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Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

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Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#121

Post by logfromblammo »

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", for the purposes of grammatical agreement, is indistinguishable from plural "they", in much the same way that singular "you" acts like plural "you". The distinct singular 2nd person pronouns and verb forms are now archaic and obsolete.

You wouldst not match the verb form associated with "thou" when using the singular "you". When anyone does, they sounds wrong to the ear of a native speaker.

(The above is intentionally wrong for illustrative purposes.)

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#122

Post by jpmattia »

dragonwriter wrote: post #115
jpmattia wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.)

Like I said: Those terms will need refining, and all you've done is add "grammatical" and "semantic" to differentiate the cases.

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#123

Post by dragonwriter »

jpmattia wrote: post #122
dragonwriter wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

Like I said: Those terms will need refining, and all you've done is add "grammatical" and "semantic" to differentiate the cases.

> Those terms will need refining

But they won't. We've used "plural" and "singular" fine in referring to the grammatical features of verb tenses and the nouns/pronouns they agree with just fine for centuries, despite the fact that grammatical number of "we", "they", and especially "you" has often -- for longer than we've even had formalized descriptions of English grammar -- disagreed with semantic number.

There's nothing new here to necessitate "refining" anything.

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#124

Post by warfangle »

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.

What'll really blow your mind is that gender only tangentially has to do with genitals in the first place ;)

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#125

Post by warfangle »

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.

"it" comes with the linguistic/cultural baggage of being associated primarily with inanimate objects, which I think you can understand is rather disconcerting to those who are genderqueer and very much alive.

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#126

Post by warfangle »

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.

You'll see this in Facebook, too. Even though they ask for your gender.

But that's because you can choose which set of pronouns you prefer.

(They also have a pretty okay list of genders to choose from, if you're into labeling things)

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#127

Post by mitchty »

dragonwriter wrote: post #112
mitchty wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tw…

What you're saying is true as well and goes much further in the use of gender itself.

But it has a bit of a snag for some languages if you were to try to "fix/correct/whatever" the genders of certain nouns to fit a social context. Take German with das Mädchen (das being neuter gender), the plural of this is die Mädchen, aka all plurals in German are feminine gender. Changing the gender of this noun in its singular state is... problematic at best and grammatically would amount to almost a new language. You would also have to tackle do you make all plurals not feminine gender?

Additionally you'd have to handle/tackle use of er/es/sie/Sie/usw... I think I can speak for the Germans here and say changing the language to suit these social constructs would be ludicrous. I know other languages and their grammar would also have issues with revisions along these lines akin to not being the same language.

Aligning gender like people are want to do in English lately is problematic and possibly misguided grammatically.

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#128

Post by dragonwriter »

mitchty wrote: post #127
dragonwriter wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tw…

What you're saying is true as well and goes much further in the use of gender itself. But it has a bit of a snag for some languages if you were to try to "fix/correct/whatever" the genders of certain nouns to fit a social context. Take German with das Mädchen (das being neuter gender), the plural of this is die Mädchen, aka all plurals in German are feminine gender. Changing the gender of this noun in its singular st…

> But it has a bit of a snag for some languages if you were to try to "fix/correct/whatever" the genders of certain nouns to fit a social context. Take German with das Mädchen (das being neuter gender), the plural of this is die Mädchen, aka all plurals in German are feminine gender.

This is a complicated area and I'm not sure that the issues in German occur in the same places as in English: in English, for people, the exclusive dual grammatical gender has been paired with and directly mapped to (but for the use of the masculine grammatical gender to include generic ascribed gender) the exclusively dual socially ascribed gender, to which personal gender identity has been generally expected to conform. With languages with a more complex gender structure and where the mapping between grammatical gender and socially ascribed gender of persons is more complex, the particular problem areas (if any) where grammatical gender is problematic in terms of interfering with the desire to encourage socially ascribed gender to align with gender identity and, also, to avoid communicating gender(-identity/ascription) biased norms, may be different than in English.

It may be different, for that matter, even within a single language, based on the history and expectations around the use words and their associations in different places and cultures using the same language.

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#129

Post by n7c3c1 »

dang wrote: post #118
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.

The quote is completely substantive. Just because you disagree doesn't make it uncivil.

But is the irony of you threatening to ban me for "inflammatory comments" and the quote itself--about the culture of militant political correctness--not lost on you? Do you see the irony?

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#130

Post by undersuit »

DennisP wrote: post #6

I've never liked this, but I have to admit that logically, a mismatch in number is no worse than the mismatch in gender we get by using "he," which has the disadvantage of being annoying to many people. And I don't think efforts to make up a new pronoun are likely to succeed. Singular "they" might well be the future. But if I could have my pick I'd go with "um."

>a mismatch in number is no worse

And we've had that same issue for years with you and you.

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