What exactly is the pronoun 'They' used for?

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Fnord
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23 Jun 2016, 8:32 am

LittleLu wrote:
Genderfluid people, androgynes, multigender, trigender, basically anybody who is nonbinary and doesn't fit in the realm of "male" or "female" but doesn't fit with the "he/him" or "she/her" pronouns either.
That's what YOU think. The REAL experts know otherwise:
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary wrote:
they - pronoun, plural in construction:

1a: used as third person pronoun serving as the plural of he, she, or it or referring to a group of two or more individuals not all of the same sex

1b: often used with an indefinite third person singular antecedent.

2 : used in a generic sense
So, unless an individual has a multiple personality disorder or a sentient internal parasite, it is improper to refer to that individual as "they".

What's next? Will LGBT individuals start referring to themselves as 'We'? Will "They be gay" and "We be gay" be considered proper grammar? I shudder at the thought of such arrogant malappropriation of the English language. :shaking:


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kraftiekortie
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23 Jun 2016, 1:21 pm

I wish English would adopt a neutral pronoun which encompasses everybody. This would solve the problem.

I'm not going to refer to one person as "they." Not going to happen. No offense to nonbinary people. It's a plural word in my consciousness.

But we'll have to wait (i.e., the adoption of the neutral pronoun) until the process of linguistic "natural selection" takes hold.

I wonder if Old English had a neutral pronoun.



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23 Jun 2016, 2:25 pm

kraftiekortie wrote:
I wish English would adopt a neutral pronoun which encompasses everybody. This would solve the problem.

I'm not going to refer to one person as "they." Not going to happen. No offense to nonbinary people. It's a plural word in my consciousness.

But we'll have to wait (i.e., the adoption of the neutral pronoun) until the process of linguistic "natural selection" takes hold.

I wonder if Old English had a neutral pronoun.


Old English does have a gender neutral (neuter) pronoun...however it is plural-only & identical to the male variant. :(

KK, I'll bet you already use the singular they/their without realizing it.

"If I get a call, tell them they can call me back."

"Did someone leave their books here?"

and nobody would ever say, 'Every candidate thanked his spouse, including Hillary.'

;)


http://www.npr.org/2016/01/13/462906419 ... -it-or-not


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kraftiekortie
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27 Jun 2016, 1:36 pm

"If I get a call, tell them to call me back," is used if no specific person is asked to call back. Therefore, it can be plural--any number of people call "I" back. If a specific person is referred to, the singular pronoun is always used.

"Did someone leave their books here?" does not refer to a single person, because the single person is unknown. It can refer to any number of people. Even though the "someone," obviously, is singular. Again, if a specific person is referred to, the singular pronoun is always used.

"Every candidate thanked his spouse, including Hillary." This is an instance, of course, of the male pronoun having precedence over the female pronoun. "Every," of course, implies more than one person. This is also a case of "plural, but singular in construction" because it refers both to a group of people, and, potentially, to one person.

It's a bummer that there's not a true neutral gender pronoun in English. That would solve the problem.



BaronHarkonnen85
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29 Jun 2016, 8:21 pm

They is plural, unless you don't know someone's gender or are being ambiguous.

Expecting other people to call you 'they' is just stupid.


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30 Jun 2016, 2:48 am

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Expecting other people to call you 'they' is just stupid.

Ok, we get it, you don't agree with anything nonbinary and are unwilling to be open to it. That's your opinion, not a fact. Having your say is one thing, but why reply to every topic mentioning anything nonbinary and deride it? What is the point?


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09 Jul 2016, 10:42 pm

C2V wrote:
Quote:
Expecting other people to call you 'they' is just stupid.

Ok, we get it, you don't agree with anything nonbinary and are unwilling to be open to it. That's your opinion, not a fact. Having your say is one thing, but why reply to every topic mentioning anything nonbinary and deride it? What is the point?

Usually it's because non-binary is seen as a threat to some aspect of who the person is, or how they see the world. Typically they *need* it to remain a perceived binary. Often because if that falls, so many other things must follow either in the person's head, worldview or even society itself.


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10 Jul 2016, 3:43 pm

I kind of learned to use "they" to describe others in the 80's gay culture, just for safety. But in writing it flows better than s/he, which I used for years too (APA guidelines, "consideration of the reader") and now back to they.

Since I miss some social cues, it's safer for me; I've used the wrong pronoun for some trans people in the past and feel absolutely horrible for it. They is safe; screw the plural grammar nazis.


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10 Jul 2016, 6:53 pm

Nine7752 wrote:
I kind of learned to use "they" to describe others in the 80's gay culture, just for safety. But in writing it flows better than s/he, which I used for years too (APA guidelines, "consideration of the reader") and now back to they.

Since I miss some social cues, it's safer for me; I've used the wrong pronoun for some trans people in the past and feel absolutely horrible for it. They is safe; screw the plural grammar nazis.

I've found that s/he ends up often pronounced by people not familiar with it as "she-he", which is an anti-trans* slur so I tend to avoid it.

Singular they is grammatically correct. It is accepted as part of - and fulfills an important purpose in - the English language, and has done so for 600 years. There are two or three generations however that were brought up being told that masculine pronouns should be used when a gender neutral pronoun was needed. This largely occurred as a backlash to the fight for suffrage, but the effects have lingered. With time they will subside until only a few who emotionally need to see humanity as a pure binary will still insist on not using "they".


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14 Jul 2016, 5:50 am

Edenthiel wrote:
Nine7752 wrote:
I kind of learned to use "they" to describe others in the 80's gay culture, just for safety. But in writing it flows better than s/he, which I used for years too (APA guidelines, "consideration of the reader") and now back to they.

Since I miss some social cues, it's safer for me; I've used the wrong pronoun for some trans people in the past and feel absolutely horrible for it. They is safe; screw the plural grammar nazis.

I've found that s/he ends up often pronounced by people not familiar with it as "she-he", which is an anti-trans* slur so I tend to avoid it.

Singular they is grammatically correct. It is accepted as part of - and fulfills an important purpose in - the English language, and has done so for 600 years. There are two or three generations however that were brought up being told that masculine pronouns should be used when a gender neutral pronoun was needed. This largely occurred as a backlash to the fight for suffrage, but the effects have lingered. With time they will subside until only a few who emotionally need to see humanity as a pure binary will still insist on not using "they".


Watching people lose their s**t over singular they in this thread is intriguing, given that Chaucer and Shakespeare both used it. I hear people use singular they all the time. It's a common usage, not unknown and not forbidden.

Heck, my preferred pronoun is they, and the people I know and like use it without trying to drag me into pointless semantic debates or ahistorical insistence that it must only and has only ever meant plural.

Also, "you" used to be plural and the shift to singular you from "thou" was bitterly complained about at the time. Language grows, shifts, adapts, and changes according to usage. Grammar is not prescriptive, it is descriptive in that it describes how people use language. Quoting a dictionary is pointless because dictionaries never cover all uses, and are again descriptive in terms of telling you how a word is used, but not saying "this is the only way that word is used." Many usages don't make it into a dictionary for years or even decades.



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01 Aug 2016, 8:36 pm

Lemme just stick this here:

Image

English doesn't have grammatical gender, but it does have natural gender*. Interestingly, the only Indo-European language on that map that doesn't have grammatical gender is, voila, English. (Afrikaans, a derivative of Dutch spoken in South Africa, is another example of an Indo-European language without grammatical gender.) The other languages are Saami (of the Uralic family), Finnish (Uralic), Estonian (Uralic), Hungarian (Uralic), and Turkish (of the Turkic family). The Uralic and Turkic languages don't have grammatical gender, while it is ubiquitous among Indo-European langauges. (But English is one exception. :) )

Anyway, what's happening with "they" is exactly what happened with "you", originally a plural pronoun, when it replaced "thou" (the "real" 2nd person singular pronoun).

Will "they" end up replacing "he" and "she", and possibly also "it", entirely?

EDIT: Grammatical gender is the morphological system where all nouns and pronouns are grouped into genders, and modifiers (generally adjectives) must be inflected (or changed) to "agree" with the gender of the noun or pronoun described. Designation of gender in this type of system can be very arbitrary and not at all match the natural gender described. In Old English, which had grammatical gender, the word wīfmann ("woman") was actually of the masculine gender (due to ending in mann, which meant "man"). A modern example is the German Mädchen ("girl"), which is neuter.

Natural gender is where you simply have words representing genders as they exist in reality.


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Last edited by beneficii on 01 Aug 2016, 8:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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01 Aug 2016, 8:51 pm

kraftiekortie wrote:
I'm not going to refer to one person as "they." Not going to happen. No offense to nonbinary people. It's a plural word in my consciousness.

You. Have. To. If someone asks to be referred to as "they", you have to refer to them as "they". They have a right not to be misgendered every day of their life.



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04 Aug 2016, 8:11 pm

TheAP wrote:
kraftiekortie wrote:
I'm not going to refer to one person as "they." Not going to happen. No offense to nonbinary people. It's a plural word in my consciousness.

You. Have. To. If someone asks to be referred to as "they", you have to refer to them as "they". They have a right not to be misgendered every day of their life.

I agree. It's so f*****g petty too, like they're saying "I care more about my perceptions of proper language than being respectful of your identity." Like there's no twisting it, that's what they're saying. It's not hard to call someone they, I literally call almost everyone they even when I know their gender and it's not one you'd use they for. I only use gendered pronouns when asked specifically. And no, this isn't some "sjw" thing I do, I've always done it. It makes a lot more sense to me than having to expend more effort into using multiple gender pronouns. The fact that I was already practicing gender respectful language was just a bonus when I learned more about it.


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04 Aug 2016, 8:27 pm

If somebody specifically wants to be called "they," I will call the person "they."

That hasn't happened yet, though.



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15 Aug 2016, 1:59 am

It appears that English, in some dialects at least, has used a gender-neutral 3rd person singular pronoun in place of "he", "she", and "it" since at least the 14th century. The pronouns have been variously "ou" and "a". They are mentioned on the Wikipedia article "Gender-specific and gender-neutral pronouns".

It then goes further to say that in Baltimore and other American cities, "yo" has been used as a gender-neutral pronoun.

This is interesting, as in the Turkic languages (e.g. Crimean Tatar, Turkish), "o" is used as the 3rd person singular, and it is gender neutral. These English forms look similar.


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