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Gender neutral pronouns are just so much more convenient; I tend to use them even when I know someone’s gender. I do wish English had some common-use ones that were explicitly singular, though.
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my prediction is for th’all and y’all or just thal and yal in the long run
I have a soft spot for ‘yous’, personally.
youse guyseses
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I believe I read somewhere that the singular for “they” used to be “thy”, but that makes language sound terribly old. Doubt it’ll get picked up in the mainstream
‘Thy’ is the disused informal ‘your’. There’s ‘thou’/‘thee’ but that’s still second-person.
Interesting! Do you have any etymological sources that go into this more? I’d be curious to learn
This looks like an alright starting place:
But when the World needed him most, he vanished.
Roses are red, violets are blue, singular they predates singular you.
People who were/are upset about singular they really don’t understand that language change is pervasive and unstoppable. Shifts in pronoun agreement are no different.
Prescriptive grammarians cling to their (arbitrary) rules because they believe in a “pure” form of the language. That itself is a misunderstanding and just mirrors other common things some people do to divide the masses. Do not listen to such people.
As someone deeply engrained in the field of Linguistics for decades (personally, academically, and professionally), I can tell you that one of the biggest challenges in teaching people how language actually works is breaking down the preconceived notions they have about such things – the exact notions those prescriptivists tout.
Fun fact: there has been more time between the first use of singular they and today than there was between the first use of plural they and the start of the criticism of singular they
I still don’t get why people have such an issue calling people what they want to be called.
You don’t balk at a guy or a girl named Robin, or Alex, or any of a hundred different androgynous names…
But you take issue with “he”, “she”, and “them”?
Why?
My only problem, and to be clear this is entirely my problem, nobody else’s, is that I’m so dumb, I frequently forget and call someone he/she when they prefer they/them. I fuck it up sometimes. I try, but decades of societal norms are getting in the way of me getting it right sometimes.
To every person who identifies as they/them please forgive me because I’m going to screw it up. Just correct me when I say it and hopefully in time my brain will stop making this mistake.
I still don’t get why people have such an issue calling people what they want to be called.
Why?
Normally I’m the type to wax philosophical for a few paragraphs about what the heck may be going on in their heads, but honestly I think it’s assholes being proud to be assholes. Punching down just feels so good. That and people who are suffering enough that they don’t care about others, but don’t realize they need to work on their mental health. Or they’ve been conditioned to see doing that as a character flaw or weakness. And of course the snowball effect of those people raising the next generation of assholes, building up some inertia behind the generational trauma.
Because underlying it all, regardless of which impactful arguments they think they are making or refuting, they just don’t want to be nice to people that are different.
Fair enough. I honestly just think they can’t see the forest because of all the trees in the way.
They’ll cry foul on someone insisting on being called by they/them pronouns, arguing that it’s an incorrect usage of they/them, or whatever the argument of the week is, then immediately use they/them pronouns for an individual in a different context without batting an eye, or even realizing what they’ve done.
Ignorance and hypocrisy.
Definitely, because the issue is not with the words but with the people who are different that they don’t want to be nice to, lol.
By being offended I don’t start calling them by their pronouns right away my brain immediately goes into defense mode and refuses to acknowledge whatever the fuck they identify as.
Fairly certain most don’t get offended at genuine mistakes. It’s doubling down that usually upsets people, and if you’re the type to immediately go “well fuck you”, I suspect that may be the case with you.
Thank you. I’m elated to hear that most don’t get offended at genuine mistakes.
That’s all I really needed.
Remember that it’s the loud ones we hear most. If a hundred people just say nothing to avoid awkwardness, a dozen correct you politely and a single one kicks up a fuss, it’s the fuss you will remember.
It’s also easy to take corrections way more personally than they’re intended. Someone saying “It’s they, actually” isn’t an expression of offense, even if it can feel bad to be corrected (because it feels bad to be “wrong”). Compare it to bumping into someone you didnt see, who then goes “watch out” to point out there’s someone in the way – they’re not necessarily upset, just informing you.
And finally, sometimes people are just irritable for whatever reason. They might not usually get offended, but for whatever reason will lash out that one time. To take the analogy of bumping into someone, perhaps their shoulder was already sore.
There certainly are some that do get offended. Some are so upset with the norms people grow up with they end up lashing out at those people instead. Some genuinely lack any understanding or patience for the other side of the issue. Some are just plain entitled. Some are looking for things to be upset at. Assholes exist in just about any sufficiently large grouping of people.
But for most I’ve known, it’s really just about mutual respect, and often there’s a base assumption of respect too. We all know how hard it can be to untrain a habit, and most people don’t want unpleasantness. Don’t let the exceptions get to you.
I love linguistics but it has some weird stuff in it.
Chinese doesn’t have gendered pronouns in the spoken language. “He”, “she”, and “it” are all pronounced, “tā”. Possession and number are done by adding 的 (de) or 们 (men) after the pronoun, irrespective of gender. Originally, there was only one character for “tā”, 他. In the early 20th century there were several westernization movements in China. One of them included adding gendered pronouns, in order to be able to more accurately translate English texts. Thus, 她 (she) and 它 (it) were adopted. (they used to mean other things and were repurposed). One immediate problem that people noticed was the choice of components. 他 includes the 亻component, which means “person”. 她 replaces it with the 女 component, which means “female”. So some linguists pointed out that this implies that women aren’t people. The current situation is that people tend to use, 她, when there is a single subject who is known to be female. When it’s unknown or there are multiple subjects they default to, 他 or 他们.
German is heavily gendered. You can still linguistically gender someone correctly but, in addition to pronouns, you also need to match adjectives. You also need to get comfortable with the gender of nouns often not making any logical sense. eg:
Moon - Der Mond - masculine
Girl - Das Mädel/Mädchen - neuter
Sun - Die Sonne - feminine
There’s the added confusion that the third person feminine singular, is spelled and pronounced the same as the second person plural. The second person doesn’t differentiate in gender but it’s often impolite to use the singular so it’s common to refer to males as “Sie”. Not to say that any of that is hard. Native German speakers constantly need to match the gender of adjectives to nouns so they’re very used to it.Russian seems to be more complicated. I recently read that Masha Gessen uses, “they”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masha_Gessen It seems that Russian uses gendered past-tense verbs. They originally used masculine verbs out of, “hoping that I would wake up a boy. A real boy” but switched to feminine verbs as a teen and stuck with that. If anyone speaks Russian well I’d love to hear more about how gender is used and perceived in Russian. Particularly from the linguistic, rather than the cultural, perspective. It looks like Russian does have gendered pronouns https://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/pronouns.php but the Wikipedia article doesn’t say which they use.
edit: clarifications and grammar
i like this comment but i feel the need to reply because it touches upon a pet peeve of mine in linguistics: there is a persistent myth in the modern period that grammatical gender is useless, pointless, or somehow arbitrary and is just some sort of vestigial, rotting, lexical limb that made it to the 21st century by fluke.
this is simply not true. just because grammatical gender often appears arbitrary or illogical doesn’t mean it actually is. and just because grammatical gender follows many, many rules does not mean there are no rules. grammatical gender is just a fairly common form of noun class system. as with most forms of noun classing, what the rules are in a given dialect can be a little wishy-washy but they are certainly not arbitrary.
for example, you point out the german Mädchen as an example of illogical noun gendering. this is an opinion often expressed by foreigners learning the language, and even by linguistically-ignorant germans. it makes sense on the face of it, this word has a similar meaning to the english phrase “little girl,” so it is strange the germans decided to sort this word into the neuter gender, no?
well, no. it isn’t strange and it isn’t illogical, in actuality. -chen is a diminutive in german. for those who are unaware, diminutives are suffixes/prefixes in languages that serve to make nouns feel smaller or more cute in a language. think booklet vs book or dog vs doggie for some english examples.
what are some examples of more german diminutives?
das Kätzchen - kitten
das Hündchen - puppy
das Plätzchen - a cookie (depends on dialect exactly what this refers to afaik but generally is always some sort of cookie)
das Ohrläppchen - earlobe
noticing a trend? these are all neuter! and thus we uncover a little grammatical rule that grammatical gender was trying to tell us. all diminutives are neuter.
most every “arbitrary” example of grammatical gender people provide has some sort of similar reasoning or rule behind it, some story or information it is trying to give you that makes speaking the language that much easier.
just because what it is encoding doesn’t seem useful or logical to (rhetorical) you doesn’t mean it is not. grammatical gender is much more than just gender-washing everyday speech for kicks and does carry useful meaning, if you can be bothered to puzzle it out. attempts i’ve seen to “de-gender” spanish (this is just what is local to me) all fundamentally misunderstand what it is they’re even trying to do and often opt for rotely tearing out the entire gendered case system without offering proper lexical and linguistic infrastructure for the language to actually effectively function without it. these attempts sound clunky because they are clunky! and to be perfectly clear i’m not dogging on the premise, just the serious attempts i’ve seen implemented in real life speech and their implementation. i think it’s relevant bc it showcases how modern misunderstanding of what grammatical gender is can realize as actual, negative manifestations in the non-conceptual world. why this is important to think about more than passingly!
edit:formatting
The big thing that people get wrong and which makes me so very tired is that IT’S NOT SOCIETAL GENDER, it’s just a case of terrible terminology that we’re stuck with. A chair isn’t feminine or whatever, it’s just that words related to femininity happen to be in the same class as other words.
I really wish we could all agree to call it basically anything else, like “genre” which shares the same root but doesn’t create the connotation to societal gender.
Thank you for your thorough response. You make some good points. I think we’re talking about slightly different topics though.
There’s always some explanation to why certain words or grammar forms evolved. Sometimes those reasons are commonly known, sometimes the “commonly known” reasons are wrong, sometimes linguists argue about the origin, sometimes they have no idea.
For everyday speakers, the “logic” of immediate usage, is more important than the etymology.
German speakers are generally aware of the “rule” that diminutives are neuter. If you look at this list words, some of them have non-diminutive forms;
Die Katze
Der Hund
Die Ohrlappe
Two of them don’t really.“Platz” is grammatically, the non-diminutive form of “Plätzchen” but it doesn’t mean “(normal sized) cookie” (aside: Not to make fun of our Northern friends but “Keks” gets around that confusion) “Magd” is the non-diminutive form of “Mädel” but girls aren’t (generally) “little maids.” I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone say, “magd” to refer to a living person.
Also notice that when we strip off the diminutives, the remaining words are no more “logical”. Cats and earlobes aren’t inherently feminine and dogs aren’t inherently male.
My usage of “logic” in the context of German grammar, is that grammatical gender is often at odds with both self identified gender and biological gender. German speakers are generally comfortable saying “Der” about subjects, that nobody would think of as male. German speakers are likewise comfortable saying “Sie” about subjects that nobody would think of as female and, “Das” to subjects that are very obviously not neuter.
The reason for contrasting several languages was that I suspect there are different cognitive loads involved in correctly gendering people, depending on language. Many people notice that native Chinese speakers routinely “randomize” he/she/it. They don’t just misgender trans-people, they often just forget which one means which. German speakers are pretty used to playing around with endings to imply additional meaning. “Dutzen” is often done without the word “du”. Speakers easily put together the correct endings for the singular and listeners instantly recognize the implication.
As a final example, I’d offer the sentence, “___ ist ein fesch__ ___.” I posit that if I insert “Die” vs “Der” into the sentence, most German speakers would instantly correctly fill in the rest of the blanks with, “-es Madl” or “-er Bua”. If you try to say the wrong one it just sounds weird.
tbh gendered pronouns are stupid. We should call everything it.
laughs in Finnish
Yeah, realised pronouns were stupid because of finnish.
Edit: gendered pronouns
gendered pronouns*
oh yeah. People who complain about just pronouns are the ones who are bad at english, everyone has pronouns, it came with speaking a langauge.
Mean, not like need pronouns at all. Just speak like cavemen.
Learning French it just seemed normal to use singular they
Vous
Vous is the 2nd person plural pronoun. Only for when you’re speaking directly to someone, which isn’t gendered anyway (2nd person singular pronoun is Tu).
French doesn’t have a gender neutral 3rd person pronoun. It’s il or elle. Which is unfortunate. There have been attempts to create a gender neutral 3rd person pronoun but none have really taken off. Most French non-binary people who prefer gender neutral pronouns in English will use the pronoun in French that most closely align with their presentation. Il for mascs, elle for femmes. I’m hopeful for this to change honestly.
Sounds like you’re mad for the sake of being mad
Singular they is the same in English
I am bilingual and have been speaking French every day since I was 4. I work every day entirely in French. I am correcting you on a fundamental aspect of the French language.
Vous is equivalent to saying “you all” in English. It can also be used as a 2nd person singular pronoun, equivalent to “you” in English. You’ll note that “you” isn’t gendered.
“They” is a 3rd person pronoun. It’s used when referring indirectly to someone else. “He” and “she” are also 3rd person pronouns. “You” is the 2nd person singular pronoun in English. We don’t have a dedicated 2nd person singular pronoun (not since like the 17th century), so when referring to 2nd person to a group of people, we say “you all” or “you guys” etc.
Pronouns in French go like this:
Person Singular Plural first Je Nous second Tu Vous third Il/Elle Ils/Elles In English the equivalents are:
Person Singular Plural first I We second You “You all/guys” etc third He/She They People’s preferred pronouns in both English and French are third-person ones (at least when referring to these kinds of pronouns, there’s others like Sir/Ma’am). French does not have a gender neutral third person pronoun by default.
Spanish is pretty similar, but we have a dedicated formal “you” (usted/ustedes). Its technically second person, but its conjugated the same as third
Person Singular Plural first yo nosotros second tú vosotros third él/ella/usted Ellos/ellas/ustedes Languages evolve through use
You can use vous in place of il elle, just like there is nothing stopping people from using they in place of he/her in English
Did… did the tables not help? They can be used as either singular or plural but it’s always third person.
If I was speaking directly to you, and you used they/them pronouns. I wouldn’t convert the sentence “You are tall” to “They are tall”. Those 2 sentences mean entirely different things. That’s what the “person” part of a pronoun is. It’s who you’re referring to. 1st person is the person speaking, 2nd person is the person being spoken to, and 3rd person is someone about whom you are speaking.
1st - “I am tall.”
2nd - “You are tall.”
3rd - “He/She/They is/are tall.”
1st - “Je suis grand.”
2nd - “Tu/Vous es grand.”
3rd - “Il/Elle est grand(e).”
Does this help? Tu is already not gendered. Vous isn’t gendered either. It’s not the same as “they” at all. It means an entirely different thing.
You/they aren’t gendered already. You/They are tall. He/She is tall
People started using them as pronouns even though you would never say “they is tall”
It’s the same thing
No you’d say “They are tall.” Because that’s how we conjugate that in English. They has always been used as both a singular and a plural because we don’t always know the gender of who were talking about. In French il/ils is the default when you don’t know a 3rd person’s gender. Il/ils is masculine.
It isn’t. I’m a French speaker, I’m telling you it isn’t. Vous is second person singular or plural. They is third person singular or plural. They is NEVER second person. Vous is NEVER third person. This is how the language is used around the world today.
Tom Scott is so jacked in that video!
Tom Scott also hated reddit before it was cool
Ngl, took me a long while to get used to defaulting to “they” after a lifetime of assuming “he”.
