sure you are, once they’ve crinkled their way down past your bosom(s).

hurray?

(hurray?)

i just didn’t know to what you referred, is all.

“their self” made me smile before i saw your addendum, though.  because it was correct, of course, while my relatives here, for instance, would use it thus: “theirself”, which is nonsensical unless there really is a southern hive mind, but nonetheless is an actual colloquialism, like y’all, here.  my cousin once actually asked me what part of speech “hisself” was; i believe i answered that it was the foot.  i probably should have said idiomatic, though, that would have gotten her.

their self would be correctly posessive, the self belonging to the person(s) in question, two words; theirself would be just an ignorant misuse of the formulation himself or herself.  as for why not themself (which you already know, i realize and are just being controvesial, keiths) them is objective plural and self is singular, is why.  for that matter, i suppose their self is allowed only to bridge the gender gap crated by his self or her self (as opposed to hisself, etc., op. cit.)

i go now.

except there really aren’t any non-gendered words, but let’s not go there.  you get to that place that asks why all farmers and sailors are women and why isn’t there such a thing as a professor emerita, don’t do it.  i’ve always used one a lot, myself (oneself) but then i do end up frequently sounding not unlike dorothy sayers or some such. or that frobisher character in the audible version of Cloud Atlas, have you heard that?  one finds it most amusing.

And every year they don’t see the point.

Chinese (spoken) uses a gender-neutral he/she/it pronoun.  While it solves the neutrality problem when you need such neutrality, the rest of the time you have a 66%-reduced chance of having any clue about who- or what-the-fuck they’re talking about.

I know next to nothing about the history of languages and their formations, so am perfectly comfortable asking dumb questions or wondering out loud.

I wonder how much of any given language’s development is tied to that particular culture’s philosophical and/or religious views regarding the person as an individual, rather than as a small, insignificant part of a march larger whole.  In the Chinese, for example, might the exclusion of gender simply be a statement regarding importance - in this case, that the events taking place are more important than the participants of those events?

So using this sort of reasoning, the gender-based words would be a culture’s attempt to attach importance to things and individuals, and in some way, a verbal or written way of elevating status.  Pronouns take on gender, further defining the individual.  I might argue that the further extension of this “importance-defining” would be the attachment of titles to names, such as Dr. or Judge.

Further, I see that while I don’t know Chinese, I understand your example perfectly.  Tom spotted a bird, woofed, the dog expressed his appreciation for the attractiveness of the bird, and Susie, apparently very hungry, thought about eating the bird.

Scrine; it’s like a recepticle for the chaos storm of words.

I got told a good answer to the ‘chicken and egg, which came first?’ question:  dinosaurs. 

However, I can’t quite figure out how dinosaurs have caused the culturally differing gender influences in language.

I knew I could trust you to make of sense of this for me.

Maybe the reason dinosaurs (supposedly) became extinct is because they had a violent and bloody war on the use of non-gender specific terminology.