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Comment by electrograv | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always liked pronouns like “they” because it never made sense to me (when growing up and learning “proper grammar”) why our only singular pronouns must be gendered. It seems better for everyone to focus on the substance of the sentence without anyone having to think about gender at all, unless it’s explicitly relevant to the sentence (and it’s usually not).

That said, I wish we actually had an explicitly singular version everyone agreed upon. Since “they” is usually thought of as plural by default (at least without context), it can be confusingly ambiguous to use when referencing sets of people in both singular and plural.

Perhaps we should recycle old words like “thee” ;) (mostly joking, but it would be kind of cool).

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You can't easily gender plural pronouns because the people/things they refer to could be a mixed group.

Gendering singlur pronouns is one way to avoid ambiguity.

Take these sentences:

I met a boy and a girl. They gave me a toy.

If it said "he" or "she" gave me the toy, you would know who specifically gave me the toy. The fact it says "they" likely means they acted together to give me th toy (otherwise I'd have said "he" or "she").

You could dump gendered pronouns and make everyone "they". But then you lose information. Who gave me the toy?.

You could dump pronouns all together, but then you would have to specifically name all the people/groups and use their full names all the time. That's long and complex.

Both pronouns, and semi-specific pronouns (gendered or plural/singular or cased ones or any combo of those) let you push more information in less time. They're a hack, but a very useful one.

Any misunderstanding can be improved with better communication skills, which everyone can stand to improve

The actual reason is that language evolves organically and randomly, and so there's no a priori reason to expect any of it to “make sense”.

Though "organically" falls perpendicular to "randomly" as we've made sense of much of what has arisen over the long term in the actual organic world right?

In the same way many (perhaps reading Douglas Adams' puddle analogy) sided with evolution over creationist fervor, I think eventually many will begin to sympathize with the minority of thinkers who have "made sense" of why it was so important for pre-21st-century speakers to know the sex of everyone in a discussion, over an explanation that might be more incentivized...

Yes, there is sometimes an internal logic in the sense that it’s possible to find reasons for why language evolved in one way or another. (Historical linguistics is a field!) But that doesn’t have to follow any criteria that we might care about, like consistency or expressiveness.

To stretch your biology analogy even further: sort of like how humans have an appendix.

I wouldn’t try to read anything into culture based on the specific set of pronouns any language has. Turkish and (spoken) Chinese have never distinguished between “she” and “he” and it’s not because knowing someone’s sex is less important in their cultures than it is in Indo-European ones; it’s just random chance.

I see where you're coming from but that doesn't really refute the idea for me... Some cultures didn't develop footbinding, but that doesn't disqualify footbinding as what it is.

And even if they arose purely for convenience, why did they stick around? If today's populations really developed the self-reflection to operate critical of importance of sex, why are "he/his" not as weird to say as "whitey/whitey's" would be as pronouns?

In an ideal world, we'd probably have a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun. Meanwhile, in the real world, that's such a political minefield that anything is going to get a lot of people up in arms and call all sorts of attention to itself. And just using "they" works pretty well in the vast majority of cases.

we'd probably have a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun.

Is not "it" the third person singular? Although that does carry its own overtones.

It is not a great one to use for humans, unless you want to imply less than human status.

Well yes, I did say that.

As you say, "it" carries its own overtones especially in non-binary sexual identity contexts where singular they is clearly relevant. "It" isn't really gender-neutral so much as it's explicitly non-gendered/not human. (I mean, you'll get people who object to those who would call their pet it.)

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