Interesting that you experienced such a strong aversion to it.
“I find both the written form and spoken form distasteful for some reason. It feels gutteral. And the similarity to “it” seems dehumanizing. Trying to put my finger on it, I think it’s not in the range of words that could have been organically formed for that purpose; it feels semantically out of place.”
Couldn’t this be just lack of habituation to it? I mean, after 6 months living in Utland would you still care?
Regarding being guttural, it doesn’t go against my aesthetics, English could be much more guttural and I wouldn’t mind. If it is a problem, however, it seems like a problem of habituation, because there are much more guttural phonemes out there which people don’t mind using it if it’s part of their language.
Regarding ‘ut’ being dehumanizing:
1) I can’t see how it is dehumanizing if it is explicitly for humans and not for things. Maybe as a first impression, yes, but once you heard ‘ut’ referring to humans 1000 times and never referring to things, I believe your mind would adjust.
2) My first idea was much more “dehumanizing”; it was just using ‘it’ itself. I am Brazilian, and in Brazilian Portuguese, the distinction between people and things that exists in English doesn’t exist. We refer to things with ‘he’ and ‘she’, just as we do with people. Since people are accustomed to it, no one cares. So, I thought ‘it’ could be used to solve the problem of referring to people of unspecified gender in the singular in English. But, quickly I realized that I didn’t need to forgo the differentiation between people and things, I just needed to modify ‘it’ to be a unique pronoun that would refer only to people, hence ‘ut’.
All that being said, you still had what seems like a very negative reaction to it, which signals that other people may also be reluctant and widespread adoption problematic. Which I realized seems to be the case given the number of downvotes to the post.
Thanks for the comment.
Interesting that you experienced such a strong aversion to it.
“I find both the written form and spoken form distasteful for some reason. It feels gutteral. And the similarity to “it” seems dehumanizing. Trying to put my finger on it, I think it’s not in the range of words that could have been organically formed for that purpose; it feels semantically out of place.”
Couldn’t this be just lack of habituation to it?
I mean, after 6 months living in Utland would you still care?
Regarding being guttural, it doesn’t go against my aesthetics, English could be much more guttural and I wouldn’t mind. If it is a problem, however, it seems like a problem of habituation, because there are much more guttural phonemes out there which people don’t mind using it if it’s part of their language.
Regarding ‘ut’ being dehumanizing:
1) I can’t see how it is dehumanizing if it is explicitly for humans and not for things. Maybe as a first impression, yes, but once you heard ‘ut’ referring to humans 1000 times and never referring to things, I believe your mind would adjust.
2) My first idea was much more “dehumanizing”; it was just using ‘it’ itself. I am Brazilian, and in Brazilian Portuguese, the distinction between people and things that exists in English doesn’t exist. We refer to things with ‘he’ and ‘she’, just as we do with people. Since people are accustomed to it, no one cares. So, I thought ‘it’ could be used to solve the problem of referring to people of unspecified gender in the singular in English. But, quickly I realized that I didn’t need to forgo the differentiation between people and things, I just needed to modify ‘it’ to be a unique pronoun that would refer only to people, hence ‘ut’.
All that being said, you still had what seems like a very negative reaction to it, which signals that other people may also be reluctant and widespread adoption problematic.
Which I realized seems to be the case given the number of downvotes to the post.