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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

I've gotten used to saying "they" when referring to people I don't know. When it comes to people I do know, I prefer "he" and "her" because it still provides context when referring to multiple people while saving on syllables. But I think it's a good thing not to immediately assume gender when referring to someone(one doesn't know) in an occupational role so we get out of the habit of thinking of nurses as "she", for instance.

I really appreciate someone pointing out that "they" is perfectly adequate. Ze and zir are still gendered, and extraterrestrial genders at that.

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> I really appreciate someone pointing out that "they" is perfectly adequate. Ze and zir are still gendered, and extraterrestrial genders at that.

I've always been really confused at these weird attempts at pseudo-gender-neutral pronouns when "they" exists. It's like… I'm not a native English speaker. I learned about "they"-as-singular in English year 2. How do native English speakers not know about it? How do you get to "zir" before you learn about something this basic?

Many native English speakers don't know about it because it was technically incorrect when they were taught English ("he" was both gender-neutral and male), and sort of still is, even though language evolves and the gender-neutral-singular "they" has certainly entered the common parlance.

The singular "they" has been in use since the 14th century[1]. But there are plenty of people who speak English as a second language, where their mother tongue has gendered nouns (which includes effectively all European languages except English) -- so it's very hard for them to get over the mental hurdle of having to constantly reference gender in speech. For instance, in Serbian (my mother tongue) you cannot speak in a gender-neutral way because all verbs have different suffixes depending on the gender of the subject.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

It's been around for centuries, but if you're over 25, you were probably taught that it was wrong.

I'm 22, and grew up in Australia -- the concept of singular "they" never sounded strange to me growing up (but I also don't ever recall being specifically taught that it was correct or incorrect). My parents remarked that it was weird that English had this concept which was so foreign to them -- but they probably ran across it when they were getting more fluent in English.

I've never met someone (in person) who has had a strong opinion against the use of singular "they" (though I do know they clearly exist, Stallman being an obvious example). I wonder if it's a cultural difference between where I live in Australia and the US, or if I happened to fall into a filter-bubble of people who aren't against the concept.

I'm 28 and singular-they was taught to me in school; year 2 of English as I said. This is in France which doesn't even have a great track record in producing anglophones.

In French, there is a gender-neutral He and I can assure you you it is nothing like the English one. We quite literally have two very distinct and incompatible "il" ("he") words; the neutral one better translates to "it". (Il pleut => He is raining [sic] => It is raining).

In unknowns, French genders to masculine by default, though some people may choose to disambiguate if targeting a group of people (Same as saying 'He or she' in English).

French has plurals for both "he" and "she" ('hes' and 'shes' => "ils", "elles"). In English, you'd translate both to "they", because you simply do not have plural gender pronouns to work with. "Ils et elles" => "They".

Translating back to french without the disambiguation, we use "Ils". But again, not the masculine one, the distinctly-neutral-albeit-grammatically-masculine-because-french-has-no-neutral-gender one. Which is simply the plural of "it". However, because it's dehumanizing/objectifying to refer to a person as "it", English uses "they".

So there you go:

- Je / Tu / Il / Elle / (Il|Il) => I / You / He / She / (It|They) - Nous / Vous / Ils / Elles / Ils => We / You / They / They / They.

In English, this is all honestly very instinctive. There are only seven distinct pronouns! But that doesn't mean anglophones don't get to think about how to use them in all different circumstances… "they" is a multi-use tool, just like "you".

The serious answer is that in normal colloquial English, they was typically only used as a singular pronoun when talking about an unknown person; for example:

A: Somebody called asking for you.

B: Oh, what did they want?

This has always sounded perfectly natural in colloquial English (at least in the US; I can't speak for other countries). Contrast with the following:

A: Joe called asking for you.

B: Oh, what did they want?

This construction is slowly becoming more widespread, but would have sounded absolutely bizarre and ungrammatical to most native speakers (regardless of literacy/education) before the movement for gender-identity inclusiveness became mainstream, because people didn't really conceive of the possibility of knowing a specific person but not being able refer to them as "he" or "she".

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In response to sibling comments: I think this explanation is a lot more convincing than any variant of "singular they is (or was) wrong". There are two very different kinds of singular they, which elicit very different grammaticality responses from native English speakers.

That doesn't sound any less grammatical than:

A: Joe called asking for you.

B: Oh, what did she want?

(or vice versa if Joe is female)

It turns out that - in a purely objective, language-design sense - the anatomical details (or clothing, whatever) of the bag of meat hosting the specific person this particular use refers to is a really, really dumb way to assign a grammatical gender to a proper noun.

This is sort of an orthogonal issue. Even without knowing Joe's gender, A would have accepted either "what did he want" or "what did she want", under the assumption that B does know Joe's gender.

However, A would not have accepted "what did they want" as grammatical under any circumstances.

> in a purely objective, language-design sense

There is no such thing as this in linguistics.

"Anatomical details" is certainly not the weirdest or most arbitrary-seeming way of assigning noun classes, across the world's languages. Compare e.g. the Ganda language. From Wikipedia:

> ten classes called simply Class I to Class X and containing all sorts of arbitrary groupings but often characterised as people, long objects, animals, miscellaneous objects, large objects and liquids, small objects, languages, pejoratives, infinitives, mass nouns, plus four 'locative' classes

> However, A would not have accepted "what did they want" as grammatical under any circumstances.

Huh, so what do they use when B doesn't know Joe's gender?

> There is no such thing as this in linguistics.

Well, more pedantically: in the sense that it makes determining whether a sentence is grammically correct more dependent (or dependent, if it wasn't already) on random details of the outside world that shouldn't matter until we check for semantic correctness.

> is certainly not the weirdest or most arbitrary-seeming way of assigning noun classes

Of course not, natural langauges (actually by definition) are 'designed' by pseudo-evolutionary processes; if anything, it's surprising they aren't worse.

> It turns out that - in a purely objective, language-design sense

Let me introduce you to many of the world's languages which have a concept of completely arbitrary object gender.

A spoon is feminine in French. It's masculine in german. A fork is feminine in both. Oh and a knife is neutral in german (not in french, which doesn't have a concept of neutral; a knife is masculine. Unless you mean like a dagger… that's feminine.)

You'll note the abscence of genitals, chromosomes, or anatomical details on most of the above.

> but would have sounded absolutely bizarre and ungrammatical to most native speakers (regardless of literacy/education) before the movement for gender-identity inclusiveness became mainstream, because people didn't really conceive of the possibility of knowing a specific person but not being able refer to them as "he" or "she".

I strongly disagree. I don't think responding "Oh, what did they want?" would have ever sounded bizarre or ungrammatical even if this was decades ago and everyone knew that Joe was a man. Language isn't always literal. Using a singular "they" (a pronoun normally used for an unknown person) instead of "he" in that context doesn't necessarily mean the speaker literally doesn't know if Joe is a man. It could just as easily be a subtle way to indicate that the speaker doesn't know Joe very well.

They is overwhelmingly used for plural. See how the wikipedia article starts:

> They is the third-person plural personal pronoun (subjective case) in Modern English.

And only after that:

> Although still controversial,[citation needed] and not officially accepted in formal context,[citation needed] it is also used with singular meaning, sometimes to avoid specifying the gender of the person referred to: see gender neutrality in language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They

You say that, but the singular they has been in use since the 14th century[1] with criticism only becoming prevalent since the 19th century.

Also I would pay strong attention to the [citation needed]s.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

I think part of it is they were trying to draw attention to how ubiquitous gender is, and how much impact it has in apparently neutral language. I've read a whole bunch of sci-fi with hirs and so on, and it definitely does something.

afaik, "ze/zir" is not supposed to be gender neutral, but to have a gender denotation outside he/his and she/her.

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