68 lines
5.6 KiB
Markdown
68 lines
5.6 KiB
Markdown
# Short history of the project
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<small>2021-11-25 | [@andrea](/@andrea)</small>
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We get asked that question more often recently, so I've decided to put an answer in writing 😉
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How did pronouns.page start?
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Well, it started circa two years ago, and in quite a different linguistic reality than English.
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You see, while in English referring to a person in a way that doesn't force them into a gender binary
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is basically a question of replacing a personal pronoun in its five forms (eg. they/them/their/theirs/themselves)
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and a few gendered nouns (eg. boy/girl to kid or enby), in Polish it's way more complicated.
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Even a sentence as simple as “I did” or “I'm hungry” requires a person to disclose their gender.
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Almost every person-describing noun is gendered too, and for many of them the masculine version is treated as the “default”,
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with women being shamed for using those “strange” feminine versions.
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Not only is it all complicated, but also unpopular and new. Trying to un-gender Polish is quite a linguistic revolution.
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(If you're interested in an overview (in English) of how the solutions look like, check out [zaimki.pl/english](https://zaimki.pl/english)).
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In November 2019 I stumbled upon [a blog post](https://www.przemyslenia-maniaka.pl/2019/11/maniak-marudzi-27-niebinarne-tumaczenia.html)
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in which the author criticised the Polish translation of She-Ra for ciswashing and erasing the gender of a character called Double Trouble.
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It was a constructive criticism, it included a list of ideas on how to translate a character that uses they/them into Polish
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without arbitrarily assigning them a binary gender. My brain, having always been fed with the assumption that such a thing is impossible,
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now almost exploded with joy! It's a very analytical brain, though, so it wanted to have a more structured collection
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of those ideas. To put them into grammar table, to test every word, to consider every grammatical form, to fill in every gap.
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So I wrote [a blog post of my own](https://avris.it/blog/genderneutralizacja-polszczyzny), in which I attempted to do just that.
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But I wasn't really happy with the result. My own conclusions back then were that I don't see any bright future
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for the nonbinary forms in Polish that wouldn't sound unnatural or be doomed to be wildly unpopular. Oh, how wrong I was!
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Enter [@Ausir](/@Ausir), a translator whom I've followed on Twitter and who's fascinated with how nonbinary forms get translated
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into different languages, mainly Polish. He was gathering examples from literature and publishing them in a Google Docs document
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– and they confirmed that indeed it is possible to do it in an elegant way that doesn't erase nonbinary identities.
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Around the same time [@Sybil](/@Sybil) was coming up with a solution to a similar, yet separate problem
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– how to extend the person-describing nouns into a system that also includes the grammatical neuter.
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They wanted to describe their nonbinary partner in a way that doesn't impose a binary gender on them
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– but in Polish they had no other option than to… expand the dictionaries in the name of love!
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They created [a fanpage on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/neutratywy) where they shared their proposals.
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And the three of us have joined our forces to create one bigger project: [zaimki.pl](https://zaimki.pl)
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– a website that [started very humbly](https://web.archive.org/web/20200725174439/https://zaimki.pl/),
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basically as a Polish version of [pronoun.is](https://pronoun.is/), to be extended with
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[a text corpus](https://zaimki.pl/korpus) and [a dictionary of nouns](https://zaimki.pl/neutratywy).
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I [announced it on Twitter](https://twitter.com/AvrisIT/status/1286400337465802752) on June 23<sup>rd</sup>, 2020
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and was absolutely astounded by the overwhelmingly positive response.
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The project almost immediately [attracted attention of queer media](https://queer.pl/artykul/204685/zaimkipl-strona-jezyk-polski-niebinarnosc).
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More people were helping out with creating it – and [on November 22<sup>nd</sup>, 2020 we gathered](https://twitter.com/neutratywy/status/1332403345542221827)
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together online to discuss how would such a cooperation work. We came up with [the name of the collective](/blog/why-the-name)
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and agreed on a non-hierarchical, anarcha-queer structure.
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Thanks to their hard work new features and language forms were getting developed.
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Arguably the biggest one of them being the ability to create an account and an easily sharable card
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with one's names, pronouns and liked/disliked words.
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This feature was met with enthusiasm and prompted new feature requests: can we also have such a card in English?
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So [@Ausir](/@Ausir), [@Szymon](/@Szymon) and [I](/@andrea) translated the website to English,
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researched the most popular neopronouns, looked up literature that uses it –
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and on December 5<sup>th</sup>, 2020 [we announced the start of an English version](https://twitter.com/PronounsPage/status/1335322304931393536).
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It's the only one initially created by people who use the given language as their additional one (although later it was proof-read by native-speakers too).
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For all the others we were contacted by their native-speakers who offered help preparing the content,
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while we provided the technical tools and support.
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Today, the project covers 9 languages 🤯, has almost 300 000 users 🤯, and the Polish team regularly gets invited by the media, including those mainstream 🤯.
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And that's despite it being only two years old and having been created entirely by a non-profit, non-hierarchical group of volunteer activists.
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I'm in awe in how far we've all come, and I'm eternally grateful to all the people who keep making it happen! ❤️
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