Memes

Shakespeare used the singular they in his works. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.html

That was an interesting read. I think you "over-quoted" me here. Only the first sentence is about singular they for when the gender is unknown. I can't remember where I picked up the thing with the ~100 year old novel. I read it somewhere. But that might have been specific to use of singular they in the US or something. And I might misremember the number entirely. What's really fascinating is that Shakespeare even uses 'they' when the gender is known. I wonder, though, whether that allows for any inference on how people spoke back then? After all, it's prose for the theatre and Shakespeare is credited with inventing a lot of new language, not all of which would have stuck (I'd assume).

One could also think of they as that new pronoun. A lot of languages reuse sounds (including English) even in fairly common grammar components so one could think of this as a new word with a familiar sound assigned to it.

You're right of course. Though, that adds another meaning to an existing word and hence increases the ambiguity I mentioned. I know it's common among all natural languages (that I know of) to have multiple context-dependant meanings for some words. The computer scientist in me, that prefers interacting with compilers over humans, finds that revolting ;-)

Let's party in party of the party. (celebrate, in company of, political organization)