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