Gender neutral “he” started as a legal fiction, to avoid having to amend hundreds of years of law.
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I speak a few of those, and not having an “it” to work with is even more typical. I’ve had many an Arabic learner turn to me with, “how do you say ‘it?’”
Me: “He or she.” (In Arabic)
Them: “But what if you don’t know what the gender is, or if the thing has no gender.”
Me: “Go by word ending sound. If it ends in a vowel, it’s probably feminine.”
Them: “No, you don’t get it, what it is a thing that has no gender.”
Me: “In Arabic, everything has a gender.”
Them:
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I don’t think there would be a problem. A word like “ze” used as a gender-neutral singular would be grammatically like “it”, only used to refer to a human.
Be careful what you wish for, someone might take that literally!
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Wouldn’t the obvious solution be to use the name here? “Andy wanted Italian, but they (or their friends)wanted Dim Sum”
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Yeah, I often wonder what’s going to happen when new standard for language inclusivity hit languages that simply can’t support them. I also wonder if people find excluded by it. Presumably if you are a monoglot that’s just how language works as far as you re considered? I’d ask a monoglot trans* person but I don’t know any.
And I always wanted to learn Arabic but I could never find the resources to do so and I don’t have the intellectual wherewithal to do just get a grammar book and a dictionary and hammer through it. Especially not for a non Indo-European language.
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You don’t use those words for yourself. I can refer to people of indeterminate gender with ‘he’ and I will be fine because I know what I mean. But it’s not about me being fine it’s about, firstly, being understood, and, secondly, not creating an unpleasant atmosphere for people who, for various reasons, do not wish to be referred to as ‘he’ or thing ‘he’ does not include them.
Since we have a perfectly serviceable replacement, we can make those people happier without damaging our sprachgefühl even slightly. Win/win/win, as far as I’m concerned.
The one that really was gender neutral that I lament is ‘man.’ It really honestly was gender neutral (with ‘wer’ being the masculine form and ‘wif’ the feminine[1]) and I’d so like it to revert back to that state.
I don’t mind ‘human’ or ‘person’ but the language really needs a robust-sounding single-syllable word there. Shame, really.
[1] Leading to the rather amusing implication that a female werewolf should really be a wifwolf. I tend to bust this out whenever someone insists that an ‘android’ only ever applies to masculine humaniform robots.
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Good point, and I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot recently. One problem is that gender in language is not always the same as biological gender - thus in French a soldat becomes feminine when he goes on duty as la sentinelle. In German there are cases where “it” applies to people, e.g. a small girl is das Mädchen so es ist ein junges Mädchen is perfectly OK.
Perhaps the answer for sociolinguistics is social rather than linguistic - we just have to get used to new usages and not get hung up about them.
Making my point; even Quakers don’t do that any more and most people (not you…) who try get it wrong.
Hence my remark above about Java, which shows what happens when you don’t have the equivalent of pronouns.
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I’d really have to find someone who cares about this who speaks one of the languages I know (or sorta-know) where this is an issue. I wonder if it is an issue, especially for a monoglot.
But it’s going to be tricky. Adapting to new usages is relatively painless but adding a new pronoun to a language with a double handful of cases is going to be damn tough to coordinate. I mean you can put ‘ze/zir/zirself’ in English and away you go. For a language that’s more inflected you’d need a whole table.
Indeed. Mark Twain’s reaction to this particular feature of German is always worth reading, of course. 
But that does lead to an interesting question of if it is even meaningfully possible to misgender in German.
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The problem is that the proposed new usage of “they” in this case is less precise and more cumbersome. It works worse as language. Sure, the problem can be fixed in any number of ways. Here’s a similar sentence:
Maximiliano and a group of friends went out for dinner.
Traditional grammar: He hated the food, but they liked it.
Proposed new usage: They hated the food, but they liked it.
Probable fix: Maximiliano hated the food, but they liked it.
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Yet it’s the one gender neutral pronoun that has any staying power. see @kcsaff’s earlier post with the link about failed pronouns.
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I would think that to be a slight underestimate. There will be times when people use it in confusing ways. Most of those times will happen because the person using it is communicating poorly. But as for the tiny remainder of a tiny remainder: ambiguity is likely to be an unavoidable feature in human languages. And i would argue that that ambiguity is one of the strengths of languages, enabling metaphor and such poetical things.
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I use and actively promote the use of “y’all”. It was also fun teaching a French speaker how to say it.
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I’m not sure that the ‘everybody does it’ argument works perfectly here. Just about anytime you see a sign on a checkout lane saying it’s for ten items or less, only a few customers feel irked.
They might complain to the manager, but they will likely just smile and nod at them. They might ask upper management or just fix it themself, but it’s more likely they will ignore them.
Do you truly not find that horrid?
One might say that other gender neutral pronouns also have stood the test of time.
How did those pronouns do that in any way other than being historic curiosities?
Tangentially connected, I wonder if there were the same complaints when you started being commonly used instead of thou.
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One could demonstrate their continued relevance by using one in a sentence.
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Yes, I read the first one, anyway. Why do you ask?
I just wondered what you made of her gender-neutral use of “she”.
I didn’t care about the gender-neutral “she” one way or the other. That usage fine with me, just as is gender-neutral “he”, but I prefer “he” because it is the time-honored usage and everyone understands it. I just thought she didn’t tell a very good story.
