Yes. I don’t like “y’all”, but it would be nice if the language had separate words for the singular and plural forms. If you want to know my philosophy on language, I think Heinlein was right when he said words should mirror the way we think about reality. Addressing a single person is very different from addressing a crowd, so it’s logical to have different words for each. I’d say similar considerations apply to neutral pronouns; sometimes people want to refer to someone of certain but unknown gender, and he/she/it doesn’t cut it. However, I don’t necessarily agree with Hofstadter that sexism is partly due to gendered pronouns.
Incidentally I was reading an old grammar guide (circa 1961) and when listing the different genders it said something to the effect of “he, she, and it are for male living things, female living things, and non-living things (neuter) respectively”. It’s interesting how the original english speakers decided a fourth category of living-but-necessarily-gendered was unimportant.
]]>I think clarity and consistency are always good things to strive for in a language
I agree with the principle, but not with the application of it.
Can you think of any actual cases in your life where somebody used the singular they
and you couldn’t understand what they were saying because of it?
If so, what was the case? If not, then it seems like your worry about clarity
is misplaced.
As for consistency,
is it a violation of consistency for English to have a single word, you,
for the second-person singular and the second-person plural? If not, how is that different from having a singular they
? If so, does it rub you the wrong way when someone uses you
in the plural (or singular) just as much as when they use they
in the singular? If it does, do you fix the problem by introducing dialectical constructions like y’all
or youse
or yuns
in formal contexts? If it doesn’t, what do you suppose accounts for the difference in your reaction?
Well I think clarity and consistency are always good things to strive for in a language; I just don’t see the singular “they” as satisfying either.
]]>theyhas more or less nothing to do with the norms underlying actually-existing good English, either written or spoken, and everything to do with a fetishized ideal of how a
logicallanguage should work, or, more concretely, with participating in a particular culture of correction and officious priggishness, which institutional schooling browbeats most educated professionals into accepting. ]]>
shein preference to
heas a gender-indefinite pronoun. But in any case I don’t see either practice as posing much of a stylistic problem when you do want to specify gender: you just do that in the antecedent, rather than in the pronoun. In a language that had no gendered pronouns, that’s what you’d have to do anyway.
Anyone who likes words like ze,
hir,
ey,
xe,
thon,
etc. should feel free to use them as widely as they can; I’m certainly not going to begrudge them the minimal effort it takes on my part to pick up on new monosyllables. But I generally don’t like them, stylistically speaking, because they usually don’t sound much like English–they don’t fit very well into the phonetic structure of either formal English or dialect. (For example, how is hir
even supposed to be pronounced by an English speaker?)
The one big exception to that is the singular they,
which comes out of living speech and which flourishes in most dialects because in most of the constructions you might use it in, it sounds pretty natural. But it often gets frowned on and doesn’t have much uptake by self-conscious language reformers, because the kind of people who would actually use a word like ze
in writing or speech also tend to be the kind of people who would feel awkward about using an incorrect
singular they.
If yo
gets some uptake, that would sound fairly natural, too, and would sidestep whatever uneasiness people may feel about the singular they.