So what does it follow up with? English doesn't have a non-gendered way to say "Do you want to meet him/her?"
Is the idea just to eliminate all useful suggestions that contain genders?
Is the idea just to eliminate all useful suggestions that contain genders?
"Do you want to meet the <noun>?"
"Do you want to meet <name>?"
"Do you want to meet ___" <prompt for autocomplete from set of pronouns>
etc.
I'm not going to repeat myself - my opinions on that topic are recorded in the comments of the article about Richard Stallman's opinion of "singular they".
But that seems unlikely - we're probably talking about an engine that just recommends whatever occurs frequently in its corpus (hence the article talking about the team black-listing swear words and so forth). In which case adding gendered pronouns to the list seems reasonable enough, and non-gendered forms will presumably show up regardless (to whatever extent they appear in the corpus).
People use English this way constantly and it's well understood.
Say do you want to meet them? would work fine in this case.
They is not singular. Replacing gendered pronouns with 'they' shits the flow of the sentence and creates ambiguity. There's a whole class of expressions that just stop working without a singular pronoun, hence the proposed 'ze' or whatever it is these days.
And what do you propose for all the languages where nouns and verbs and adjectives are gendered? In Russian, using gender-neutral phrasing when speaking about someone is an insult that implies that they're a thing rather than a person.
> Anecdote time: a friend from one of the nation's major universities was involved in a road authority funded study to evaluate the safety impact of newly installed speed cameras at several intersections. [...] They found there was none.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18532386
Edit: after I replied, you edited your comment to add the caveat "except sometimes in 3rd person". "They" is always a third-person pronoun, and there are no criteria that would make it acceptable only in a subset of situations.
Edit 2: now the caveat is gone. Can you just reply to me rather than changing what I'm replying to retroactively?
My them example was in reference to the parent's phrase, not a general prescriptive. And in your example, while them would be a bit odd, from context you can gather them refers to Vincent alone. If there were further people one would likely be saying Vincent and his children are in the lobby, do you want to meet them now? In either case, I was primarily referring to they.
> And what do you propose for all the languages where nouns and verbs and adjectives are gendered?
I don't. I was explaining they usage that a lot of english speakers seem to not be aware of. I agree with this linguist: https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/08/singular-they-prono...