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  • Roses are red, violets are blue, singular they predates singular you.

  • People who were/are upset about singular they really don't understand that language change is pervasive and unstoppable. Shifts in pronoun agreement are no different.

    Prescriptive grammarians cling to their (arbitrary) rules because they believe in a "pure" form of the language. That itself is a misunderstanding and just mirrors other common things some people do to divide the masses. Do not listen to such people.

    As someone deeply engrained in the field of Linguistics for decades (personally, academically, and professionally), I can tell you that one of the biggest challenges in teaching people how language actually works is breaking down the preconceived notions they have about such things -- the exact notions those prescriptivists tout.

    • Again, the corrupt and unsound form of speaking in the plural number to a single person, you to one, instead of thou, contrary to the pure, plain, and single language of truth, thou to one, and you to more than one, which had always been used by God to men, and men to God, as well as one to another, from the oldest record of time till corrupt men, for corrupt ends, in later and corrupt times, to flatter, fawn, and work upon the corrupt nature in men, brought in that false and senseless way of speaking you to one, which has since corrupted the modern languages, and hath greatly debased the spirits and depraved the manners of men;—this evil custom I had been as forward in as others, and this I was now called out of, and required to cease from.

      Thomas Ellwood, ca. late 1600s.

      • This kind of thinking is exactly what is meant by "prescriptive grammar". It is, in many ways, not even grammar, at least not in the scientific sense.

        Amusingly enough, modern day prescriptivists would now probably flag Mr. Ellwood for a run-on sentence.

    • People who were/are upset about singular they really don't understand that language change is pervasive and unstoppable.

      What do you mean by this, exactly? As someone who is deeply "engrained" (?) in the field of linguistics, surely you must be aware that singular "they" has been in usage since the 14th century.

      • It has been in usage a long time -- and yet, it is still considered "improper" English by many a grammarian (though improper English is as nonexistent as Standard American English).

        In the 18th century, there was a push away from singular they on the basis that it did not fit within the logic of the agreement paradigm as some understood it. Most (if not all) rules suggesting it is poor usage derive from this thinking.

        But this is exactly the problem: the fact that singular they arose naturally is the point. If it does not fit within one's understanding of the agreement paradigm, then that understanding is wrong. That is the key difference between prescriptivism and descriptivism, at least in the way those are often discussed in Linguistics.

        If those grammarians cared about grammar as much as they claimed, they would be seeking to better describe it and not trying to change the way that others use it. When I say that they don't understand "language change is pervasive and unstoppable", I mean that prescriptivism is naturally conservative in suggesting that one should not deviate from some particular usage; that isn't how language works.

        PS- I assume your quoting is to suggest "ingrained", but I'd argue that ingrained and engrained both work in this context. Even if we disagree there, spelling isn't really about language either -- simply one possible representation of it. Given that the purpose of language is information transfer, if I had put "ngrayned" above and you had gotten my meaning, then it would have served its purpose.

  • I love linguistics but it has some weird stuff in it.

    Chinese doesn't have gendered pronouns in the spoken language. "He", "she", and "it" are all pronounced, “tā”. Possession and number are done by adding 的 (de) or 们 (men) after the pronoun, irrespective of gender. Originally, there was only one character for "tā", 他. In the early 20th century there were several westernization movements in China. One of them included adding gendered pronouns, in order to be able to more accurately translate English texts. Thus, 她 (she) and 它 (it) were adopted. (they used to mean other things and were repurposed). One immediate problem that people noticed was the choice of components. 他 includes the 亻component, which means "person". 她 replaces it with the 女 component, which means "female". So some linguists pointed out that this implies that women aren't people. The current situation is that people tend to use, 她, when there is a single subject who is known to be female. When it's unknown or there are multiple subjects they default to, 他 or 他们.

    German is heavily gendered. You can still linguistically gender someone correctly but, in addition to pronouns, you also need to match adjectives. You also need to get comfortable with the gender of nouns often not making any logical sense. eg:
    Moon - Der Mond - masculine
    Girl - Das Mädel/Mädchen - neuter
    Sun - Die Sonne - feminine
    There's the added confusion that the third person feminine singular, is spelled and pronounced the same as the second person plural. The second person doesn't differentiate in gender but it's often impolite to use the singular so it's common to refer to males as "Sie". Not to say that any of that is hard. Native German speakers constantly need to match the gender of adjectives to nouns so they're very used to it.

    Russian seems to be more complicated. I recently read that Masha Gessen uses, "they". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masha_Gessen It seems that Russian uses gendered past-tense verbs. They originally used masculine verbs out of, "hoping that I would wake up a boy. A real boy" but switched to feminine verbs as a teen and stuck with that. If anyone speaks Russian well I'd love to hear more about how gender is used and perceived in Russian. Particularly from the linguistic, rather than the cultural, perspective. It looks like Russian does have gendered pronouns https://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/pronouns.php but the Wikipedia article doesn't say which they use.

    edit: clarifications and grammar

    • i like this comment but i feel the need to reply because it touches upon a pet peeve of mine in linguistics: there is a persistent myth in the modern period that grammatical gender is useless, pointless, or somehow arbitrary and is just some sort of vestigial, rotting, lexical limb that made it to the 21st century by fluke.

      this is simply not true. just because grammatical gender often appears arbitrary or illogical doesn’t mean it actually is. and just because grammatical gender follows many, many rules does not mean there are no rules. grammatical gender is just a fairly common form of noun class system. as with most forms of noun classing, what the rules are in a given dialect can be a little wishy-washy but they are certainly not arbitrary.

      for example, you point out the german Mädchen as an example of illogical noun gendering. this is an opinion often expressed by foreigners learning the language, and even by linguistically-ignorant germans. it makes sense on the face of it, this word has a similar meaning to the english phrase “little girl,” so it is strange the germans decided to sort this word into the neuter gender, no?

      well, no. it isn’t strange and it isn’t illogical, in actuality. -chen is a diminutive in german. for those who are unaware, diminutives are suffixes/prefixes in languages that serve to make nouns feel smaller or more cute in a language. think booklet vs book or dog vs doggie for some english examples.

      what are some examples of more german diminutives?

      das Kätzchen - kitten

      das Hündchen - puppy

      das Plätzchen - a cookie (depends on dialect exactly what this refers to afaik but generally is always some sort of cookie)

      das Ohrläppchen - earlobe

      noticing a trend? these are all neuter! and thus we uncover a little grammatical rule that grammatical gender was trying to tell us. all diminutives are neuter.

      most every “arbitrary” example of grammatical gender people provide has some sort of similar reasoning or rule behind it, some story or information it is trying to give you that makes speaking the language that much easier.

      just because what it is encoding doesn’t seem useful or logical to (rhetorical) you doesn’t mean it is not. grammatical gender is much more than just gender-washing everyday speech for kicks and does carry useful meaning, if you can be bothered to puzzle it out. attempts i’ve seen to “de-gender” spanish (this is just what is local to me) all fundamentally misunderstand what it is they’re even trying to do and often opt for rotely tearing out the entire gendered case system without offering proper lexical and linguistic infrastructure for the language to actually effectively function without it. these attempts sound clunky because they are clunky! and to be perfectly clear i’m not dogging on the premise, just the serious attempts i’ve seen implemented in real life speech and their implementation. i think it’s relevant bc it showcases how modern misunderstanding of what grammatical gender is can realize as actual, negative manifestations in the non-conceptual world. why this is important to think about more than passingly!

      edit:formatting

      • Thank you for your thorough response. You make some good points. I think we're talking about slightly different topics though.

        There's always some explanation to why certain words or grammar forms evolved. Sometimes those reasons are commonly known, sometimes the "commonly known" reasons are wrong, sometimes linguists argue about the origin, sometimes they have no idea.

        For everyday speakers, the "logic" of immediate usage, is more important than the etymology.

        German speakers are generally aware of the "rule" that diminutives are neuter. If you look at this list words, some of them have non-diminutive forms;
        Die Katze
        Der Hund
        Die Ohrlappe
        Two of them don't really.

        "Platz" is grammatically, the non-diminutive form of "Plätzchen" but it doesn't mean "(normal sized) cookie" (aside: Not to make fun of our Northern friends but "Keks" gets around that confusion) "Magd" is the non-diminutive form of "Mädel" but girls aren't (generally) "little maids." I can't remember the last time I heard anyone say, "magd" to refer to a living person.

        Also notice that when we strip off the diminutives, the remaining words are no more "logical". Cats and earlobes aren't inherently feminine and dogs aren't inherently male.

        My usage of "logic" in the context of German grammar, is that grammatical gender is often at odds with both self identified gender and biological gender. German speakers are generally comfortable saying "Der" about subjects, that nobody would think of as male. German speakers are likewise comfortable saying "Sie" about subjects that nobody would think of as female and, "Das" to subjects that are very obviously not neuter.

        The reason for contrasting several languages was that I suspect there are different cognitive loads involved in correctly gendering people, depending on language. Many people notice that native Chinese speakers routinely "randomize" he/she/it. They don't just misgender trans-people, they often just forget which one means which. German speakers are pretty used to playing around with endings to imply additional meaning. "Dutzen" is often done without the word "du". Speakers easily put together the correct endings for the singular and listeners instantly recognize the implication.

        As a final example, I'd offer the sentence, "___ ist ein fesch__ ___." I posit that if I insert "Die" vs "Der" into the sentence, most German speakers would instantly correctly fill in the rest of the blanks with, "-es Madl" or "-er Bua". If you try to say the wrong one it just sounds weird.

      • The big thing that people get wrong and which makes me so very tired is that IT'S NOT SOCIETAL GENDER, it's just a case of terrible terminology that we're stuck with. A chair isn't feminine or whatever, it's just that words related to femininity happen to be in the same class as other words.

        I really wish we could all agree to call it basically anything else, like "genre" which shares the same root but doesn't create the connotation to societal gender.

  • Ngl, took me a long while to get used to defaulting to "they" after a lifetime of assuming "he".

140 comments