How would you rephrase: "He requires access."
They require access would imply multiple people right?
They require access would imply multiple people right?
"There's a new person joining the team." "What do we need?" "They require access to the stack."
Both are obviously singular they.
"They are at the door right now, please open it asap"
You'd say:
"Someone is visiting, they are at the door right now, please open it asap"
This indeed does not sound unnatural or misleading to me anymore.
(I know you'd probably just rephrase the second sentence but this is just and example)
"They are at the door right now, please open it asap [and let a singular individual in]". If that bracketed portion is the intent, requires context. It implies a specific individual who you could identify by name or by a gendered pronoun if known (and unique in context) or description. Either way, you need to let the person you're speaking to know which "they" of the potentially many individuals at the door you want to permit in.
This context may have already been supplied. For instance, on visiting an office for an interview a name will already be supplied and the person (security, admin) doing the opening may already know the identity and that it is a singular person who is expected. In which case, "they", because of prior context, is entirely unambiguous again.
Most of the time, either the number of the noun is clear from context or you are completely fine not knowing what it is.
“They are waiting at the door for you.” Is there one of them? Is there more? Who cares, the sentence covers both!
Granted, Japanese has syntactic gadgets that enable you to add that information in a natural way in cases where you actually do care, but it’s still surprising at first how much communication works without obsessively marking every noun for number. How do Japanese, Chinese, and Korean speakers communicate without grammatical number? The same way Russian speakers communicate without grammatical definiteness, or English speakers communicate without grammatical perfectiveness, or all of them communicate without grammatical clusivity, etc.: either they mark it explicitly or—in most cases—they can perfectly well do without. It’s technically ambiguous, but only in the way every other word that isn’t marked for every grammatical category found across human languages (i.e. every single word) is ambiguous.
(In case you were wondering why speakers of Slavic languages sometimes tend to overuse “some” and “this” in English, that’s why: those are the way their native languages, lacking obligatory articles, mark nouns for definiteness when it actually matters; the overuse is what happens when you teach articles as “these weird formal words you have to use according to these weird formal rules” without telling your students that they actually bear meaning.)
Why "they requires access" isn't fine?
It looks grammatically incorrect but the ambiguity is removed thanks to the "s" particle.
English already has similar irregularities in other contexts which seem to bother nobody.
i.e the sentence "If I were you, I'd do X and Y". The word "were" looks weird there but it solves a problem. Can't we treat "they" as singular in a similar manner?
This can introduce ambiguity, but declining to use ancient (800 years, why are we debating it still?) inclusive phrasing because some people fail to create context for their pronouns is silly.
It just isn't.
When I was learning French I quickly learnt not to question why something is right or wrong. It's wrong because the natives say it's wrong. It's as simple as that.
I just feel (citation needed) that there are more non-native English speakers than native ones and natives' opinions is no longer enough.
"They need access" - no context, ambiguous.
"They need access" while pointing towards an individual, unambiguous; while pointing toward a group of new students on the first day of school, unambiguous.
"They need access" in an email as a single line or a subject with no message body, completely ambiguous and will elicit a response of "Who needs access?" If it's part of a prior conversation chain that the recipient can recall, they'll give access to however many individuals they are aware of be it one or one hundred because it's unambiguous in the context (for them, but not for us).
French and German also use a grammatically/historically plural form for polite "you". But Italian seems to use a feminine third-person pronoun for that purpose ...
I knew it could be applied to a group in certain cases, but only when referring the group as a single unit, really still singular. Or when speaking one-to-many, where each recipient is meant to hear you to refer to themselves, though the speaker spoke to a group.
"you 12 come with me" is really still referring to a single unit to me, the group, not the individuals. IE, it conveys no more meaning than saying "you come with me" where the object might be either a person or a group equally.
It's interesting, I don't think English has a way to distinguish "me singular" vs "me a member of a plural", other than by adding other words like "you all"
“The user can change settings by selecting properties. Once there, they can opt out of silly debates.”
Is there any ambiguity? Pronouns belong in places where an identity can be, well, identified. Not standalone. Sans context we don’t even know who “he” is. If it’s a real person and not a hypothetical person, use their gendered pronoun if desired.
“Jtsummers needs access. His credentials can be verified by…”