Roses are red, violets are blue, singular they predates singular you.
Tom Scott also hated reddit before it was cool
Gender neutral pronouns are just so much more convenient; I tend to use them even when I know someone's gender. I do wish English had some common-use ones that were explicitly singular, though.
I do wish English had some common-use ones that were explicitly singular, though.
In the long run I predict that "they" will follow the same path as "you" - it'll become increasingly more associated with the singular, until it's the default interpretation. I also predict that both "they" and "you" will eventually require a pluraliser to convey the plural.
"Vos" (you, singular) in Rioplatense Spanish followed a similar path.
If that's correct, eventually there'll be explicitly singular second and third person pronouns.
my prediction is for th'all and y'all or just thal and yal in the long run
Dude is supposed to be gender neutral and singular.
Still, maybe don't. Not everyone agrees with the gender neutrality of "dude". How many dudes have you slept with?
i think there is alot to be said about the influence of patriarchy on masculine words becomming applied to everyone. men being seen as the norm and all that...
Ahah, you changed it plural which genders it. It’s dudes and dudettes in that case.
Did you see that dude I slept with last night?
Totally different now that it’s a singular.
Yeah language sucks.
Tom Scott has a page of reflections and corrections for that video from a few years ago. He's a good ally but I think we all envy past Tom's optimism.
I also appreciate the thoughtfulness he showed when he found out someone he had recently collaborated with had made transphobic comments in the past.
You're never going to appease everyone, and I appreciate that he shared the thinking that led him to his decision. I just regret not finding out about the incident until like a week after I ordered her book.
People who were/are upset about singular they really don't understand that language change is pervasive and unstoppable. Shifts in pronoun agreement are no different.
Prescriptive grammarians cling to their (arbitrary) rules because they believe in a "pure" form of the language. That itself is a misunderstanding and just mirrors other common things some people do to divide the masses. Do not listen to such people.
As someone deeply engrained in the field of Linguistics for decades (personally, academically, and professionally), I can tell you that one of the biggest challenges in teaching people how language actually works is breaking down the preconceived notions they have about such things -- the exact notions those prescriptivists tout.
Again, the corrupt and unsound form of speaking in the plural number to a single person, you to one, instead of thou, contrary to the pure, plain, and single language of truth, thou to one, and you to more than one, which had always been used by God to men, and men to God, as well as one to another, from the oldest record of time till corrupt men, for corrupt ends, in later and corrupt times, to flatter, fawn, and work upon the corrupt nature in men, brought in that false and senseless way of speaking you to one, which has since corrupted the modern languages, and hath greatly debased the spirits and depraved the manners of men;—this evil custom I had been as forward in as others, and this I was now called out of, and required to cease from.
Thomas Ellwood, ca. late 1600s.
Every time I read “he or she” I think “YOU COULD HAVE SAVED FIVE CHARACTERS!!”
mad respect for counting those spaces
Programmer brain go brrrrr
{s,}he
He/she
s/he
length("s/he") == length("they")
It also just sounds awkward to say he/she
No rule in title = you must eat 196 gummy sharks,, WITHOUT A YOUTUBE VIDEO
also my homophobic mom threw away a book because the talking plant wanted to be called 'they' instead of 'it' and it's too woke for her. LITERALLY JUST A TALKING PLANT 😭
Your mom should definitely check out the monk and robot series by Becky Chambers. The first main character (the monk) uses they pronouns but the robot uses it pronouns. Your mom will love it!
But when the World needed him most, he vanished.
I still don't get why people have such an issue calling people what they want to be called.
You don't balk at a guy or a girl named Robin, or Alex, or any of a hundred different androgynous names....
But you take issue with "he", "she", and "them"?
Why?
My only problem, and to be clear this is entirely my problem, nobody else's, is that I'm so dumb, I frequently forget and call someone he/she when they prefer they/them. I fuck it up sometimes. I try, but decades of societal norms are getting in the way of me getting it right sometimes.
To every person who identifies as they/them please forgive me because I'm going to screw it up. Just correct me when I say it and hopefully in time my brain will stop making this mistake.
Because a bunch of bad faith actors have been carefully building an outrage-generating cash machine on the idea of 'culture wars' for decades.
I still don't get why people have such an issue calling people what they want to be called.
Why?
Normally I’m the type to wax philosophical for a few paragraphs about what the heck may be going on in their heads, but honestly I think it’s assholes being proud to be assholes. Punching down just feels so good. That and people who are suffering enough that they don’t care about others, but don’t realize they need to work on their mental health. Or they’ve been conditioned to see doing that as a character flaw or weakness. And of course the snowball effect of those people raising the next generation of assholes, building up some inertia behind the generational trauma.
Because underlying it all, regardless of which impactful arguments they think they are making or refuting, they just don’t want to be nice to people that are different.
Fun fact: there has been more time between the first use of singular they and today than there was between the first use of plural they and the start of the criticism of singular they
If they're here, then why am I alone 😓
I love linguistics but it has some weird stuff in it.
Chinese doesn't have gendered pronouns in the spoken language. "He", "she", and "it" are all pronounced, “tā”. Possession and number are done by adding 的 (de) or 们 (men) after the pronoun, irrespective of gender. Originally, there was only one character for "tā", 他. In the early 20th century there were several westernization movements in China. One of them included adding gendered pronouns, in order to be able to more accurately translate English texts. Thus, 她 (she) and 它 (it) were adopted. (they used to mean other things and were repurposed). One immediate problem that people noticed was the choice of components. 他 includes the 亻component, which means "person". 她 replaces it with the 女 component, which means "female". So some linguists pointed out that this implies that women aren't people. The current situation is that people tend to use, 她, when there is a single subject who is known to be female. When it's unknown or there are multiple subjects they default to, 他 or 他们.
German is heavily gendered. You can still linguistically gender someone correctly but, in addition to pronouns, you also need to match adjectives. You also need to get comfortable with the gender of nouns often not making any logical sense. eg:
Moon - Der Mond - masculine
Girl - Das Mädel/Mädchen - neuter
Sun - Die Sonne - feminine
There's the added confusion that the third person feminine singular, is spelled and pronounced the same as the second person plural. The second person doesn't differentiate in gender but it's often impolite to use the singular so it's common to refer to males as "Sie".
Not to say that any of that is hard. Native German speakers constantly need to match the gender of adjectives to nouns so they're very used to it.
Russian seems to be more complicated. I recently read that Masha Gessen uses, "they". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masha_Gessen It seems that Russian uses gendered past-tense verbs. They originally used masculine verbs out of, "hoping that I would wake up a boy. A real boy" but switched to feminine verbs as a teen and stuck with that. If anyone speaks Russian well I'd love to hear more about how gender is used and perceived in Russian. Particularly from the linguistic, rather than the cultural, perspective. It looks like Russian does have gendered pronouns https://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/pronouns.php but the Wikipedia article doesn't say which they use.
edit: clarifications and grammar
i like this comment but i feel the need to reply because it touches upon a pet peeve of mine in linguistics: there is a persistent myth in the modern period that grammatical gender is useless, pointless, or somehow arbitrary and is just some sort of vestigial, rotting, lexical limb that made it to the 21st century by fluke.
this is simply not true. just because grammatical gender often appears arbitrary or illogical doesn’t mean it actually is. and just because grammatical gender follows many, many rules does not mean there are no rules. grammatical gender is just a fairly common form of noun class system. as with most forms of noun classing, what the rules are in a given dialect can be a little wishy-washy but they are certainly not arbitrary.
for example, you point out the german Mädchen as an example of illogical noun gendering. this is an opinion often expressed by foreigners learning the language, and even by linguistically-ignorant germans. it makes sense on the face of it, this word has a similar meaning to the english phrase “little girl,” so it is strange the germans decided to sort this word into the neuter gender, no?
well, no. it isn’t strange and it isn’t illogical, in actuality. -chen is a diminutive in german. for those who are unaware, diminutives are suffixes/prefixes in languages that serve to make nouns feel smaller or more cute in a language. think booklet vs book or dog vs doggie for some english examples.
what are some examples of more german diminutives?
das Kätzchen - kitten
das Hündchen - puppy
das Plätzchen - a cookie (depends on dialect exactly what this refers to afaik but generally is always some sort of cookie)
das Ohrläppchen - earlobe
noticing a trend? these are all neuter! and thus we uncover a little grammatical rule that grammatical gender was trying to tell us. all diminutives are neuter.
most every “arbitrary” example of grammatical gender people provide has some sort of similar reasoning or rule behind it, some story or information it is trying to give you that makes speaking the language that much easier.
just because what it is encoding doesn’t seem useful or logical to (rhetorical) you doesn’t mean it is not. grammatical gender is much more than just gender-washing everyday speech for kicks and does carry useful meaning, if you can be bothered to puzzle it out. attempts i’ve seen to “de-gender” spanish (this is just what is local to me) all fundamentally misunderstand what it is they’re even trying to do and often opt for rotely tearing out the entire gendered case system without offering proper lexical and linguistic infrastructure for the language to actually effectively function without it. these attempts sound clunky because they are clunky! and to be perfectly clear i’m not dogging on the premise, just the serious attempts i’ve seen implemented in real life speech and their implementation. i think it’s relevant bc it showcases how modern misunderstanding of what grammatical gender is can realize as actual, negative manifestations in the non-conceptual world. why this is important to think about more than passingly!
edit:formatting
Learning French it just seemed normal to use singular they
Vous
Vous is the 2nd person plural pronoun. Only for when you're speaking directly to someone, which isn't gendered anyway (2nd person singular pronoun is Tu).
French doesn't have a gender neutral 3rd person pronoun. It's il or elle. Which is unfortunate. There have been attempts to create a gender neutral 3rd person pronoun but none have really taken off. Most French non-binary people who prefer gender neutral pronouns in English will use the pronoun in French that most closely align with their presentation. Il for mascs, elle for femmes. I'm hopeful for this to change honestly.
thank you Lemmy user 'ILoveBoobies' for your valuable contribution to this conversation
Ngl, took me a long while to get used to defaulting to "they" after a lifetime of assuming "he".
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