Just out of curiosity, is it considered best practice these days to use the gender-neutral "their" even with a specific subject (Obama) who is known to use masculine pronouns for himself?
These aren't avoidable problems: e.g., in the greeting for a business letter ('Dear ...'), or when getting the attention of a member of restaurant waitstaff whose name I don't know, etc.
Someone needs to come up with a plausible set of gender-neutral terms. They/their/them works for she/hers/her/he/his/him circumstances, but the needs are broader than that.
Some people use Mx as a gender neutral but I don’t think that would fly with a more conservative minded person.
I've never seen Mx, so I think many people would wonder what it meant. Just "M." seems better and matches other usage (though outside contemporary English).
Preferred form of address, not just gender, and this has been the rule for quite a long time. Even within the classical binary, there are all kinds of variations of status, preference, relationship with the sender, etc., that feed into that.
John Smith (a man) might be properly referred to in a salutation as any of:
“Mr. Smith”
”John”
“Dr. Smith”
“Your Excellency” (without the “Dear” that would prefer the others)
“Rev. Smith”
“Father Smith”
(And most of these correspond to one or more different forms that would be used in the main address, as well.)
I typically lean towards gender neutral terms in my speech, but this actually wasn't one of those cases. I had originally used "his", but noticed it resulted in he/him/his referring to two different people. "Destin has also peaked [...], as he interviewed Obama during their presidency." vs "Destin has also peaked [...], as he interviewed Obama during his presidency."
Obviously, Obama was president and Destin wasn't, but the sentence still reads more weirdly with the grammatical implication that Destin was president.
Also, you reminded me of a quote from yesterday: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore."
You can think of pronouns as sort of like `$?` in bash or `_` in Python's interactive shell. They give you a short way to refer to a previously mentioned noun. When you have more than one of these "special variables", you can use them more often as long as they conveniently get uniformly distributed across the previously mentioned nouns.
So, in English, you can say:
"Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. gave Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk Koyaanisquatsiuth Williams a sweater for Christmas. She liked his gift."
The second sentence can use two pronouns because they happen to be unambiguous. With only a single pronoun, that sentence ends up like:
"Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk liked Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff's gift."
(This is obviously an extreme example for comedic effect.)
This is also why Romance languages have noun gender for inanimate objects where actual biological gender isn't meaningful. It's not about genitals, it's about scattering a few pronouns uniformly across the noun space.
Of course, one might rightly argue that gender is not a good mechanism to use for your pronoun distribution. We could do something like shells do where we assign pronouns based on recency of the mentioned noun. Or some other system.
But my point is that gendered pronouns aren't completely bananas. They serve a pragmatic function.
> For it to make sense they would need to (for example) refer to (say) a table as 'he' later in a sentence. Do they do that?
I don't speak any Romance languages beyond high school Spanish, but I assume that's the case.
Actually in that example, you still don’t need gendered pronouns to resolve ambiguity: “they enjoyed the gift”.
Now, trying to parse out if "they" is meant to refer to a group or an individual when used in place of s/he, that does take some work.
No effects on gender equality seem observable.
I assume that in some older form of Chinese the sounds must have been different, but they converged and people get by fine in spoken language.