At that time, Liu Bannong, an important writer, famous poet and linguist in the early period of China's New Culture Movement, first put forward the word "she" to refer to the third-person woman.
"She" is a common personal pronoun in modern Chinese, especially the woman of a third party. This word existed in ancient China, pronounced jiě. It was not until the 1920s, with the rise of the feminist movement, that the sound tā appeared.
At that time, the word "she" was an uncommon word, so Liu Bannong thought he had created the word "she", but it wasn't! Before modern times, there was no tradition in China to distinguish between male, female and third person singular pronouns. For thousands of years, no one seems to feel the need to make this distinction. However, with the rise of the vernacular movement and the spread of western languages, especially English, this problem has gradually emerged and stood out.
In ancient Chinese, the third person as the object was represented by the word "zhi". Later, the vernacular rose, and the word "He", as a third-person pronoun, can be used to refer to men, women and anything.
Around the May 4th Movement, some literary works also used the word "Yi" to refer to women, such as Lu Xun's early works. 19 18 Liu Bannong, an important writer, famous poet and linguist in the early days of the New Culture Movement in China, was the first to put forward the word "she" to refer to the third-person woman. Sensational throughout the country. As soon as this phenomenon appeared, it was attacked and opposed by feudal conservative forces, but it was quickly recognized and praised by the people and widely used. Various dictionaries also include this word (because it is an uncommon word, it is not included in small dictionaries). ), it became a sensational news in the cultural circles at that time.
There is no word translated relative to the English word "she" in Chinese, so when translating "she" at first, it is often translated into "other woman" and "that woman". Because "she" is a common word, it often leads to a long list of "other women" and "that woman", which looks and reads awkward. Later, people borrowed the word "one" from Wu dialect to express the third person singular of women, which became a trend in the late Qing Dynasty and around the May 4th Movement. In the works of modern writers such as Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren, the word "clothes" is used to refer specifically to women.
As early as 19 17, Liu Bannong put forward the suggestion of using the word "she" to correspond to "she". But before 1920, although he had this informal proposal, he did not publish an article clearly stating his views. However, Zhou Zuoren wrote an article in New Youth 19 18 published on August 5th, and mentioned Liu Bannong's suggestion: "The third person pronoun in China has no gender distinction, which is inconvenient. Semi-peasants created the words' she' and' he'. " However, Zhou Zuoren believes that this matter needs to be discussed for a long time. The reason is that "there is no one in the printing house, and it is difficult to make a new casting". Zhou himself is still willing to use the word "Yi" that has been used all the time.