arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
Please use my correct pronouns, which are helpfully offered on the left.
Posted By: jimbob
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Split Thread Pronouns
- Thread starter arthwollipot
- Start date
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
I don't use sex or gender-identity based pronouns for anyone at all. I only use neutral pronouns, and I endeavor to use sex neutral terms whenever it's feasible without sacrificing understanding.
You aren't special enough for me to upend my entire approach.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
I've literally asked you to use the pronouns I have given for you. Are you so rude as to ignore my wishes in the matter?
But you are sacrificing understanding by using plural for single persons, or implying that they have a split personality or a gender uncertainty.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
No, you're not. You can regain your understanding from the context in which it is used, and avoiding the use of artificially constructed situations that are contrived specifically to introduce the most possible ambiguity in your argumentation.
"I have a non-binary child. They run a tavern at the local LARP game." I'm clearly talking in the singular. There is no second person in the mix here. It's quite clear exactly who my second sentence is referring to - my non-binary child. Singular. You'll only ask yourself "who is the second person here" if you explicitly intend to introduce ambiguity that is otherwise not there.
I put it to you that properly used, the singular they does not sacrifice understanding at all.
And the usage goes back in English for hundreds of years. "Someone's just fallen on the ice, I'm going to see if they need help" could have been said and understood a long time ago.
No, you are not clearly talking in the singular. You start in the singular and switch to the plural, and it is up to the reader to resolve the mismatch to understand what is happening. And there are tons of other examples where the mismatch cannot be resolved, such as "my non-binary child met some friends when they were going shopping".
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
Only an idiot, or someone with an incredibly poor understanding of written English, would think I was talking about a different thing in my second sentence than I was in my first. And for the record, singular they has existed in English since at least the 14th century. The only people who can't understand it now are those who are deliberately not understanding it. So no, I'm not starting singular and switching to plural, I'm starting singular and staying singular.
Knock knock!
There's someone at the door!
What do they want?
And as I said, those "tons" of examples are deliberately contrived specifically in order to introduce as much ambiguity as possible. Your example is one of those.
Look, like I said, I have a non-binary child who uses singular they. I use their pronouns on a regular basis (whose pronouns?). This is factually true. It's really not that hard unless you want it to be, for whatever reason.
Clearly, this is a major difference between my own language and English that I have never heard of before. I accept that this might be easier for native speakers than for me. And I also accept that one can get used to this use so that it isn't so jarring.
But in principle I find it odd to sacrifice an important distinction in a language in order to blur another.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
English is super-easy to degenderise compared to a lot of European languages. The gendered versions of words are almost never necessary. We have fire fighters, police constables, access hatches and chess pieces.
And we also have the singular they.
And for the record, steenkh, despite us being members of the same forum for over twenty years, I had no idea you weren't a native English speaker until just now when I checked your Location field.
Safe-Keeper
My avatar is not a Drumpf hat
There is no mismatch. As was said, it's clearly about one person, and you know they is also a gender-neuutral pronoun for one person.
But sure, pronouns can be confusing, and you have to work around that sometimes, like when there's multiple men and 'he' can refer to either of them. Should the gender-neutral pronoun in English have been something else, though? Possibly, but I think they is there to stay at this point.
Helen
Implicitly explicit
I understand your confusion, steenkh, it gets a little less clear in Scandivaian languages, but at least in Swedish, there's a similar function; "någon blev tagen av polisen igår, undrar vad de hade gjort?", a bit clunky, which is why I think a new neutral pronoun (hen = singular they, works well with our other third person singular pronouns, han = he and hon = she) caught on so quickly here (new pronouns are otherwise extremely rare in languages). I have really envied the singular they, in Swedish you used to have the horrible he/she option, if you didn't know, or didn't want to be specific.
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Flo
Illuminator
And that makes it difficult at first for us non native speakers to get those nuances unless we put some efforts or get those kinds of explanations.
In French, the answer to "there's someone at the door" would mostly automatically be
"Qu'est-ce qu'il veut ? what does he want ?
but sometimes also "Qu'est ce qu'ils veulent? what do they (masculine) want?
Which doesn't say anything about who and how many persons are expected to be there.
It takes some training and some reflexion in order to see the relatively same pattern in English.
Various new words have been proposed in Danish, and I think the least clunky is the Swedish 'hen', but there are other problems, such as a replacement for the forms 'ham' and 'hende' that nobody have solved. But that is for another thread.
P.J. Denyer
Penultimate Amazing
I'm genuinely amazed you haven't encountered this before, it's absolutely normal everyday usage when gender isn't known as in @arthwollipot's example. Our other non-gendered pronoun is 'it' but using 'it' for people is incredibly rude and pretty much exclusively used as an insult.
Steve
Penultimate Amazing
And yet changes to meaning of words are readily accepted all the time - see "gay". There is no question that "it" is both singular and gender neutral. If the gender police could get over their phobia and help to bring it into general use for people it would avoid ambiguity.
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
I'd say some of them are veering from the point of this thread.
And that intent matters: you can examine past body of work to determine if someone is genuine in their stated beliefs behind their chosen grammatical practice or if they're just stirring up ◊◊◊◊ because they have a monomania on a tangentially related topic and wish to goad their perceived enemies on that topic.
In other words, stop feeding them.
And that intent matters: you can examine past body of work to determine if someone is genuine in their stated beliefs behind their chosen grammatical practice or if they're just stirring up ◊◊◊◊ because they have a monomania on a tangentially related topic and wish to goad their perceived enemies on that topic.
In other words, stop feeding them.
Helen
Implicitly explicit
Pronouns are the most "stable" words there are in most languages, they rarely change, their meaning remains the same, and any change would have to come from the users. The new pronoun here, "hen", third person singular (they), is a very interesting and rare phenomenon to linguists, since it caught on so quickly. This only happens when there's a perceived lack among the users of a language. There is no real lack in English, "they" works well, and has done so for a very long time, and I don't think "it" could replace it - it's too closely associated with things. Nor was the Swedish "den" ever considered an appropriate pronoun for people, for that reason.
But no matter how deeply interesting this is - and it is! IIt is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done."t is! - it is slightly ot in a thread about a revolution in Iran, so perhaps we should return to the actual topic...
But no matter how deeply interesting this is - and it is! IIt is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done."t is! - it is slightly ot in a thread about a revolution in Iran, so perhaps we should return to the actual topic...
Yup language is what people use and the singular "they" has been used in English since middle English. So I don't see any need for a new word.
The plural of thou and thee have now replaced those words as the singular as well as the plural.
In French there is still a difference, but if asking someone what they called themselves, it would typically use the plural you.