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Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

I envy the English grammar over this. In German the equivalent third person plural pronoun "sie" could absolutely not be used in singular context and would cause the predicate of the sentence to have to switch to plural too which doesn't work semantically.

So in German, I'm stuck with trying to evenly distribute female and male pronouns or writing the ugly equivalent to "he/she"

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> would cause the predicate of the sentence to have to switch to plural too which doesn't work semantically.

Not sure how English is different here. We do have to make somewhat awkward constructions using "they", and the predicate changes as well.

"She has to make sure her code passes tests before committing it" changes to "They have to make sure their code passes tests before committing it".

I hadn't actually thought of that you're right. We still treat they as plural from the perspective of the verb even if we're using it as a singular pronoun.

It really is sort of a hack to use an existing pronoun in a way that sounds least wrong to people.

All language is spaghetti code.

I really wish people would just invent a new word, rather than breaking our ability to distinguish singular vs plural.

they have invented many... that might be part of the problem

I wonder if, as a singular "they" becomes more common, we will begin seeing it treated as singular grammatically.

i.e. "They has to make sure their code passes tests before committing it"

It sounds weird after a lifetime of treating they as plural, but is a lot more clear. I have a friend who's S.O. prefers to be referred to as "they", and I constantly find myself confused whether we are talking about his S.O., or some group of people.

"They have" is already normal grammar for singular they. "Tell each programmer that they have to commit their code."

I find that hard to believe considering how ubiquitous singular-they is in virtually everyone's speech including yours.

What's bizarre to me is how many people suggest this is some new phenomenon lately when actually it comes so naturally to us that we don't even notice it. You've used and read singular-they probably daily in your life since you could read, yet now you've convinced yourself you're somehow only used to plural-they.

Your post history even shows that you use singular-they which is basically guaranteed for anyone with enough comments on the site: "I assume they [upstream HNer] are referring to Chrome on mobile."

It turns out that context makes this distinction so simple that we totally forget it's a non-issue.

No, we won’t. (Even if singular “they” becomes ubiquitous, which is by no means guaranteed).

You was once exclusively plural. It is now usually singular, but we still use plural verb forms with it (“you are”, etc.). Conversely with on in French, which was once exclusively singular but now means “we” in colloquial speech yet still takes singular verb forms (“on est français” = “we are French”. “il est français” = “he is French”.)

Wow, I never noticed that! I suppose it's rather naive to think that common use would evolve to follow rules, rather than the other way around.

German also has Sie playing the role of its formal "you," and the singular "she," in addition to meaning "they." I don't see why it's hard for it to pick up an additional responsibility.

While it's possible in English and we do it a lot now, there was a lot of argument against it for a long time. It still sounds weird to me, but I've accepted the necessity.

Perhaps German should just do the same? Or invent a new neutral pronoun that doesn't break the rules.

I believe that singular "they" is fairly ancient in English, it's not really novel even though it's become a bit of a hot topic over the past couple of decades with the broader arguments over gender in society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Older_usage

When it comes to bringing the same grammatical features over other languages you have to keep in mind that English grammar is pretty un-gendered compared to German or Romance languages for instance. Maybe it would be possible for German to start using Sie in the singular if people try hard enough (after all they already do it for polite 2nd person, but that might actually make it more confusing instead of less) but that would be a dead end in Romance for instance since we have feminine and masculine "they" (and no neutral) so it wouldn't solve anything.

Beyond that in English grammatical gender is basically limited to pronouns, whereas in other languages adjectives, nouns and even sometimes verbs have to agree so the churn is much higher if you decide to tweak those rules. Some francophone people champion "l'écriture inclusive" for instance in order to solve this problem but the changes in grammar are much more invasive than merely s/<s?he>/they/.

In French we have a similar problem but sometimes you can work around it by using "la personne" (the person) and then use the feminine for the rest of the sentence. It's convenient were you're talking about an hypothetical people, of course it doesn't work if you're talking about a concrete person whose gender you want to obfuscate. Certainly there's something similar in German?

The historically "correct" way to do it in English was just to default to masculine unless the person in question was known to be a woman. (Or unless the person was in a role that you just assumed was a woman, like a secretary.)

Which is one of the problems. You're using the third person pronoun to make assumptions about genders for some role. (And beyond that, you're assuming binary gender identities.)

>The historically "correct" way to do it in English was just to default to masculine unless the person in question was known to be a woman.

I realize the implication of you putting "correct" between quotes but I want to point out that it really depends what time frame you have in mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Older_usage

The prescription that "he" be used as gender-neutral is, in the grand scheme of things, fairly recent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Older_usage

>The earliest known explicit recommendation by a grammarian to use the generic he rather than they in formal English is Ann Fisher's mid-18th century A New Grammar[...]

Meanwhile gender-neutral singular "they" has been used by some authors for much longer:

>"Eche on in þer craft ys wijs." ("Each one in their craft is wise.") — Wycliffe's Bible, Ecclus. 38.35 (1382)

By correct, in this context, I mostly meant English (especially American English) style guides and similar that were published over a number of decades prior to maybe ten years or so ago. I'm sure there are lots of individual examples that don't follow that timeline though.

After people started to become more generally sensitive to gender role assumptions and language that reinforced those assumptions, I can recall lots of examples of "he/she" constructions and/or writing examples in a way that you had both a male engineer and a female engineer.

The preference for using singular they in part because it doesn't still rely on binary pronouns is relatively recent in my personal experience--at least in formal writing.

Native Swahili speaker here and the language cares only if its a being or not a being and for beings, it simply doesn't care if its a man, a woman, a horse, a pig or an alien with ten sexes.

Its possible to speak naturally in Swahili without revealing the gender of the person being talked about and for this reason, i find the he/she/they in English to be very strange and limiting at times.

You don't have an impersonal pronoun?

The one thing about English that is a mess are our pronouns. In Italian you can just use "si" and be done with it. I then am not declaring me, you, s/he, we, they, one, ect. I'm explicitly not declaring the pronoun.

Spanish has that too, and I'm pretty sure French does too. The closest English has is "one" which doesn't really work as well.

We do. But "it" carries a strong implication of not only gender-neutral but inhuman. A lot of people won't even use "it" for a pet. And there's even a fairly strong tradition of actually using feminine pronouns for, e.g. ships.

Maybe they (the language) can use the historical “neuter” pronouns iz/sui, ës/iro, imu/im.

Most likely people will use singular sie and it will cease to be exclusively fem in singular.

This is not a mess in german, because it would not be "sie", it would actually be "Sie".

Edit: Typo

no. it would be "sie". Personal pronouns are not capitalized.

The only "Sie" in use is the second person singular in formal form (something else English doesn't have) when used to address a person directly.

Well, you are right about that, but this is the kind of thing I usually see done in things like job descriptions to avoid gendered third person and to sound more personal

"Sie können fließend Englisch sprechen und [...]"

Using "sie" to specify one person in german sounds a lot like "pluralis majestatis" to me. Which is sorta like (but not quite) the "royal we" in english

> Using "sie" to specify one person in german sounds a lot like "pluralis majestatis" to me."

no. we have that too, but it's the second person plural. Nobody uses this any more though because we killed our kings back in the early to mid 1800s :p

Why don't you just use sie and not change anything else?

That doesn't really work in German as the pronoun "sie" changes meaning depending on context. It can mean "she": Sie ist kalt (she is cold). It can mean the plural "they": Sie sind kalt (they are cold). And it can be used for the formal "you": Kommen sie? (are you coming?)

But isn't that what we're talking about here? "They are cold" can be plural in English, but it can also reference a singular "they". The formal usage would just go away with use probably, or stay around totally on context.

Seems like "sie" would work just as well in German as in English.

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