Farsi’s gender-neutral pronoun enables ambiguities English cannot express

Evidence

Arash: That’s a really good point. Farsi is an interesting language. Like, have you all ever noticed that when we say “he” or “she,” we don’t distinguish between genders [in pronouns] in Farsi? So if you look at somebody like Hafez, all of these moments in which he’s just playing with your mind. He’s talking about love. You don’t know if he’s talking about a girl, you don’t know if he’s talking about his mom, you don’t know if he’s talking about God, and he’s saying that he loves Oo [gender-neutral pronoun] right? But you don’t know who Oo is, and he’s using the language in order to make that happen. So Farsi allows you to do certain things with language that English may not. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 467

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how the pronoun ‘Oo’ works and its poetic function in Farsi.
• XREF: connects to: Grammatical gender assignment is arbitrary yet skews feminine for abstractions