People of the Internet: we can fix the English language | Hacker News Reader

People of the Internet: we can fix the English language

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7 pointszlotty16 comments

'They' is perfectly acceptable, and has been for hundreds of years.

From http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/they :

The use of they, their, them, and themselves as pronouns of indefinite gender and indefinite number is well established in speech and writing, even in literary and formal contexts. This gives you the option of using the plural pronouns where you think they sound best, and of using the singular pronouns (as he, she, he or she, and their inflected forms) where you think they sound best.

In Latin based languages there are no gender neutral pronouns, traditionally the masculine pronoun should be used in gender neutral contexts. I've also noticed lately that there is a trend to use the feminine pronoun, specially in fields (like computer science) where the agent is likely to be a man.

>If you spend a lot of time writing copy for the web or answering support emails, you know what I’m talking about. When you start a sentence, you can feel the nausea coming on from a mile away: there’s no gender neutral third person singular pronoun.

Technically, there is such a thing. "it" is a gender neutral third person singular pronoun[1] and even more amusingly it is not part of the proposed "replacement" list. It does sound very weird in most cases - and would definitely look dehumanizing in a support reply, but technically speaking the language is not broken.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_%28pronoun%29 . Example given: "Is it a boy or a girl?"

I like the Mandarin Chinese approach:

he, she and it: ta

his, hers, and its: ta de

they and their: ta men and ta men de

Clean, simple and consistent (although the ambiguity is another problem).

My college girlfriend's dad's first language was Chinese and he would often refer to either her or her brother as "it." "Tell it to come down for dinner!"

I just use "they". That has a better chance of adoption than any of the proposals listed.

I agree. The proposed options seem too weird to be accepted easily. If you just started using one in your writing, people would think it was a typo.

I don't think there's a downside to just using "they".

I also don't understand the reluctance to use it. It's as versatile as "some" in logic/mathematics. And its already common usage: "If a person walks into a bar, and they order a drink..." - sounds fine to me. Maybe there are cases where it sounds strange?

  I was talking to a group of friends about this and he thought it was weird too.

Is that confusing? That's about how it sounds to me when anyone uses a plural pronoun in place of a singular one. I know it's common usage but it's not a particularly good solution.

Surely it's no worse than this:

I was talking to a group of friends about this and thon thought it was weird too.

Well "he" is never plural but "they" is sometimes singular (like the logical "some").

Does the sentence: "I was talking to someone about this and they thought so and so." really sound weird to you? It doesn't to me. Also I wouldn't call it a "solution" because it wasn't just invented to solve this problem, it's just already common usage.

No we can't : English isn't the mother tongue of all the People of the Internet/World !. If you want your customers, the people who pays your salary, speak perfect English please stick with UK-Market and stop cry.

The author claims using "they" is common, but grammatically incorrect - then recommends some arbitrary (and currently unknown and incorrect) set of replacement words to be adopted and thus become correct by weight of numbers.

Why not just continue using "they" until it is widely accepted enough to be correct? Frankly, I don't think we're too far off that. The supposedly erroneous example he quoted read fine to me.

Yes. Treating 'they' as singular also has precedent in English with the replacement of 'thou' with 'you' as second person singular. Perhaps future Southerners will use 'they-all' as third person plural.

My thought exactly. We should all just agree that using "they" in that context is grammatically correct, and just call it a day.

I agree. Especially since all the proposed ones he linked to were horible. For a word to be accepted it has to flow and none of those do.

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