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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

The interesting thing is that the singular usage of "they" doesn't get used with singular verbs. It seems that the syntactic pluralness of "they" is too strong for it to simply get thrown in place of "he" or "she" without changing the verbs.

I would say "she is here" or "he is here," but not "they is here."

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One of the things I find weird in English is you do that too “you”: “you are” even when talking to a single person; whereas in French (for instance) there are two different pronouns for the singular and plural use of “you” (“tu” and “vous”), with different forms forms for the verbs.

So using plural form of verbs with singular “they” does not seem that surprising to me.

English "you" is the grammatically plural (previously used also to denote formality, where it is not semantically plural) form, corresponding to French "vous". The English grammatically singular form ("thee/thou") corresponding to French "tu" has generally fallen out of use, so "you" has in effect become the all-purpose 2nd-person pronoun, but its still grammatically plural.

Likewise, "they" is grammatically plural, regardless of its contextual semantics.

Some sub-cultures of Australian society use: "youse" as the plural for "you" when addressing more than one person. For example: "Youse guys are late". Here there is a double plural "youse" and "guys" for one group of people. Also "guy" is generally considered to refer to men, but in this context "guys" is gender neutral - the group of people being referred to can be composed of both men and women.

But you also use "vous" as a form of politeness, be it to people older than yourself, more formal situations, or just people you do not know. It is very prevalent. This form also still has the verb in its plural form despite talking to only one person.

In that case, it seems like you would say "they are here." and realize that it's only one person from context.

> The interesting thing is that the singular usage of "they" doesn't get used with singular verbs.

Verb forms agree with the grammatical number of the subject, independent of the semantic number; in English those almost always are the same, but aside from "they", "you" (which is grammatically plural, even though its semantics are sometimes singular) is a case where they can diverge.

> Verb forms agree with the grammatical number of the subject, independent of the semantic number

That's what I find interesting: that "they" isn't actually being used grammatically as a singular pronoun that can be dropped in to replace "he" or "she." The entire grammatical construct is exactly the same as if "they" was referring to multiple people. It's the context that makes it clear that only a single person is being referred to.

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