Gender-Neutral Pronouns

Another possibility is that you can’t use ‘he’ as a gender-neutral pronouns in a context where gender is presumed. Although the actual gender is unknown in both your examples, it’s presumed because of parallelism.

On another related note, I thought I’d mention that Hungarian doesn’t have gendered pronouns. It is completely possible to tell comprehensible stories and follow discussions without pronouns having genders. It’s also easier to deal with. Such basics of language seem to go quite deep. Although I speak English well, at times when I’m really tired I will sometimes mix up gendered pronouns. I find this curious given that I rarely use Hungarian these days (my native tongue). I guess at some very core level that’s how my brain got wired? (Less infantile comments on this will be appreciated.:)

If it’s good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for me–

“There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me,
As if I were their well-acquainted friend.” (Comedy of Errors, Act IV Scene 3)

Stolen from an excellent essay on this very subject: http://www.users.bigpond.com/burnside/they.htm

;)

‘They’ is a plural pronoun. Period. I wholely approve of the attempt to use a gender-neutral pronoun, but it MUST be a singular, otherwise you have a grammatical mess. Sorry, but usage by a famous writer does not constitute correctness. By the way, the only reason ‘he’ became the gender-neutral pronoun is because in our culture male is presumed to be the natural state and female the abberation. It’s the same phenomenon that produced ‘man’ for ‘the human race.’

Y’know, at some point it seems appropriate to remember that language is an artifact of human culture and therefore legitimatically subject to change at human will. In actual usage, singular “they” seems to be catching on. There are good arguments for it. There seems to better idea on offer. So let’s just decide it is legitimate and use it. Saying makes it so. If the language police don’t like it, put the onus on them to justify their objections. To be fair, sometimes I think a little conservatism with the language is advisable to avoid it degrading from simple sloth, but when conflicts like this come up, they should be decided on the merits, not on the superstition that “they” is a plural pronoun regardless of what we may think. “They” is what we think it is.

I would like to see some actual evidence rather than just confident pronouncements from those who claim “they” has to be plural. As Kathryn says, there is evidence that “they” came into the language as a singular-only pronoun, and its usage as a plural is a latter-day mutation, so if that’s right the said argument won’t be historical. And it pretty clearly can’t be from general use. Nor can it be from use by the most approved/respected sources. And I’m not really sure what other kind of argument could be offered. Maybe someone will say that God decreed that “they” is always plural. I won’t believe them, but if He really said it I guess that would be an alternative argument. Short of that, I’m not sure where the argument is going to come from.

Good point about “he” not being acceptable. I also have a problem with “they” being used in the singular. On-line, most of my friends use “hir”, “hirs”, or “hirself” for objective and possessive case singulars, but a workable nominative form escapes us. “Hi” wouldn’t work in speech, as it would sound too close to “he” to do any good. Suggestions?

When I was in high school, I decided for a while that since ‘they’ wasn’t the correct gender-neutral pronoun for the singular, I would use ‘it’ instead.

This severely irritated a number of my classmates who were unable to process ‘it’ as applying to a person in a non-pejorative fashion.

I agree with those who propose “they”as a gender-neutral, singular pronoun but I can’t get even one of my colleagues in my Rhetoric and Writing Studies Department at SDSU to agree with me. He or she always brings up the numbers game, using language as a mathematical construct and not a living means of communication. The Modern Language Association (see “Handbook for Writers of Research Papers,” 60) goes through the same number-agreement rigamarole, as does Anne Raimes in “Keys for Writers” (262). Two things:
1. As noted by that damned medievalist, there is a gender bias problem in pronoun usage, and we should do something about it–official-like, with MLA and the other pooh-bahs.
2. I’m sure we all recognize that the most fierce, rigid, “defenders” of normative, algorithmic grammar are Bush supporters, no?

I think 2 in Chris’s post is fine. Indeed the very locution appears “several times on Google”:http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Everyone+should+look+at+themselves%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&filter=0. Here’s “over 2000 instances”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=%22Everyone+should+*+themselves%22&btnG=Search of people using “themselves” as bound by “everyone”. I’m deferring to the wisdom of crowds on this one.

But I’m guessing that at least a few people have heard of the ungendered ‘spivak’ pronouns (coined by Michael Spivak) which became popular in MOOs and similar environments.

Neologisms don’t usually work to correct perceived grammatical anomalies, though: instead, ‘what you’ve got’ is moulded to fit.

Cool to learn that Hungarian has ungendered pronouns. Chinese is the same.

German on the other hand has three genders, masculine feminine and neuter. And a young woman is neuter instead of feminine.

aside from the fact I forgot to type “look”.

Sharif

And just when I thought you were offering us room for experimentation…

Can anyone explain to me why the two examples offered by Pullum are unacceptable? They sound just fine to me. I venture to say that they will sound fine to anyone whose ears have not become gender-obsessed. I doubt whether most people would even blink if hearing either sentence in daily conversation.
In fact, “Either the husband or the wife has perjured himself” is the only way to say what is meant here without awkwardness or confusion. “Either the husband or the wife has perjured themselves” makes it sound as if the statement of one party has somehow made both of them guilty of perjury. Should we say instead “Either the husband or the wife has perjured himself or herself”? Ugh!
This whole style of argument is questionable in any case. How can two sentences prove anything about the language? Their value as evidence must rest on an assumption that the language is rigorously consistent, in the sense that constructions as individuated by grammarians are permissible everywhere if permissible anywhere.

Time to set a few things straight:

‘He’ as an epicine pronoun: http://www.bartleby.com/64/C005/004.html

‘They’ as a singular epicine pronoun: http://www.bartleby.com/64/C005/018.html

BTW, ‘they’, ‘their’ and ‘them’ came from Norse, as a matter of point.

Anybody who thinks the use of ‘they’ as a singular should really study linguistics for a while. Finno-Ugric languages (Hungarian, Estonian and Finnish) get by quite well without a distinction between genders. Latin and Greek distinguish between interrogative and relative pronouns, yet in English the lack of distinction rarely causes a problem. There are languages like Russian and Latin that don’t have indefinite or definite articles. And there are languages that get by with just three personal pronouns. And don’t forget that English doesn’t distinguish between the plural and singular second person, so how would another lack for the third cause problems?

Contrary to the prescriptivist idea that lacking such distinction in langauges will cause problems, each of the languages I’ve mentioned have ways of resolving any such problems when they arise, through the use of context, adverbs, etc.

To screw about with what humpty dumpty said: A word means what I want it to mean, as long as everybody else can understand it.

As far as I can tell, the only responses I’ve got to the challenge of what makes “they” plural have been either straight out repititions of the claim (and repeating something doesn’t make it right, nor does repeating it again) and appeals to experts. I’m not sure who’s on the Bartleby’s expert panel that Keith refers to, but I’ll note that “Language Log”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/, which is where this thread started, has a lot more distinguished linguists than we’re going to find here. In any case, if Bartleby’s are going to refer to _the typical student_ as a singular noun I’m certainly not going to take what they say very seriously. (Just what exactly is _the typical student_ meant to denote. A student with 1.5 parents?)

If we’re just comparing experts at this point, I’ll note that “this rather magisterial book”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521431468/qid=1093009567/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2_2/026-3487924-1202019 approves of singular _they_, and I’m pretty sure it was written by people who’ve studied a bit of linguistics.

On David’s point, I thought the Pullum examples were striking for the following reason. Normally I think of examples like (1) as being inappropriate rather than ungrammatical. (Note I didn’t star it.) But Pullum’s examples sounded completely awful, in a way that (1) didn’t. So I’m not _trying_ to beg any questions here. Though I admit I look like I was making a hasty generalisation in saying that no dialects licenced those sentences.

And of course it is an option to simply deny that the language is systematic at this point. But when there is a simple systematic explanation of the data (or at least the data as it appears to me) I don’t know why I should buy in to unsystematic explanations.

Anyone who insists that “they” is not and cannot be singular has centuries of useage and Languagehat standing against them; if they wish to continue to do so, that’s their own lookout. —Anyone who insists that any sentence can simply be rewritten so as to eliminate the need for a gendered pronoun to refer to an individual of undetermined gender, thus obviating the need to even consider the problem, hasn’t given enough thought to the necessary mellifluosity of prose, and the sheer drudgery of rewriting; so long as they never edit my copy, they may say what they like.

Attempts to craft or graft a gender-neutral singular pronoun for English go back a surprisingly long way. I wrote about them a whiles back. (At the time I was resigned, if a bit snerkily, to the use of “they” as a singular; I’ve since come fully round that corner. If, like most recent converts, I’m a bit of a zealot, well, I’m attempting to temper that.) —I would like to note, however, that any credible attempt to create a full set of pronouns, based on gender, for any grouping which (largely) consists of two genders, needs not three pronouns to get by, but five:

• male;
• female;
• androgynous, or epicene, for those individuals or occasions when one wishes to indicate a mix of both;
• sexless (“it,” natch);
• and assuming no gender at all, or non-specific.

That last is necessary for those occasions when it would be inappropriate or unnecessary to refer to a person’s sex (or gender) in the capacity in which one is addressing them: as presidents or police officers, as reporters or handyfolk, as letter carriers or committee chairs.

So on the whole, I think the singular “they” is a fine, fine hack for the problem in question: any discomfort one might feel at tripping over an assumed plural in a singular context is much, much less than the general discomfort of assuming the general, usual gender to always be one and never the other. Genderless “he” is far kludgier than singular “they.”

“Someone who is considering whether to enter into a contract with others should take careful stock of their financial resources.”

What is the antecedent of possessive pronoun?

Sorry — I see that wolfangel already noted E. Nesbitt’s practice in his above: I should have read the comments more closely.

In penance, here’s a song that addresses the issue. It is sung to the tune of “Adon Olam.” (Which tune to Adon Olam? When the song scans right, you’ve got the right tune.) I’m afraid it presupposes a bit of knowledge of contemporary Judaism. Apologies to those who find it cryptic.

In days of yore, when God was King
The pronoun choice on Yom Kippur was no big thing
But then one day, with great surprise
Mankind observed that humankind was twice its size

[Chorus]
We can’t use “he;” we can’t use “she”
We can’t use “it;” we can’t use “thee”
The question is: what can we use?
We have to find a way to speak of God–we’re Jews!

The old guard said: “Let’s just use ‘Lord’”
The young guard went to pose the question to the Board
The Board said: “What? You’re asking us?
Go bug the Rabbi —he’s the one who made a fuss.”

[Chorus]

The children said: “We know the rule
We learned it back in Gimel Class at Hebrew School
It’s aleph bet, not A, B, C…
And ‘mi’ is ‘who’ and ‘hu’ is ‘he’ and ‘hee’ is ‘she’”

[Chorus]

The Rabbi said: “Now don’t you fret,
I’ll go and post the problem on the Internet!”
And so he did. Here’s God’s reply:
“When I am speaking of myself I just use ‘I.’”

Well 2000 may not seem like much, but there’s under 700 for “everyone should * himself”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=%22Everyone+should+*+himself%22&btnG=Search and only 9 for “everyone should * herself”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=%22Everyone+should+*+herself%22&btnG=Search so I think the crowd is with _themselves_ as being at least acceptable here.

Of course on this point there’s no universalising claim to be made. If someone wants to speak a dialect of English on which ‘their’ can only be a plural, that’s their choice. All I’m claiming is that there’s a perfectly good dialect of English (the one spoken by Shakespeare, Wilde etc) in which this rule does not hold.

I was going to make the E. Nesbit point but two people got there first. I’m pleased to see other people have noticed. Her usage always makes me laugh a good deal. ‘Everyone took off its coat,’ oh chortle chortle.

I have a friend who’s a linguist, and gets very annoyed at the problem Eszter refers to. She (m’friend) knows perfectly well that ‘they’ can be a singular – but she also knows that a lot of people don’t know that and will think she is silly or ignorant or both if she uses it that way in writing – so she doesn’t – which annoys her. Kind of damned if you do damned if you don’t sort of thing.

(It is true about the usual ability to re-cast the sentence though. Speaking as an editor, I usually can do that in such a way that the seams don’t show.)

Let me come in on Kip Manley’s side, with a citation from the OED, for “they, pers. pron.” at

http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/00251026?query_type=word&queryword=they&edition=2e&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=iPky-WkPmrY-3101&hilite=00251026

*********
2. Often used in reference to a singular noun made universal by every, any, no, etc., or applicable to one of either sex (= ‘he or she’).
See Jespersen Progress in Lang. §24.

1526 Pilgr. Perf. (W. de W. 1531) 163b, Yf..a psalme scape ony persone, or a lesson, or else yt they omyt one verse or twayne. 1535 FISHER Ways perf. Relig. ix. Wks. (1876) 383 He neuer forsaketh any creature vnlesse they before haue forsaken them selues. 1749 FIELDING Tom Jones VIII. xi, Every Body fell a laughing, as how could they help it. 1759 CHESTERFIELD Lett. IV. ccclv. 170 If a person is born of a..gloomy temper..they cannot help it. 1835 WHEWELL in Life (1881) 173 Nobody can deprive us of the Church, if they would. 1858 BAGEHOT Lit. Stud. (1879) II. 206 Nobody fancies for a moment that they are reading about anything beyond the pale of ordinary propriety. 1866 RUSKIN Crown Wild Olives §38 (1873) 44 Now, nobody does anything well that they cannot help doing. 1874 [see THEMSELVES 5].
*********

The citations begin in 1526, so singular “they” is certainly not in the spirit of a neologism. Although, as my father once responded to another OED citation, “They didn’t know how to spell back then, either,” I suspect that hoary usage comes as close to making something correct as anything can.

Oops. Of course, I meant, “I probably should have closed my last sentence with the phrase, “hoary usage comes as close as anything can to making something correct.

Here are a couple of nice, old, utterly respectable citations of ‘themselves’ with ‘everyone’ as antecedent. I got them from the OED.

1600 SHAKES. Lucr. 125 Euery one to rest themselues [ed. 1594 himselfe] betake.

1874 G. W. DASENT Half a Life 3 Every one likes to keep it to themselves as long as they can.

“Tamar, thanks for posting that song, I love it! Do you know of others like it?”

Actually, it’s part of a series that I wrote in honor of my father’s retirement. (He was a congregational rabbi for 35 years.) I’m afraid the rest are a bit too “insidery” for public posting.

Apropos the Nesbitt: interestingly, some of her *characters* use “their” as a gender-ambiguous pronoun,whereas others use “it.” For example, in the “No Wings” chapter of *Five Chidren and It*, the Vicar and his wife say Nisbetty things like: “There’s a dangerous lunatic in the church and you must go immediately and catch it.” But three pages later, Anthea (one of the children), upon being asked whether someone else has played a role in their recent misadventure, replies: “Yes…but it wasn’t their fault.” (Even more interestingly, the “they” whose fault it wasn’t is the Psammead itself — who is, of course, the “It” of the title.)

(Nothing turns on this, of course: I include it only to make Ophelia chortle.)

How many prescriptivists does it take to change a pronoun?

Thai is another language with gender-neutral third-person pronouns. It also uses terms for “sibling” which indicate whether the person is older (“Pee”) or younger (“Nang”) than the speaker, but not whether it’s a brother or a sister.

Indeed, Finnish is one of the languages that has only one philological gender: `hän’.

Having lived in Britain for a few years I had some trouble making a distinction between `he’ and `she’, especially when I did not have time to think what was it that I had to say — which was relatively often, to be honest. (Being male and in a hurry, I opted for the masculine, of course.)

Tamar, that series sounds really neat! Well, I’m glad you shared what you were able to.:)

I would suspect that people whose first language is a Romance language all have the same issue in reversing the genders.

In English, the possessive is the gender of the possessor. I borrowed it from John, his book vs. I borrowed it from Mary, her book.

In French the possessive is the gender of the possessed. I borrowed it from Mary, his book[m]vs I borrowed it from John, her table[f]. My francophone friends usually get this wrong in English when the possessed is alive — about his friend Maxim and her sister, or his friend Charlotte and his father.

I get this wrong half the time because I use the English system and half because I can’t remember which is the right gender.

I would suspect that people whose first language is a Romance language all have the same issue in reversing the genders.

That’s the thing: I know Francophones, Italians, Lusophones, Catalunians, though no Romanians, and none of them seem to have the difficulties I mentioned, even if their english isn’t all that strong.

And while such errors might be understandable in cases where the posessive is used, it’s not really understandable where subject pronouns are concerned. Leaving apart the fact that subject pronouns are still optional in Castillian, that still doesn’t explain the phenomenon. Many of those spaniards I mentioned have expressed the same kind of puzzlement as me as to why they do it.