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Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

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Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#131

Post by fian »

progval wrote: post #70
baddox wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting thing is that the singular usage of "they" doesn't get used with singular verbs. It seems that the syntactic pluralness of "they" is too strong for it to simply get thrown in place of "he" or "she" without changing the verbs. I would say "she is here" or "he is here," but not "they is here."

One of the things I find weird in English is you do that too “you”: “you are” even when talking to a single person; whereas in French (for instance) there are two different pronouns for the singular and plural use of “you” (“tu” and “vous”), with different forms forms for the verbs. So using plural form of verbs with singular “they” does not seem that surprising to me.

Some sub-cultures of Australian society use: "youse" as the plural for "you" when addressing more than one person. For example: "Youse guys are late". Here there is a double plural "youse" and "guys" for one group of people. Also "guy" is generally considered to refer to men, but in this context "guys" is gender neutral - the group of people being referred to can be composed of both men and women.

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#132

Post by ward »

progval wrote: post #70
baddox wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting thing is that the singular usage of "they" doesn't get used with singular verbs. It seems that the syntactic pluralness of "they" is too strong for it to simply get thrown in place of "he" or "she" without changing the verbs. I would say "she is here" or "he is here," but not "they is here."

One of the things I find weird in English is you do that too “you”: “you are” even when talking to a single person; whereas in French (for instance) there are two different pronouns for the singular and plural use of “you” (“tu” and “vous”), with different forms forms for the verbs. So using plural form of verbs with singular “they” does not seem that surprising to me.

But you also use "vous" as a form of politeness, be it to people older than yourself, more formal situations, or just people you do not know. It is very prevalent. This form also still has the verb in its plural form despite talking to only one person.

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#133

Post by baddox »

dragonwriter wrote: post #79
baddox wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting thing is that the singular usage of "they" doesn't get used with singular verbs. It seems that the syntactic pluralness of "they" is too strong for it to simply get thrown in place of "he" or "she" without changing the verbs. I would say "she is here" or "he is here," but not "they is here."

> The interesting thing is that the singular usage of "they" doesn't get used with singular verbs. Verb forms agree with the grammatical number of the subject, independent of the semantic number; in English those almost always are the same, but aside from "they", "you" (which is grammatically plural, even though its semantics are sometimes singular) is a case where they can diverge.

> Verb forms agree with the grammatical number of the subject, independent of the semantic number

That's what I find interesting: that "they" isn't actually being used grammatically as a singular pronoun that can be dropped in to replace "he" or "she." The entire grammatical construct is exactly the same as if "they" was referring to multiple people. It's the context that makes it clear that only a single person is being referred to.

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#134

Post by SilasX »

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.…

It doesn't matter whether it's related to biological gender[1]; the fact remains that these languages force you to remember extra information that serves no semantic purpose, which causes the same problem as English does/did when forcing you to pick a gender for the pronoun of a generic person.

Whether you call it "grammatical gender" or "gender" or "noun class" is irrelevant; it all burns down the same cigarette butt.

[1] Although it pretty clearly is, since languages consistently lump in the female version of a human noun (cartera) with the grammatical gender of woman, and male (cartero) with man; the little-girl exception you mention from German is because that diminutive suffix (-chen in Mädchen) takes the neuter case with higher priority. The (fact that this is such a predictable, rare) exception proves the (general validity of the) rule.

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#135

Post by dragonwriter »

SilasX wrote: post #134
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.…

It doesn't matter whether it's related to biological gender[1]; the fact remains that these languages force you to remember extra information that serves no semantic purpose, which causes the same problem as English does/did when forcing you to pick a gender for the pronoun of a generic person. Whether you call it "grammatical gender" or "gender" or "noun class" is irrelevant; it all burns down the same cigarette but…

> Although it pretty clearly is, since languages consistently lump in the female version of a human noun (cartera) with the grammatical gender of woman

Languages with grammatical gender don't even consistently have "masculine" and "feminine" categories (though certainly that's the most common distinction, with or without a "neuter" category, in a grammatical gender system.) E.g., several have the grammatical genders of "animate" and "inanimate" (or something similar), but not "masculine" and "feminine".

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#136

Post by SilasX »

ctdonath wrote: post #103
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…

The perspective from someone who learned English as a first language is that it's just as annoying a linguistic issue as it is to those who learned English later. Those of us raised on English likewise have a bad time with ambiguous gender situations ("he/she"). Used to be just "he" when ambiguous/irrelevant, but sociopolitical outrage over possible misapplication of the pronoun discourages such use, so our choice is…

Agree about it being annoying for native English speakers as well, but I don't think you have to be PC to balk at the use of "he" for the ambiguous case. Brains work by association, and forcing "he" to do double-duty is simply confusing.

For example, let's say you tell a story and refer to a generic surgeon as "he", when some patient's father is known to be far away. Later, you have the surgeon saying "I can't operate on this patient; he's my son!" People will feel deceived if it turns out the surgeon was a woman after you used "he" to refer to her, and no amount of lecturing about how "'he' is a perfectly fine for ambiguous cases" is going to change this.

Btw, Douglas Hofstadter (somewhere in Metamagical Themas) made a great point that the use of "they" vs "he" for the generic singular being an issue of whether people are more offended at being called a man when a woman or multiple when singular. There are fewer interest groups looking out for the latter...

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#137

Post by SilasX »

dragonwriter wrote: post #135
SilasX wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter whether it's related to biological gender[1]; the fact remains that these languages force you to remember extra information that serves no semantic purpose, which causes the same problem as English does/did when forcing you to pick a gender for the pronoun of a generic person. Whether you call it "grammatical gender" or "gender" or "noun class" is irrelevant; it all burns down the same cigarette but…

> Although it pretty clearly is, since languages consistently lump in the female version of a human noun (cartera) with the grammatical gender of woman Languages with grammatical gender don't even consistently have "masculine" and "feminine" categories (though certainly that's the most common distinction, with or without a "neuter" category, in a grammatical gender system.) E.g., several have the grammatical genders…

I know -- I perhaps should have clarified that I meant "languages with [something commonly referred to as grammatical] gender for nouns", although I feel it was clear from context, since the footnote was referred to after "these languages" (not languages in general).

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#138

Post by thescribe »

davesque wrote: post #53
colept wrote: post #51

When writing "he or she" - they does seem like a viable substitute when gender is irrelevant. But I cannot stand this new trend of making gender irrelevant for the sake of pushing gender lines. We use gendered pronouns for context clues, metadata, and comedy. It's a natural construct and universal to many languages.

Just because people use singular they doesn't mean we can't still use gender-specific, third-person pronouns.

I think the grandfather post is saying that this is motivated by people who wish to eliminate gender, not that we are precluded from he or she.

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#139

Post by erikpukinskis »

mei0Iesh wrote: post #74
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."

"They" isn't really used illogically. If someone wants to understand, they only need to examine it beyond what they learned as rules in English class. The use of "they" is usually general, when not really pointing to a specific person. If Dennis is standing in front of me, and someone asked me whom to speak to, I wouldn't point at Dennis and say, "They is the one to speak to". But if I was talking about DennisP onlin…

> I wouldn't point at Dennis and say, "They is the one to speak to".

The correct conjugation is "They are the one to talk to" which to me is a perfectly sensible to way to refer to DennisP.

Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

#140

Post by erikpukinskis »

colept wrote: post #51

When writing "he or she" - they does seem like a viable substitute when gender is irrelevant. But I cannot stand this new trend of making gender irrelevant for the sake of pushing gender lines. We use gendered pronouns for context clues, metadata, and comedy. It's a natural construct and universal to many languages.

I do this. I'm sorry I'm offending you. That's not my intention.

I use it not for some political purpose, but because I actually believe gender is irrelevant to the things I'm saying. I am almost never trying to say "I went with Dave in his essential maleness to his house" I'm just trying to say I went to Dave's house. I'm not trying to reference occupation or nationality or anything else. Referencing gender is noise.

It's also impractical to have to ask everyone their gender and keep that huge database in my head. Much easier just to use one word.

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