this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
1147 points (97.0% liked)
Memes
45753 readers
848 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I very much agree. Learning English as a foreign language, it feels very wrong to use plural for a single person. I'm still not quite used to it! Although, had I been taught that early on, I doubt it would feel any weirder than using "you are" for a single person.
Funny, English is also my second language but in my first language 'she' and plural 'they' are the same word, only distinguished by the verb, so it never seemed that weird to me.
Interesting. What's your first language?
Dutch. It's ze/zij for both singular female and plural they.
I find it most inconvenient when “they” is used to refer to one person and a group in the same paragraph.
Is that any different than when you have two people of the same gender and suddenly can't use plain old gendered pronouns to unambiguously refer to the two people?
Eg, if Susan took Anna's apple, it'd be confusing to say "she took her apple".
Yeah pronouns can get really messy. I try to avoid them as much as I can in technical writing so I can follow my own sentences lol.
It's not plural though. It's just the third person neuter pronoun. Singular "they" has been a thing in English for centuries, and has only been controversial among a small segment of the population for a very short time.
Think of it a bit like French "vous". That's a "plural" (second person) pronoun, but is also used in the singular. In the French case, it's used as a singular formal second person pronoun in addition to a plural second person pronoun. Nobody in France is getting up in arms about how you shouldn't use "vous" when talking to one person.
I'm aware it's a thing and not really a plural. What I was trying to say is that it looks plural and since I didn't learn about this part of English until several years into my studies as a kid, it isn't as well established in my mind as "you are" is (that also looks like a plural, but I'm used to it).
"They are" for a single person catches my mental error filter the same way as "I are" or "you is" would, which is highly annoying.
Okay this actually touches on something interesting, but before I get to that, I think it's perhaps a sign that your intuition with English is very much at odds with (not merely different from, but directly contradictory to) the broader English speaking community. Most English speakers would be either 100% okay with "you" being either singular or plural, or would be more likely to interpret it as more singular. That's why some dialects have developed terms like "y'all" or "yous", and why phrases like "you all" or "you guys" get used.
But the really interesting thing here is that etymologically, you are much closer to the mark. Historically English has had a number of different second person pronouns. You, ye, thou, thee. "You" was, in fact, the plural objective second person pronoun. Today, English never distinguishes between subjective and objective pronouns in the second person, even in common informal use. But it used to have "thou" and "ye" as the singular and plural (respectively) subjective pronouns, and "thee" and "you" as the objective. And I find it kinda funny how that's basically flipped in modern usage.
And that's actually a pretty recent development. Less than a decade ago, I remember getting marked down in English class for using "they" as a genderless singular pronoun, as my elderly teacher grew up only ever using "they" to refer to a group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Your teacher was just one of those purists and it was never something with strong consensus for being wrong.