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this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Singular "They" is literally almost as old as the word "They" itself.
People have gotten by using it for almost 700 years.
It's not clear when you say they if you mean a person or a group. The term is for both. It's ambiguous.
It’s not. Context provides you all the needed info in 99.9% of cases.
Sure, you need to provide context, but you’d need to with a pronoun anyway.
You’re essentially looking at the words singular and plural definitions and coming up with a reason they don’t work. (Hey, another “they” and I’m sure you picked up on the fact that I’m not talking about a singular human.)
Can you even think of a situation that has ambiguity, which would actually come up in natural language?
Really easy and you know it. Of top of my head:
"Get who wrote this rubbish in here." "I've message them. They are coming to the meeting now." "You mean a team or an individual did this?"
It does depend how pedantic you want to be. I'll dyslexic and I don't process language like others and so I don't like ambiguous. My default interpretation is frequently different. Human language has enough ambiguousness as it is. I'd like it reduced ideally.
“Who wrote this rubbish” is already ambiguous from the start, since it can be a singular author, or multiple. I admit they/them didn’t help resolve that ambiguity, but it isn’t the cause.
I agree 'who' is ambiguous and 'they/them' tells you nothing further. If we had a 'xhe' or whatever, you could narrow it down to a single person, without having to get into gender needlessly. I don't need to know/care about gender.
The ambiguity doesn't lie in they, it lies in the way the writer constructed that sentence, as the person you responded to already stated.
The writer (and the person they are communicating with) knows the plurality of the "who", an outside observer (us, the readers) aren't privy to that information. Clarification on the part of the writer would provide that context. But the sentence isn't written to be read to a 3rd party, but the other party (the person the writer is communicating with).
99.99% of people understand this intuitively, but this is the way you'd parse the understanding of that sentence.
And if you'll note, in my second sentence, "they" is understood to be singular—the writer.
E: and for Shits n' giggles: if neither party (the writer nor the person being communicated to) knows the plurality of the "who" they are referring to, then it's irrelevant information. They will discover who wrote it when they go searching.
And if you'll note, in that previous sentence, it's understood that I am using the plural they (the writer and the person being communicated to) in both uses of the last sentence.
As a dyslexic I don't parse sentences like others. I've also been programming since childhood, I'm sure it's made that worse in some ways. I read unclear ambiguity when other don't.
I've literally had it were multiple people are sure of the same interpretation but could not explain why. They didn't even see ambiguity until I pointed it.
I'm not arguing everyone should have a gender. Only that I wish we had another thing to use. Well constructed writing can use them just fine, but there is a lot of writing not well constructed. Not least of which is mine! I'd rather be going the other way in language. I'd like language to be compilable. 😉