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Comment by progval | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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