The addition of ze (gender-neutral pronoun) is even better than OK.
I like the idea of "ze" (gender-neutral pronoun), but this is the first I've come across it. Hopefully it'll catch on as IMHO it's a big improvement over alternatives like "they".
While on the topic of "missing" words, when will our language finally get something reasonable for "you (plural)"?? Extant "y'all" (southern) and "yous" (NJ) are not cutting it!
We still have ye.
Perhaps more importantly, I don't think singular "they" would be considered proper in formal writing.
> The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375, where it appears in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf.
from https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
There's not a man I meet but doth salute me/ As if I were their well-acquainted friend.
The catch is that it sounds best when there's no specific antecedent: "Every user of the workshop must be responsible for their own safety."
It sounds odder when it is deliberately used to avoid (mis)gendering a specific individual: "Pat does not discuss their* gender." I think this is the niche that 'ze' is supposed to fill.
So, the “their” could change to any of “hir”, “mer”, “zir”, or “zes”, depending on which “ze” pattern was used.
I suspect it depends on dialect. "their" just sounds more informal to me, "his"/"her" sounds slightly more formal.
I looked at some older examples of singular-they and they almost exclusively refer to an unknown or unspecified person ("Everyone loves their mother"). Using it for a specified person seems to be fairly new: Time Magazine had a piece describing how their (in this sense) was the 2015 word of the year.
It does sound wrong for some uses of he/she.
“I’m worried about my kid at summer camp”
“Don’t worry, I’m sure they are having a great time”
Sounds very natural to my west coast ears.
The accord with the verb is still as if it's a plural pronoun. Just like with "you" which technically also used to be plural, doesn't take the old singular second person forms: "you have" not "you hast"
There's also youse, seen in Irish english. (at least in the Dublin dialect, can't say I've heard it much in the north)
Edit: I should instead say I never encountered it among actual locals using the word in normal speech. Later on, the plural was sometimes used jokingly after the idea that "y'all" was plural had taken hold in popular, non-Southern culture.