Have you struggled from time to time with trying to avoid making gender reference in English - when you don't want people to know? Well, the Swedes have found a solution for the problem - in Swedish.
In Swedish, "han" means he and "hon" means she. Now "hen" can be used when the gender is unknown, the hen is neither a han nor a hon (or is in transition), or the writer thinks that gender is irrelevant. "It's quite simple," Sven-Goran Malmgren, the (male, it turns out) editor, said yesterday. "It is a word which is in use and without a doubt fills a function."
It's not a new issue in English - attempts have been made since the mid-19th century to do something similar: someone came up with "ne", "nis", "nir" and "hiser" - all to get over the gender problem.
To read more about the gender problem and pronouns in Swedish and English, then read this article printed in the Independent (18 April 2015).
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