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this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Right or wrong, calling a person "it" in English is incredibly disrespectful
We could do with something though. 'Them' doesn't really cut it as it's not clear if it's plural or singular. 'It' is insulting.
If there was a good one, I'd just use it all the time for everyone. Why should gender be so important to identity? Isn't it a regression to be so hungup on gender?
Singular "They" is literally almost as old as the word "They" itself.
People have gotten by using it for almost 700 years.
It's not clear when you say they if you mean a person or a group. The term is for both. It's ambiguous.
It’s not. Context provides you all the needed info in 99.9% of cases.
Sure, you need to provide context, but you’d need to with a pronoun anyway.
You’re essentially looking at the words singular and plural definitions and coming up with a reason they don’t work. (Hey, another “they” and I’m sure you picked up on the fact that I’m not talking about a singular human.)
Can you even think of a situation that has ambiguity, which would actually come up in natural language?
Really easy and you know it. Of top of my head:
"Get who wrote this rubbish in here." "I've message them. They are coming to the meeting now." "You mean a team or an individual did this?"
It does depend how pedantic you want to be. I'll dyslexic and I don't process language like others and so I don't like ambiguous. My default interpretation is frequently different. Human language has enough ambiguousness as it is. I'd like it reduced ideally.
“Who wrote this rubbish” is already ambiguous from the start, since it can be a singular author, or multiple. I admit they/them didn’t help resolve that ambiguity, but it isn’t the cause.
I agree 'who' is ambiguous and 'they/them' tells you nothing further. If we had a 'xhe' or whatever, you could narrow it down to a single person, without having to get into gender needlessly. I don't need to know/care about gender.
The ambiguity doesn't lie in they, it lies in the way the writer constructed that sentence, as the person you responded to already stated.
The writer (and the person they are communicating with) knows the plurality of the "who", an outside observer (us, the readers) aren't privy to that information. Clarification on the part of the writer would provide that context. But the sentence isn't written to be read to a 3rd party, but the other party (the person the writer is communicating with).
99.99% of people understand this intuitively, but this is the way you'd parse the understanding of that sentence.
And if you'll note, in my second sentence, "they" is understood to be singular—the writer.
E: and for Shits n' giggles: if neither party (the writer nor the person being communicated to) knows the plurality of the "who" they are referring to, then it's irrelevant information. They will discover who wrote it when they go searching.
And if you'll note, in that previous sentence, it's understood that I am using the plural they (the writer and the person being communicated to) in both uses of the last sentence.
As a dyslexic I don't parse sentences like others. I've also been programming since childhood, I'm sure it's made that worse in some ways. I read unclear ambiguity when other don't.
I've literally had it were multiple people are sure of the same interpretation but could not explain why. They didn't even see ambiguity until I pointed it.
I'm not arguing everyone should have a gender. Only that I wish we had another thing to use. Well constructed writing can use them just fine, but there is a lot of writing not well constructed. Not least of which is mine! I'd rather be going the other way in language. I'd like language to be compilable. 😉
Beyond the other reply about the history of the singular “they,” we also have another prominent plural pronoun we use in the singular all the time. So often we don’t even think about it as being plural anymore. So much so that we’ve created new plural versions of this already plural pronoun.
“You.”
“You” was originally the objective case plural 2nd person pronoun in English, with “ye” being the nominative.
But “thou” was considered informal, like the German “du” or the Spanish “tú,” and the plural 2nd person was used as the formal. And this eventually supplanted “thou” completely.
And now we think of “you” as singular to the point where we make slang words like “y’all” and “yous” to have a plural.
It's hard to force language to evolve in a specific direction.
I'm a native English speaker and I've used "they" as a singular third person neutral pronoun since before I even knew anything about trans or nonbinary people. It's commonly accepted and not at all unusual usage, at least in American English where I grew up.
It's fine to use it singular, but it's also fine to use it as plural. All you know is it's not zero persons.
I'd be happy with 'xe' for gender neutral single-person pronoun. And for awhile I was using that from time to time - but because its rare and people aren't use to it, using it is a distraction from what you actually are trying to talk about. I've stopped using it because I don't really want to talk about it over and over. Sometimes people find it confusing. Sometime people are just curious. And some people find aggravating (because they don't like the idea of degendering or changing genders).
I don't mind the concept of a degendeted pronoun, but I would vote against "xe". Just find it unpleasant to use the "x" sound so much. Don't know what I would like, just x makes it extra weird on top of the "weirdness" of trying to explicitly evolve language.
Sure. And as with a lot of English, it isn't totally clear has 'xe' is even meant to be pronounced. (I assume like 'ze').
Perhaps a nicer sounding version would be 'ce'. Or whatever. To be honest, it really doesn't matter to me. I'd be happy to just call literally everyone "she" or "he" or whatever. I'd suggest that we just use "he" for all genders, because many people on the internet seem to be doing that anyway; but obviously that would be upsetting to people who have been fighting for gender recognition. Pushing for "she" might be a bit better, but not by a lot. ... So we're probably in this mess for a long time. But I reckon if we just shake it up just a little bit as individuals, using different words and such, we'll eventually start to see something change more widely.
In my mind I’ve always pronounced “xe” with the X sounding like the latter half of the letter said aloud, followed by the letter E.
Though I just looked it up and “zee” is the correct pronunciation.
If you get aggravated being degendering, or of others changing gender, it makes me think you are insecure about your gender. They should get over it. 'xe' would be good, but I don't see it taking off with being popularizied some how. Some popular TV show or something.
I think they maybe meant the gender neutral they/them, which we turn to "it" for the inanimate?
Edit: on second read I'm not sure
I do mean that we Finns use "se" very often in everyday speech to refer yo other human beings, and "se" would translate as "it."
Ofc I'm aware how horrible using "it" when referring yo people would be in English.
But if someone asked me to translate a sentence like "mihin se [a person] meni", I would ofc not use a direct translation because of how offensive and wrong it would be.
I respect the distinctions languages have for genders, but I'm happy I grew up with one which didn't have them. Language shapes thought. We don't think of people as "it", it's just the colloquial form of the language.
In Finnish, if you had to give a formal speech or something, most people realise to default to "hän", the 3rd person singular.
And if you're doing customer service or addressing someone with the sort of respect you'd use titles with in English. Then you'd address the person in the second person plural instead of the second person singular.
Just like English did hundreds of years ago, and it worked so well that in the end, English left the second person singular out of the language altogether. It still exists, but isn't really used unless thou wants to pretend being from Elizabethan Britain.
Which is why I never do, obviously.
This is one of those things that, if translated directly, would be really, really bad.
Now I've spoken English for more than a quarter century, so my mouths used to it already, but I remember when learning the language, it was rather hard for the brain to keep switching between "he" and "she", as it was not a distinction my brain had to make before using English.
I mean obviously I could differentiate women and men, but having to use different pronouns for both?
Quite needless.