“They” and “y’all” work fine. I like y’all[1]. In fact, the subtle difference between y’all and all y’all is arguably a brilliant feature not found in any Indo-European language I am familiar with. If only you also had a first person plural clusivity feature…
And, yes, ‘they’ depends on context. So does everything else. Germans have been using sie to mean ‘she’ ‘they’ and ‘you’ (formal) for ages and they seem to be able to speak to one another without any difficulty. Admittedly the third use of ‘sie’ is capitalized, but the other two aren’t. Sie ist. Sie sind. It’s all about congruence.
Imposing words bred in captivity, as it were, and then enforcing their words is violence done to the language and to its speakers and hardly ever works out. English lucked out by having a natural-sounding gender-neutral pronoun. Don’t ruin this good fortune.
[1] Making grammarians wince isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. There’s nothing inherently wrong with “y’all,” and seeing as it makes the language more robust and expressive it’s, in fact, inherently good. It’s coded as low-status, yes, but that only matters to people desperately worried about that sort of thing.
I have seen some references up above, but I’m going to spell this out. I get my info on these things from my daughter, who has many friends who are gender nonbinary, gay, asexual, transgender, basically the gamut of gender and sexual identification.
Feel free if you are from this community to correct me on my info as I am an old person who grew up before people could even be openly out of the closet in high school, and I need lots of schooling.
But, for people who are want to identify as neither a she nor a he, they want to use “they.” One of my daughter’s friends has recently chosen this as their preferred pronoun. I’m sure it’s not totally a new thing but it’s a new to me thing, and I think a thing that is starting to get wider play.
I’m glad to see the dictionary hopping on the trend.
It’s been tried, about a billion times so far. It doesn’t work very well.
Adjectives and nouns and verbs, by their nature, are created and discarded all the time. But pronouns are integrated with the grammar. Changing them takes a lot more time and effort, and I doubt it could be done “by order”.
Regardless of the rest of your post, and without wanting to get into a discussion on “deep structure” and the like, I tend to think those rules are not really that different, it is that more modern languages leave the old complexities behind. In the languages with which I have at least a nodding familiarity - English, French, German, Italian, a little Greek, Russian and some largely forgotten Hebrew - apparently odd usages do turn out to have cognates, and every language has some ambiguities that are resolved by things like word order. Generally speaking, more complex languages like Russian and Hebrew are also older, more primitive languages - modern languages like English and Spanish or Italian tend to simplify and reduce, not add complexity. As an instance, the use of the genitive case around numbering. This probably harks back to an old “numeric” case which got subsumed into the genitive. So in Russian we have
syem chasov - seven of hours - while In English we have seven o’clock - derived from seven of the clock - but nowadays if someone says “What’s the time?” the answer will be “seven.” Have we lost anything? A Russian asked the time and saying “dva chasa dnom” - two of hour using the day - and an English person saying “two pee em” convey the same information but one is much easier to remember than having to know that one o’clock is chas, two is dva chasa, but 5 is pyat chasov due to some ancient grammatical rules.
How often will the use of “they” be confusing? Once it’s realised that an existing convention is being extended, not at all. “They” as a generic third person singular or plural already exists, people use it and it will spread.
When it comes to the second person, we avoid all those awkward social rules in French and German by which you tutoyer someone when the person who is older than you or very much more senior asks you to do it, and then if they want to be stroppy they will go back to Vous or Sie. English has its own ways of handling graduated affection. Would you want to go to the levels of Russian formalism (nickname < first name < first name + patronymic)? It creates a minefield for foreigners.
One obvious reason for this is that English is a language which is constantly adding new speakers in large numbers (as is Spanish) while Russian is, if anything, in decline.
At a school near where I work there are posters up that say “What should I call you?” and list a number of pronoun options including the gender-neutral “ze”. The LGBT support group also has a wall display with leaders and their preferred pronouns.
I know it’s can be uncomfortable or at least awkward but asking “What should I call you?” can be appreciated. And I always remember the Simpsons episode with John Waters. Homer says, “Queer, that’s what you like to be called, right?”
Oh, I agree there. Whatever the English language settles on isn’t going to be dictated in a top-down hierarchical way so there’s no real point in lobbying for one solution or another. I’m just lamenting that “they” still has limitations that a singular pronoun doesn’t. For example:
Sally was debating with her friends what to have for dinner; she wanted pizza, but they wanted burgers.
Bill was debating with his friends what to have for dinner; he wanted sushi, but they wanted Thai.
Andy was debating with their friends what to have for dinner; they wanted Italian, but they wanted Dim Sum.
ETA: of course the most important thing is to attempt to use whatever pronouns the subjects identify with, even it it makes the phrasing awkward.
Grammar is descriptive, when grammarians try to be prescriptive they’re doing the equivalent of a physicist saying “I don’t care what reality does, this is what it ought to do.”
Andy was discussing with his friend what to have for dinner: he wanted Italian, but he wanted dim sum.
In spoken English we emphasise the second “he” and de-emphasise the first one, i.e.
Andy…he wanted Italian, but he wanted dim sum.
Or we say “Andy wanted Italian but the friend wanted dim sum”, and this works with the plural example (i.e. we would repeat Andy and leave the second they.
But "they* has always been used as a singular pronoun. In fact, just about any time anyone writes a sentence about a non-specified person, they will use “they” as the corresponding pronoun – like I did in this very sentence.
I’ve never seen anyone complain about this use of “they” for “someone” or “anyone”, despite it being unquestionably singular. To the point where I actually don’t know what alternative there is. Yet see the exact same thing with a specified person of non-specified gender, and it’s no surprise to find someone complaining. What makes those uses different to them?
Of course the singular “they” is a time-honored usage, but you are fooling yourself if you think its usage frees you from your sexism. The use of neuter “he” is at least as old, at least as time-honored, and it is only he who cannot refrain from imputing gender who is a victim of sexism.
I find myself using they and their a lot, but I had a friend ask me to proofread something they wrote a while back and it was an utter hash because they decided to use “they” as the sole pronoun in a story involving multiple people. It was unnecessarily confusing. I maintain that we all need to get together and agree on a seperate singular neuter pronoun. I’ve personally not liked proposals I’ve heard so far for “ze,” “zir,” and worst of all “hir.” The ultimate of those being the worst in my mind because it just sounds like “her” at best and at worst sounds like the Arabic word for kitten. But I would settle for any of them if everyone got on the same page. I feel like “they” is a crummy solution to making language more better.
It is awkward. But one of the languages I speak well has gendering for everything and trust me English has it easy. It’s literally impossible not to misgender people who don’t identify with one of the two common genders. Unless they are okay with ‘it’ I guess. And inventing a new pronoun could never, ever, ever work because you wouldn’t ask for preferred pronouns, you’d ask for a preferred grammar-book. Gods above know what the hell trans* people are going to use in that language if they aren’t comfortable with either ‘he’ or ‘she.’
Yup. Agreed. The difference is that for grammar that used to be the default position, of course, but that’s vastly improved since then.
It’s literally impossible not to misgender people who don’t identify with one of the two common genders. Unless they are okay with ‘it’ I guess. And inventing a new pronoun could never, ever, ever work because you wouldn’t ask for preferred pronouns, you’d ask for a preferred grammar-book. Gods above know what the hell trans* people are going to use in that language if they aren’t comfortable with either ‘he’ or ‘she.’