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Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

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Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#111

Post by jpmattia »

dang wrote: post #46
mhurron wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author would have done well to include several examples, and they doesn't include any examples. There's your example.

I think jpmattia was joking. But it's fascinating how, when someone mistakenly thinks that it's a new proposed rule and tries to apply it, they frequently come up with an awkward overcorrection, when they're almost certainly already using it naturally in their own speech without noticing. If anyone wants examples there are 500 years' worth here: https://web.archive.org/web/20150328135337/http://www.crossm... . And as…

> I think jpmattia was joking.

Guilty as charged, your honor.

> But it's fascinating how, when someone mistakenly thinks that it's a new proposed rule and tries to apply it, they frequently come up with an awkward overcorrection

I'd note that there is a great deal of verbiage about grammar rules requiring rewrite to allow singular they . For example: A foreign speaker would be well within bounds to look at the first google hit for "define are" [1] :

  are1
  är,ər/
  2nd person singular present and 1st, 2nd, 3rd person plural present of be.
Google should note that "are" is also 3rd person singular present, consistent with 500 years of usage. But we also have to point out that singular "are" is disallowed in cases other than they, and we can't even add a gender-specific conjugation, since the neuter "it" is still not paired with "are".

Fortunately, rules in language are not subject to mathematical rigor, and people and authors and poets (and smartasses) are given free license to use language in any way that facilitates communication.

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#112

Post by dragonwriter »

mitchty wrote: post #106
gyardley wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty close to how I, as a native English speaker, feel about gendered inanimate objects. I have no idea why so many other languages force you to stick a gender on something without any genitals. I would've preferred not to have to learn that something as simple as 'milk' is feminine in Spanish, masculine in Italian, and neuter in Russian - that hunk of my brain could surely be put to better use.

The first thing you need to do is realize that grammatical gender has nothing to do with actual gender or lack thereof. Unless you really think a turnip is feminine, and a little girl has no gender like in German. All they're doing is describing a category of like nouns. The term for the grouping happens to be the word gender. The word is overloaded in this case to mean multiple things and is at best a false cognate.…

> The first thing you need to do is realize that grammatical gender has nothing to do with actual gender or lack thereof.

And, more fully, realize that none of these four things are different axis of variation: grammatical gender, biological sex, socially-ascribed gender, personal gender identity.

Most importantly, the first two things are different kinds of things from each other and the last two things (the last two are closely related, and there is very good reason to try to align them; alignment between grammatical gender and gender identity can be important instrumentally to that goal, however, especially in contexts where there is an established expectation of alignment between socially-ascribed gender and grammatical gender, since then a divergence between gender identity and grammatical gender used communicates and reinforces the divergence between ascribed gender and gender identity.)

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#113

Post by jpmattia »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #63
jpmattia wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or did I just read too fast? I must have read too fast as well. The author would have done well to include several examples, and they doesn't include any examples. Almost makes me feel like they is pranking me, to be frank.

> The author would have done well to include several examples, and they doesn't include any examples. Almost makes me feel like they is pranking me, to be frank. "Singular they" still normally pairs with plural forms of other words, not singular forms: "I talked with a person today. They were interested in grammar.". (Rather than "They was interested", which sounds completely wrong.)

> "Singular they" still normally pairs with plural forms of other words

I'd point out those "plural forms" are now "singular forms" as well, so it looks like those terms will need refining.

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#114

Post by vorg »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #76
clarkmoody wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget "all y'all" when referring to more than a couple people. "Y'all" is plural, "all y'all" is more plural.

In conversations with people who also speak multiple languages, I've sometimes explained the distinction between "y'all" and "all y'all" as similar to the one between "allí" and "allá" in Spanish. Both "allí" and "allá" mean "there" (as opposed to "aquí", "here"), but "allá" is further away in a progression; informally you could translate it as "way over there". For instance, suppose you know a family of people. Two…

I've heard "These, them, or those?" used to indicate a 3-step progression.

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#115

Post by dragonwriter »

jpmattia wrote: post #113
JoshTriplett wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author would have done well to include several examples, and they doesn't include any examples. Almost makes me feel like they is pranking me, to be frank. "Singular they" still normally pairs with plural forms of other words, not singular forms: "I talked with a person today. They were interested in grammar.". (Rather than "They was interested", which sounds completely wrong.)

> "Singular they" still normally pairs with plural forms of other words I'd point out those "plural forms" are now "singular forms" as well, so it looks like those terms will need refining.

> I'd point out those "plural forms" are now "singular forms" as well

No, they're still plural, just as they are when combined with other grammatically plural pronouns that are used with singular semantics (the royal/editorial use of "we" and -- even more commonly -- "you", the second-person plural pronoun that has in virtually all uses displaces the singular one.)

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#116

Post by kbutler »

English already has a perfectly good singular, gender-netural pronoun: "it". We're just not used to using "it" for non-child people:

  When the baby is hungry, it eats.

  When the person is hungry, it eats.
If you adopt "they", you have to either adopt plural verbs, or allow "they" to be associated with singular verbs:

  When the person is hungry, they eat. 

  When the person is hungry, they eats.

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#117

Post by sampo »

gyardley wrote: post #101
sampo wrote: post #87

My native language doesn't have gendered pronouns, and it is surprisingly difficult to learn to fluently and effortlessly use 'he' (or 'she') in English in situations when there is no need to specify the gender, or when the gender is not known ("After the user clicks the button, he/she receives ..."). My brain is just not wired that way, I feel like I am forced to create information when there is none, and potentiall…

This is pretty close to how I, as a native English speaker, feel about gendered inanimate objects. I have no idea why so many other languages force you to stick a gender on something without any genitals. I would've preferred not to have to learn that something as simple as 'milk' is feminine in Spanish, masculine in Italian, and neuter in Russian - that hunk of my brain could surely be put to better use.

> I have no idea why so many other languages force you to stick a gender on something without any genitals.

Btw, Swedish has a nice version of this, the masculine and feminine genders have merged together into the common gender, and then the other is the neutral gender. For example:

    en katt (a cat, common)
    ett hus (a house, neutral)
You are still burdened by having to memorize the gender for each noun, but at least you are spared from having to think the words as masculine or feminine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_grammar#Nouns

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#118

Post by dang »

n7c3c1 wrote: post #62

"'He or She' is an agenderphobic microaggression, Sharon. You are a bigot." -Randy Marsh

Please stop posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive and/or inflammatory comments to Hacker News. We ban accounts that do that repeatedly, and you've done it repeatedly.

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#119

Post by vorg »

volaski wrote: post #20
patrickfl wrote: post #7

Scanned the article, can someone give me a solid example of how this is used in a sentence?

You see it in notifications from social apps. "Jenny has started following you. Follow them back", etc. Because a lot of apps don't ask people to enter their gender they just resort to "them" instead of "him" or "her". It's really as annoying as people just using "her" everywhere just to be safe.

It seems annoying because personal names like Jenny and John have grammatical gender in English, so the unknown grammar use of they/them/their seems unnatural. It's also perhaps why similar-sounding names are generally spelt differently between genders, e.g. Danny/Danni, Jerry/Jeri, Tony/Toni, Billy/Billie, Francis/Frances, Robin/Robyn, Sidney/Sydney.

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#120

Post by dragonwriter »

kbutler wrote: post #116

English already has a perfectly good singular, gender-netural pronoun: "it". We're just not used to using "it" for non-child people: When the baby is hungry, it eats. When the person is hungry, it eats. If you adopt "they", you have to either adopt plural verbs, or allow "they" to be associated with singular verbs: When the person is hungry, they eat. When the person is hungry, they eats.

> If you adopt 'they', you have to either adopt plural verbs

Which we already do with semantically singular uses of the first-person and second-person grammatically-plural pronouns in English, so that's not really a big deal. (And already do with semantically singular uses of "they": its been "adopted" in English-as-actually used for over half a millennium.)

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