Singular 'They' and Its Usage

Yes. I do.

I do agree it's not practical, but, dammit, I'm going to try! Also, I'm doing this to my own speech. I'm not the sort of asshole who would force the world to conform to my strange and demented sense of values. I will argue for things that decrease ambiguity, and against things that increase ambiguity, with great passion and vitriol, though.

That sounds perfectly natural to me.

If you really want a sentence devoid of all ambiguity, you could just not use pronouns.

edited 22nd Aug '12 4:15:02 AM by Elfive

But that would be inelegant, and elegance of speech is just as important as a lack of ambiguity.

How is pronouncing "he slash she" more informal than "they"?

Except that language was never intended to be 100% free of ambiguity to begin with, so expecting that it should be, is strange and demented.

edited 22nd Aug '12 4:20:11 AM by Ever9

Elfive,

That causes ambiguity on its own.

Pigeon,

You have been quite insistently trying to convince me singular they is bad, though.

Good luck using the hilariously complex Japanese pronouns in your speech, btw. And I mean that. I actually do prefer more explained over not explained. Hell, I would like to use 'thou' but that would make me sound pedantic. I just don't like my speech to sound mechanical.

Ever 9,

If you could find a way for the language to be come both more natural, elegant and less ambiguous, it would be better, however.

edited 22nd Aug '12 4:22:24 AM by Heatth

How do you define this "elegance"? Because it seems to me that we dislike "he or she" and "he/she" for the same reason, considering it less elegant than "they".

Japanese pronouns I think mostly work in Japanese because of all the cultural context around them. :p

Also, one problem with eliminating both ambiguity and redundancy is the donkey pronoun.

I don't know. I'm perfectly fine with using "they" for a person of indeterminate gender. However I use "sie/hir" for someone who is both and "e/eir" for someone who is neither. Then again this doesn't come up in everyday conversation much, so there's not much opportunity to use them.

I have to agree that he/she still sounds faintly bureaucratic.

As for the topic at hand, I think that the singular they works perfectly fine. Sometimes, you will necessarily have to sacrifice some accuracy in order to make a sentence sound natural.

Ever 9 and Heatth have nailed my feelings on he/she/[PRONOUN] and s/he perfectly; at least to me, those two sound vaguely clunky and unwieldy.

As for thou, well... it's probably just due to having heard it only in certain contexts, but it sounds incredibly silly to me if it's said in a context that isn't medieval or similar. I just can't imagine an office worker saying thou. I just can't.

If you want really accurate pronouns, try Finnish. For instance, the word for "me" is different in the phrases "from me" ("minulta") and "to me" ("minulle.") The link takes you to the word "minä", meaning "me." Open the folder marked "Declension of minä" to see all the forms that the word takes. All pronouns have the same number of declensions.

edited 22nd Aug '12 4:29:31 AM by BestOf

@Ever: You don't pronounce the slash. You say it as "he she".

I get that it is strange and demented, but it's the sort of thing I find important.

@Heatth: Yes, because that is the topic of conversation. If I were talking with someone, and they used the singular they in conversation, I wouldn't make a single comment on it.

I never said I would use the Japanese pronouns in my speech. I certainly wish there were English counterparts, but supplanting the English pronouns with the Japanese pronouns, and keeping everything else the same, would just be wrong.

@Ever: I do have problems with the lack of elegance in "he or she" and "he/she", but the singular they has imprecision, inaccuracy, and ambiguity, which are all things that I wish to eliminate from my speech, as well, and things that are not shared by "he or she" or "he/she".

As to how I define elegance, I define it as having a clear, steady, and beautiful flow and rhythm. It is harder to have elegant speech while using "he or she" or "he/she", but not impossible.

@Best: That is truly beautiful. I should learn Finnish, some time.

edited 22nd Aug '12 4:33:07 AM by deathpigeon

...and directly on-topic: This.

Basically, British useage recommends "they", while American useage is more divided.

And the article on Gender-neutral pronoun brings up another solution: How about One?

edited 22nd Aug '12 4:34:03 AM by Greenmantle

@Green: The problem is that one is for when you are talking generally about a case that can apply to many people, whereas the singular they and "he/she" are for when you are talking about someone of indeterminate gender.

I do not know. "One" seems weird because they way it's used seems more like "you" than anything else.

Fair enough — but I'm not sure you'd like the fact the spoken Japanese language itself varies according to gender.

Best,

Finnish seems to be a lovely language. I find funny one of the few forms you don't have is one we (Portuguese language) do. The comitative case, more specifically.

pigeon,

I didn't meant actually using the Japanese pronouns (that would be just stupid) but figuring how to use the knowledge to make the English language more clear. Finnish seems better for that purpose, anyway.

edited 22nd Aug '12 4:41:09 AM by Heatth

Yes, I know, Japanese has highly gendered speech. Though the way I've seen "one" used is usually more like a formal version of generic "you" than singular "they."

@Green: Fortunately, there are forms of spoken Japanese, specifically teineigo, which are not gendered.

@Heatth: Ooooh, that makes more sense, and is a very good idea.

@Cats: I always use "one" in place of the generic you for similar reasons to using "he/she" in place of the singular they.

@Heatth: We do have the comitative case, but not for pronouns.

The problem with one is that it's completely unspecific. It means you, me, and everyone else.

Either way, the issue with using "one" as a replacement for singular "they" is because yes, while "on" in French is a singular non-gendered pronoun in French, it's used entirely differently in English, and to make it be used similarly in English would be forcing English to conform to Latin rules again, which caused this whole fake crisis of singular "they" in the first place. (though in colloquial speech, it's my understanding that "on" is used more like an informal English "we" much of the times...)

Even funnier. We only have the comitative case for pronouns.

It just hit me why single person they doesn't bother me, and it comes back to my dialect.

I use "us" as a first person singular all the time.

English is an inherently ambiguous language. Either we accept that or we use another one.

Or we could try to fix it.