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Comment by always4getpass | Hacker News Reader

I always get so confused when 'they' is used for a single person. Is there any alternative? Everything seems to sound silly

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It's kind of odd, because people seem to accept singular "they" for strangers, but not once there's a name.

If I say: "I bumped into a stranger on the street and trod on their toes, apologised to them, and they apologised to me" - generally (in normal spoken conversation, not here when we're paying attention) people don't care. Using singular "they" for strangers is pretty common, and hundreds and hundreds of years old.

The problem comes when we give someone a name. If I say: "I bumped into Julie on the street and trod on their toes, apologised to them, and they apologised to me", people might think it sounds odd (if they're not used to it).

It's as if we have an order/hierarchy in which we expect to learn information about people. Like, by the time we know someone's name, we assume we should already have been told their gender, and we confused if hasn't happened yet.

I would say it’s more that “they” is used for individuals when the subject is specified previously in the sentence or conversation. In your example sentence, “the stranger” clarifies this. If the sentence were simply “They bumped into me on the street.” it is unclear if the subject is singular or plural.

In my second example, I used "Julie" instead of "a stranger". The subject is specified in exactly the same way, but people might find "they" more surprising in that case.

Some people might even take it as a potential clue that Julie could be non-binary, because of how much we expect gender-matched pronouns at that point. (Not saying they should, just that they might.)

Ah yes, my bad, you are correct. I meant to say that it's not simply that the distinction is between "named individual" and "stranger" but is more complex.

It seems like "they" is used 'correctly' for a singular subject when the subject has been previously referred to, but hasn't been given a proper name. But I'm sure a linguist has studied this in further detail.

This shouldn’t surprise you. Most people can infer gender from visual appearance alone with well over 99.99% accuracy without being explicitly told. If you know their name and other gendered indicators, it would be a marked anomaly NOT to know their gender.

I can also guess people's height to within an inch or two, but I can still have an abstract conversation about a friend-of-a-friend I've never met, without expecting to be (constantly!) told how tall they are unless it's relevant to the story.

So in terms of the order we learn things about people we've never met (when it's not directly relevant), we expect gender much earlier than many other attributes. It mostly reflects our values as a society, as language often does, but that's kind of my point.

I misunderstood your point. I thought you found it remarkable that we expected to be able to discern gender quite quickly. In any case, I don’t know how much our gendered language indicates our values as a society, probably that gender is just information-dense (lots of behavior correlates strongly with gender) such that many languages evolved gender as a utility (and indeed English actually lost much of its grammatical gender though probably not because the density of information was lower in English-speaking societies, but rather due to massive influxes of non-native speakers which had a broader simplifying effect on the language).

But gender has a much more significant affect on how someone acts than their height, and significantly affects what kind of relationship you could have with that person.

That makes it relevant for stories like "I met him at a bar and we shared a few drinks," but not "I sold her a cup of coffee this morning" or "She's interviewing for our team."

Gender is also kind of a useless differentiator in many contexts because of the way that gender correlates with behavior: if there's a group of mothers or Catholic priests or even schoolteachers or venture capitalists, I'm much more likely to find pronouns for short/tall useful than for male/female in communicating about specific members of that group.

I can also infer race from visual appearance with similar accuracy, but if I say "Can you hand this to that black person" would be super weird and quite likely objectionable, even if I was correct that the person was black. And nobody would want abbreviated pronouns on race - "I talked to whim and whe said to talk to blim" just seems sort of ... overly concerned with people's races.

It's a linguistic quirk of English that "Can you hand this to [that female person]" is accepted and natural. On first principles it shouldn't be.

(It is interesting IMO that Japanese has a pronoun for "she," and it's a compound word that literally translates as "that woman." It only developed as a pronoun in the last century or so, from the influence of Weatern works which had he/she or equivalent pronouns.)

You reminded me of Douglas Hofstadter's "A Person Paper on Purity in Language"

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...

In which he pretends to be from a parallel dimension where you don't use he and she (for male and female) but whe and ble (for white and black) to highlight the absurdity of language making gender explicit.

My daughter is very young and currently refers to everyone, including Disney princesses as he/him which sounds totally weird to me, but I guess it is one option for phasing the distinction out.

Thank you - I hadn't seen that before, and this is basically how I feel about having to attach a gender to anyone I refer to in the third person.

Here's the first-principles argument: Most people grow up and learn the language in a family group, which has a mix of ages and of sexes. Saying "he" vs "she" here usually cuts the number of people you could be talking about in half, it's very informative, one bit! It will often let you omit the name, or shorten the sentence elsewhere.

Whereas always marking what continent you're all living on, or what race you all are, usually doesn't convey any information. So it seems entirely unsurprising that languages tend not to build this in. Many do build in markers for what species, because again this was useful information, since most of our ancestors spent a long time farming.

This sounds like working backwards. Up this thread, people have suggested that the reason is that gender matters more to society than height (this is why we don't announce people's height). When this argument is defeated by race, it switches again to what "seems reasonable".

What evidence, beyond "this seems reasonable" is there for this argument?

Sometimes multiple things are true, and none are "defeated". It seems beyond obvious that our ancestors 1000 years ago did a lot more gossiping about who was going to marry who, than about anything we'd today describe as racial distinctions.

I'm not debating whether it was true 1000 years ago. I'm saying that today, it is a linguistic quirk of English. Of course English is a language that was in use in some form 1000 years ago - and we don't use all the same words we did then, because some of them don't have value to us today. (Singular you, for instance, was much rarer back then!)

Sure, but order 10^3 years is the right time scale to think about linguistic features. People lived in villages and farmed. They speculated about other people's sex lives a lot. Argued about legitimate descendants and inheritance. Could not afford to ignore the difference between cows and bulls. And many (though not all) of their languages have gender deeply built in.

None that I'm aware of have anything resembling our modern idea of race built in. For the obvious reason that approximately nobody in said village had been 100 miles, nevermind to another continent. If a language had such a feature, the next generation would probably never have heard it used, and thus would not know what it meant. (I wonder whether any languages have grammatical markers for slavery or caste? That would be the closest thing I could imagine, divisions that many people would have talked about every day for millennia, in some places.)

Forgetting features seems to happen much quicker than acquiring them. Post-1066 English lost a lot of complication which German retained (including grammatical gender of nouns, IIRC). As you say, singular you is much younger than that, but importantly it's about forgetting a distinction we used to make. I'm not an expert on why this happened, but I didn't think it was some great shift in what needed to be communicated, just a mutation/simplification.

Gender matters more than race or height (I.e., race doesn’t make one markedly stronger or un/able to birth children or any of the social roles that emerge out of those properties), and as I mentioned elsewhere, multiracial societies weren’t a universal reality (and aren’t today) such that it would leave a mark on grammar.

Wealth, education, and any number of other categories also matter a ton. We exclusively use gender and perhaps age to label people. Why?

Because education didn't exist for most of the last few thousand years. Wealth did, but I guess it wasn't worth modifying your speech of every day to encode that today isn't the one day a year you happen to encountered a nobleman.

We don't. We use titles like 'Professor', 'Captain', 'Pastor', 'Doctor', and 'Congressman'.

> When this argument is defeated by race

What do you mean? You mean that racist societies might be expected to distinguish between races with noun classes? Seems to me this might well have happened in some language at some time, or at least a variation on it: distinguishing between those inside the clan, and those outside.

It looks like the sex distinction is the one most commonly reflected in language, which strikes me as empirical evidence that it's generally the most valuable one.

> Common gender divisions include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine and neuter; or animate and inanimate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Gender_of_p...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class#Languages_with_noun...

Race is fundamentally different than gender in many ways. Contrary to your claim, you can’t discern race as easily as gender—there are far more racially ambiguous people than there are gender ambiguous people. Unlike how gender proxies for biological sex, race doesn’t proxy for any interesting biological phenomena around which we might organize our culture—thus race is much less information-dense than gender. The likely reason you find racial qualifies objectionable is that your culture experienced racism in its history (e.g., the US’s historical oppression of African Americans), not because it is a completely useless disambiguator (although it can be if the circumstances are right—such as a group where all members share the same race). We don’t have specific pronouns for specific races because (in addition to the previously cited reasons) interactions with specific groups were rarely universal experiences. That said, we do have pronouns that can indicate membership to our people or the people across the river (originally “race” referred to a people or ethnic group—e.g., “the Celtic race”): “us” and “them”.

Considering singular they has been in common use for centuries[0], changing it now would be an uphill struggle. People have used words like "ze" but they haven't caught on.

[0] https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...

Its use with an unspecified antecedent is centuries old, but usage for specific persons is not. Time will tell whether it'll catch on.

The article I linked to gives 1794 as an example of using singular they to refer to a specific person. And as it also points out, there's nothing particularly unusual about using they in the context of a specific person as well as being a plural. It is commonly accepted that "you" is now both singular and plural.

I can't decode what the 1794 usage was. The article describes it as "singular they", used presumably in reference to one of these three authors, but, well, it would help to see the passage in question.

I don't think there's a better choice today than 'they' but that 1794 example doesn't show that this was a natural use back then. It was a conscious and intentional deviation from standard usage just as it is today, as was noted by the contemporary 'mansplaining' commenter and the contemporary response to him.

Butchering of the English language is hardly a modern phenomenon.

English is not a dead language and so it evolves. Consider 12th century English: Ealdred arceb hine to cynge gehalgode menn guldon him gyld gislas sealdon syððan heora land bohtan.

You get confused because you're not used to it. It gets less confusing the more you see it used. There are some cases where it introduces unnecessary confusion but the same is true for any other pronoun.

There are some proposed non-binary or gender neutral pronouns but none of them seem to be in use much.

For my money the best thing that ever happened to English was abandoning grammatical gender/noun classes centuries ago - no more masculine, feminine or neuter, everything is ‘the’ or ‘a’.[0]

Based on that, I propose we push for ‘it’ as a sole singular pronoun (and keep ‘they’ for plural, as knowing if someone is referring to one or many is far more useful in almost all contexts than knowing whether they are referring to a man or a woman (or ship, or country, etc.), and those few contexts where it is relevant should be easy enough to glean from other information.

If you think that could never work, I'd point out that Mandarin managed without gender-specific pronouns until contact with Europeans, and even now they are only distinguishable in written form.[1]

Alternatively, there's Stallman's proposal for ‘person’, ‘per’ and ‘pers’.[2] I'm doubtful of any proposal that involves creating new words (see ‘xe’, Spivak pronouns, etc. ), but everything else Stallman says seems to come to pass so maybe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English#Decline_of_g...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_pronouns

[2] https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html

The problem with "it" is the word's existing use to refer to non-person objects. One could easily interpret being called "it" as an insult, ie: this thing is not even a human.

I might not even be willing to refer to a dog as "it" in most circumstances.

Honestly though, I'm with you that it's a linguistic gap English needs to fill. Similarly, the second person plural pronoun need to be accepted as "y'all"- and I say that as someone not even from the southern USA.

True, which is why it needs to start with people choosing to be called ‘it’. It's yet to happen, but I'll do my bit if/when I'm ever asked for my preferred pronouns.

Also, as someone currently leaving in a place rich with Scousers I would put forward ‘yous’ as a second-person plural pronoun that rolls off the tongue a bit better (and, I would conjecture, makes more intuitive sense for learners of English).

I have encountered a few people who use it/its pronouns.

The movement grows

I still don't understand what's the problem with simply using "you" as second-person plural pronoun, most of the time it's perfectly clear from the context whether it's singular or plural. And if not, there's also "everybody" or "everyone".

In German we have "sie" which is both third-person singular female, third-person plural, and when written "Sie" also a formal second-person singular/plural. It works just fine.

The well-known mathematician M Spivak is amoung those who has suggested 'e' (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun).

Somehow the deliberate proposals often seem not to succeed.

So what's the possessive? 'er? Sounds accidentally like her in accent.

Interesting. Sounds like a French Canadian speaking English.

Yes, it feels grammatically weird, because e.g. you use "is" for he and she but "are" for they. But there's no option that isn't a compromise in some way. The alternative is coming up with an entirely new pronoun and convincing people to use it, and people have tried that as well. It seems that the singular they is much more widely recognized, though.

FWIW, I think new words are easier in this case. This new usage of “they” is really confusing when you come across it. Typical usage of first person “they” implies a degree of unfamiliarity with the person in question. So using “they” for someone who is known causes you to question your reading comprehension.

To me it's very natural, perhaps because I've been argui-- er, interacting with so many people on the internet, whose true identities and genders are completely obscured behind an arbitrary username.

"I replied to always4getpass, and told them that the generic pronoun seems pretty normal, I hope they agree."

There were probably people saying very similar things around the time when the “thou”/“you” distinction was being replaced with always using “you”. Both changes of the language make some changes, but not very large changes, and you’ll probably get used to it.

The big difference, though, is that most people have no use for this usage of “they” because most people don’t deal with non-binary people on a regular basis, if ever.

Do you have evidence to back up that claim?

The prevalence of gender dysphoria seems to be extremely low:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria#Epidemiology

This usage of 'they' would then be further restricted to the subset of people with gender dysphoria who identify as neither male nor female.

Right now, it is a cultural marker. If you run a linguistic use analysis, you see that it is used on the coasts and a few key urban areas in the US and it hasn't made progress toward universality.

Except you know Shakespeare using singular they[0]. Then the fact that I’m willing to bet decent money that random individuals in rural areas also use singular they all the time without realising. It is just when a trans person wants singular they exclusively that it becomes an issue.

1: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.h...

I'm surprised that this misses the distinction made by signalsmith above: the way Shakespeare uses "they" to refer to someone is unremarkable, but what strikes many present-day speakers as an error (even if they fail to explain why) is the use of it to apply to a particular person, especially a named person.

Do you have any citations? If you mean the deliberate usage of singular they as a neuter pronoun for subjects who identify as non-binary, then sure. But otherwise, singular they is used by almost everybody some of the time. always4getpass' comment, at least on its face, refers to the latter usage.

Frankly, I think even people offended at being forced to use the former usage will relent. Refusing to accommodate (rightly or wrongly) is confrontational, and being confrontational is exhausting. It's already quite natural to use singular they when using a passive, impersonal voice, and using a passive voice is what people will invariably resort to when they're exhausted.

Good blog post on the subject here: https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-t...

TL;DR it's been commonly used this way for centuries, all the way back to Shakespeare and even earlier.

There are alternatives, xe/xer/xem, but you can't wish new English words into existence even if they might be useful. You end up sounding sillier trying to use the new made-up words than if you just resign yourself to "they".

And can I add that this comments thread here is peak HN. There's a fascinating article about an interesting part of history I'd never heard of before, and yet all but one of the comments here are nitpicking over word choice. And I'm not helping any either.

I managed to learn Spivak pronouns because I knew someone who used them, but that didn't make it easy.

You get used to it with practice. More enbies[1] are coming out in more places, so you'll get there.

[1] Nonbinary -> NB -> enby