As I wrote in a comment below Cerberus' answer about the neutrality of masculine pronouns: It is important that the person is specified. If someone says "If someone comes to my office, I will sing him a song", I understand that it doesn't have to be a man. But if I hear "My spouse has his own business", I assume the spouse is male.

Answer 1

It is important to distinguish between syntactic gender and semantic gender. As we all know, a word like centuria, "group of ca. 100 soldiers", is syntactically feminine, but semantically it is masculine, since the Romans had no female soldiers. A feminine word is used to describe men. Or consider the feminine word virtus "manhood", from vir "man". There is no necessary conexion between syntactic and semantic gender. Cf. German das Mädchen "the girl" (neuter), Dutch het meisje "the girl" (neuter).

As you say, in Latin the masculine gender is used if you want to indicate that you are talking about a person of unknown gender. It is the same in many Indo-European languages (all that I know, at least), and that's probably why no neutral pronouns for people are used: the reader or listener knows that you are not actually indicating that this unknown person should be masculine, you're just applying the neutral use of the pronoun. So you could say that e.g. is really is the neutral pronoun for people in Latin, in addition to its being the masculine pronoun. A word can have two different senses, after all.

So in case you want to talk about someone without revealing his gender, you can just use masculine pronouns and adjectives, and nobody will know!

Answer 2

I am a language teacher, but an avid Latin fan for many years.

I could give you a lot of talk one way or another, but I will just give a suggestion.

The closest thing to an epicene pronoun of any sort is the animate interrogative quis?, as it has only an animate/inanimate distinction.

However, I would offer «isquis» based on 'quisquis' the relative/interrogative pronoun, but with some kitbashing.

SINGULAR

NOM_____GEN_____DAT_____ACC_____ABL_____VOC
isquis__iscujus_____iscui_____emquem___iscui____isquis

PLURAL

NOM_____GEN_______DAT_______ACC________ABL________VOC
esques___umquum_____isquibus_____esques___isquibus____esques

Note: *icui (Orig. DAT.SG cuicui) will do duty for both DAT.SG and ABL.SG . **esques (Orig. ACC.PL *quesques) will do duty for both NOM.PL & ACC.PL .

Again, just by way of suggestion. And 3rd decl. ADJs and PRS.PTCPs would match pretty easily in the M/F non distinction.

Have no idea what to do with 3-termination ADJs like bonus/a/um, or PFT.PASS.PTCPs, GRDVs…(?¿)

Maybe fall back on the default masculine gender in those cases? Maybe use synonyms from 3rd decl. ADJs instead (¿?)

Just some thoughts

Answer 3

Start by referring to the individual with a noun (like persona) that has a grammatical gender that does not depend on their natural gender. (I wouldn't use homo because that takes natural gender at least in some eras of Latin.) Then all pronouns you subsequently use show concordance with the grammatical gender of the noun, not the natural gender of the person, so they are gender-neutral in the sense I think you care about (i.e., unrelated to natural gender).

Answer 4

Given the general statūs (plural) of women in the ancient world, I think you're going to have to invent something epicene, as in Swedish hen. (Many folks in English have started using ze as a nominative, hir as a genitive, and mer as an objective or, alternatively, hu, hus, and hum. In fact, historically English had two epicene pronouns, ou and a, but nobody seems interested in reviving them. Thon was very popular for a while, starting in the nineteenth century, but seems to have died out.)

As far as I know, nobody has come up with syntactically epicene pronouns for Latin (the current pronouns, as @Cerberus says, are already semantically epicene). If you want new words I propose therefore es to go along with is, ea, id, hec with hic, hæc, hoc, and illed with ille, illa, illud. I have however no strong attachment to these.

Perhaps declensions would be (in the order nom, gen, dat, acc, abl):

es, es, e, em, e

hec, hes, he, hem, he

illed, illes, illu, illem, illu

I find these kind of hideous, though, and, to be honest, if you start using them, I'm far more likely to be confused than to understand what you're saying. Perhaps it would be easier then simply to decide always to use ea, hæc, and illa, and make it clear in other ways that you intend these pronouns epicenically. (Malum eæ dabo, quæ veniat. Si Marcus venit, exempli gratia, malum dabo.)

Answer 5

Here is a resource on inclusive gender for use of Latin today. LupercalLegit hosts it and the National Committee for Latin and Greek repost it in their DEI Resources with permission. https://www.lupercallegit.org/post/a-style-guide-for-gender-inclusivity-in-the-latin-language. The NCLG pages begin here: https://sites.google.com/view/nclgdeiresources/home-nclg-dei-resources. The main site is www.promotelatin.org

Answer 6

Going along with their proposal for nonbinary noun and adjective declension, Lupercal's style guide proposes a new set of pronoun declensions for referring to nonbinary people or people of unspecified gender.

The general idea is the same as for nouns and adjectives: using fifth-declension endings as a neutral option. These are used only when the form of the pronoun would otherwise be explicitly gendered (ejus looks the same in the masculine and feminine, for example, so there's no need to change it) and are attached directly to the stem of the pronoun.

For a few examples, hēs is used in place of hic or haec, ēs for is or ea, quēsdam for quīdam or quaedam. (These forms go along with the other proposal for nouns and adjectives, so you would likewise have hēs magistrēs bonēs in place of hic magister bonus or haec magistra bona.)

This proposal is relatively new (being published within the last year), so I haven't seen it used much in the wild, but it has the backing of groups like Trans in Classics and the National Committee for Latin and Greek.