Using 他 for 她

[renzhe]

I tried searching, but nothing promising came up.

I've noticed Lu Xun use 他 to refer to female characters in his short story "Medicine". At first I thought it was a conversion error of some sort, but then I found Xiaoma Cidian list 他 as a variant of 她 (and vice versa), as can be seen here. It's very easy to see in the fourth chapter, there are only two women mentioned at the beginning, referred to as "他".

Is this possible, or am I just really confused? If it is possible, is it common? In certain literature styles maybe? Author's license?

It confused the hell out of me. I had to reread several times, as I was convinced that I missed a male character somewhere and went looking for him, but there were none.

[skylee]

Look at it this way, 他 can be used for both male and female, and 她 is used for female only. Some people do not distinguish the two, but some people prefer to use 她 for female. When I was a kid I was taught to use 他, 她, 它 (牠 was not encouraged). AFAIK, in simplified Chinese 她 is not used (correct me if I am wrong).

Also take a look at the definitions of an older dictionary -

他

[modn. var. 他 (he) 她 (she) and 牠 (it) are new, but not gen., except 她]

(2) He, she, it (third person in modn. Chinese--cf. 彼，其，之 in AC): 他們 [ta1men0], they; (source)

她

She (an accepted modn. word, nonexistent in LL or AC;

the pronunciation [yi1] is purely theoretical, not current): 她們 female they;

他或她們 a modern pedantic, redundant circumlocution trying to indicate “they, male and female.” (source)

Edited October 12, 2008 at 12:52 AM by skylee

[imron]

AFAIK, in simplified Chinese 她 is not used (correct me if I am wrong).

她 is regularly used in simplified Chinese, 妳 however is rarely used.

[renzhe]

Thanks. That clears it up.

EDIT: Skylee's addition below also makes sense. "Medicine" was written in 1919. If 她 only started getting widely used after the May 4th movement, then it is not unusual that Lu Xun would use 他 back then.

[skylee]

My Xiandai Hanyu Cidian also has this remark -

注意： “五四"以前”他“兼稱男性、女性以及一切事物。現代書面語裏，”他“一般只用來稱男性。但是在性別不明或沒有區分的必要時，”他“只是泛指，不分男性和女性。

[roddy]

Topic bump time (couldn't find anything more recent and relevant, do point me in the right direction if I missed something. I have a feeling it has come up before). 
 
Just got this from China Mobile: 
在您发出邮件时，以下邮箱尚未激活。我们已经发送短信通知Ta激活邮箱，查阅您的邮件。

 

My angry red highlighting. This is ugly, is it common? Even the capitalisation is wrong. 

[lingo-ling]

Female ta is a relatively new word, so older modern literature may not feature it. In any case, I see the male and female ta confused all the time by careless writers.

[Yorin]

Before I started learning Chinese, a Chinese friend of mine would always confuse the heck out of me, constantly mixing up "she" and "he" when talking in English. At the time I was thinking "What the hell, why can't you ever get it straight?!" 

[Lu]

我们已经发送短信通知Ta激活邮箱，查阅您的邮件。

My angry red highlighting. This is ugly, is it common? Even the capitalisation is wrong.

I've seen an advertisement in the metro at some point, using 'ta*' and explaining *他/她. It's nice they try to be inclusive, but imo it's both clumsy and ugly.

Really, developing a female 她 by itself was not a good choice. Should have just stuck with 人字旁 他 for all humans, or invented a 男也 to go with 她 (and use 他 for when it's not specifically male or female).

And it's not even that hard to avoid. In your example, they could just write 'the receipient' or something, no need for 'Ta'.

[Hofmann]

Creating 她 and repurposing 它 and 妳 was a mistake. I purposefully avoid using them.

[Nathan Mao]

@roddy...I don't suppose you were attempting to contact a Teaching Assistant?

[tooironic]

In light of the above discussion, you may find Covert Sexism in Mandarin Chinese by David Moser interesting.

[lakers4sho]

他 used to be gender neutral until Westerners came to China and complained about it.

 

lakers4sho

[Lu]

她 has not been invented by Westerners. One Chinese language reformer came up with 男也 to be used next to 她, and it wasn't Westerners who felt that there was no need for a character to denote men, since of course the 人字旁 already implied it was a person = a man. Chinese can be plenty sexist without Westerners pointing it out.

[xiaokaka]

From the ABC Dictionary in Wenlin:

 

"73   她 [tā] she, her  [jiě] [chí]

她 ²tā {A} pr. she (neologism for ¹tā)

From 女 (nǚ) ‘woman’ and 也 (yě ‘also’). The character 她 used to be a variant of 姐 jiě ‘sister’. In modern times 她 was borrowed as a substitute for 他 tā ‘he, she, it’, for the specific meaning ‘she’. The modern use of three characters for 她 tā ‘she’, 他 tā ‘he’, and 它 tā ‘it’ has no counterpart in the spoken language, where there is only one word tā. For this reason, when Chinese speakers learn English, they often forget to differentiate between ‘he’ and ‘she’. (In some fántǐzì writings, two additional characters are used for the word tā: 牠, for animals, and 祂, for God.)"

 

So the character itself is old but the use as a female variant for 他 (which used to be gender neutral) with the prononciation tā is relatively new. 

 

From http://baike.baidu.com/subview/8655/6279580.htm:

 

“她”是现代汉语里常用的一个人称代词，专指第三者的女性，我国古代已有这个字，读作jiě 。只是到了20世纪20年代女权运动的兴起，才出现了tā这个音。

当时这个”她“字属于生僻字，故刘半农以为自己创造了”她“字，其实不然！

近代以前，中国本无区分男、女和第三人称单数代词的传统。几千年来，似乎无人觉得有作此区分的必要。但随阒白话文运动的兴起，西方语言特别是英语的东渐，这一问题就逐渐出现和凸显出来。

在古文里，作宾语的第三人称用“之”字表示。后来白话文兴起，用“他”字做第三人称代词，可以代男性，也可以代女性及一切事物。

“五四运动”前后，有的文学作品也用“伊”字来指女性，如鲁迅早期作品中就是如此。1918年，我国新文化运动初期重要作家、著名诗人和语言学家刘半农在北大任教时，第一个提出用“她”字指代第三人称女性。一时轰动全国。这种现象一出现，就遭到封建保守势力的攻击和反对，但却很快得到人民群众的承认、称赞，并被广泛使用，各种字典也都收录了这个字（因为其本身属生僻字，所以小字典原没有收录。），此事在当时文化界成为轰动一时的新闻。

汉语中没有字与英语“She”相对译，因此最初翻译“She“时，常译成“他女”、“那女的”。由于“她”是常用词，往往造成成篇累牍的“他女”“那女的”，看上去和读起来都感觉十分别扭。后来人们又借用吴方言中的“伊”来专门代表女性第三人称单数，并在晚清和“五四”前后成为一种趋势。像鲁迅、周作人等现代作家的作品中，就惯用“伊”字来专指女性。

早在1917年，刘半农就提出了用“她”字以对应“She”的建议，不过，在1920年以前，他虽有此非正式的提议，却并没有发表文章明确阐述有关见解。倒是周作人于1918年8月5日出版的《新青年》上撰文，提及了刘半农的这个建议：“中国第三人称代名词没有性的分别，狠觉不便。半农创造‘她’ 字和 ‘他’ 字并用。”但周作人以“印刷所里没有，新铸许多也为难”等理由认为此事还需从长计议，而周本人也仍然乐于使用已经习用的“伊”字。

[Hofmann]

Did not know 她 was an old character. Thanks.

[Demonic_Duck]

I always think it's weird that languages classify people based on their gender as if it's the most relevant characteristic by which to do so. Many transgender people I know are very vocal about their right to be called by whichever gender pronoun they choose (including "zie" and "per" and all that weirdness), but it strikes me that what they should really be advocating is removing gender specificity from this aspect of language altogether. I guess this would be more difficult with English, where the only commonly-used gender-neutral option is "they" - which also gets rid of the much more useful distinction of singular and plural.

Though in Chinese this feature may be more recent than in Romance/Germanic languages etc., it still seems to be considered "incorrect" to use "他" for "她" in a modern setting (I know I get called out on it myself when I'm not careful with my character selection whilst texting).

I've definitely seen "Ta" used before, for instance on Baidu music ("播放 Ta 的热门歌曲"). In this case it's referring to a predefined person, the gender of whom will be known to users, but isn't known to the website.

Anyway, I agree that 她 (along with 妳) is unnecessary and implicitly sexist, but I'll continue to use it until people stop "correcting" my texts.

[MeiMay]

她 wasn't invented recently... written language and spoken language are different and 她 feels natural to written language. In spoken language you can differentiate between different people with your eyes, hands and body. In writing you don't have these aids. 他/她 can be make it clearer who is being referred to without the need to make the sentence more complicated. gender is an important part of being human. people are born as different genders and brought up as different genders. everything in a society is tied to gender, it's only natural language is as well. even if society changed completely and there would be no difference between the roles of men and women biology wouldn't change. even a total change of society would be a surface change, babies would still be carried by women and so on. then people would be confused because they wouldn't know what to think about the differences. gender roles are good and useful. they tell you what to think and how to act so there is no confusion.

[Lu]

Actually it's nice that in Chinese you can talk about a tā even when you don't know that person's gender. You can have an in-dept discussion with your friend about the friend's lǎobǎn and the various good or bad things that tā does, and you can come out of that conversation not having a clue whether the 老板 is a 他 or a 她, and indeed you can have many more of such conversations with your friend and only find out the gender of the boss when you meet them (or ask). Gender is an important aspect of who people are, but you don't always need it when discussing those people.

[MeiMay]

Lu: I totally agree, I didn't say it's the most important thing about a person and you have to know it up front. I hope that's not the impression my post gave you. I also think it's great about the Chinese language that you can talk about 他 without knowing the gender of the person. That's one of the drawbacks in English as your sentences quickly start sounding bad when talking about a person whose gender neither of you knows. you can only say "they" and "their" so many times.