{"items": [{"author": "Ron", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722", "anchor": "fb-819768255722", "service": "fb", "text": "Will there be a patch for a new plural? \"They all / th'all\" and \"Them all / th'mall\"?
(Background:
I really want to see \"they\" be adopted more widely - if only for people identifying as \"they\".
Consequently, I really want to address the #1 complaint about the singular-they.)", "timestamp": "1477145464"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819769218792", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819769218792", "service": "fb", "text": "→ The current plan is to mirror standard usage of \"you\", but we'll see", "timestamp": "1477146173"}, {"author": "Ron", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819774418372", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819774418372", "service": "fb", "text": "→ The problem is the two words \"you\" and \"they\" aren't analog in terms of implied context of how many.
When one speaks in the second person, the context of audience is already established, because you're either speaking with one person or more than one.", "timestamp": "1477147897"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819780935312", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819780935312", "service": "fb", "text": "→ You are going to school. (plural)
You are going to school. (singular)
They are going to school. (plural)
They are going to school. (singular)
In other words, no \u2014 just like we currently do for \"you\", we would primarily have the same usage in singular and plural. You would be free to specify \"you all\", \"y'all\", or \"they all\" when you chose to, but it wouldn't become a standard or requirement for grammatical usage.", "timestamp": "1477149958"}, {"author": "Ron", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819782232712", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819782232712", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I know how it works. I didn't need it explained.
I also know, now that I have a bunch of friends and acquaintances who prefer \"they\" as their pronoun, I'm running into ambiguous statements.
One from yesterday:
Me:
\"They didn't feel welcomed by (some group).\"
My friend:
\"They are known for being friendly.\"
Me:
\"(The person) or (the group)?\"
It's not a huge inconvenience, and I'm happy to use they as a pronoun. However, a new explicitly-plural-they *will* arise.
In the above case, if my friend meant the person, then they could have used their name. But if speaking about a person whose name isn't known or stated, then you're now going to like... \"The person is known for being friendly.\"
If they meant the group, they would need to repeat the group name.
That's not a big deal on the surface, but it's a little awkward sounding. And language doesn't evolve to be friendly, it evolves to be convenient. Like, we can't even say \"can not\" instead of can't. If it's easier, it'll be used.
Hence, I think, whether you both believe it or not, we will see a new explicitly plural they arise.
And Jeff, we already have an explicitly plural \"you\" with \"y'all\". It can be used as a regional colloquialism, but it's also used when explicit plural is required.
Like, if I'm speaking to a group, then I shift to a single person, and back the the group - besides body language, I may use \"y'all\" the last time to refocus attention that I'm speaking the whole group again.", "timestamp": "1477150594"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819784024122", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819784024122", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I assumed you knew how it worked. But you asked for specific examples. I'm not sure what else you wanted than what I gave, especially since (as you said) you already knew.
[Hmmm, I swear there was a comment from you specifically asking for examples, but I see a different comment in its place now. It's not in the edit history either. Did you delete a comment and add a new one?]", "timestamp": "1477151705"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819784029112", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819784029112", "service": "fb", "text": "→ \"we can't even say 'can not' instead of can't\"
We can say 'cannot', though.", "timestamp": "1477151716"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819784463242", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819784463242", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I've definitely had contexts where I had to explicitly specify that I meant a broader \"you\" rather than a specific person. Sometimes this was in context of speaking with a group. It also came about through the use of rhetorical \"you\". But I can see how it might be more common with \"they\" than with \"you\", if we were to use it to replace all gendered singular pronouns.", "timestamp": "1477151870"}, {"author": "Ron", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819784473222", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819784473222", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Jeff, we can but we don't.
I meant \"can't\" in a colloquial way.", "timestamp": "1477151882"}, {"author": "Ron", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819784587992", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819784587992", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Background:
I really want to see \"they\" be adopted more widely - if only for people identifying as \"they\".
Consequently, I really want to address the #1 complaint about the singular-they.", "timestamp": "1477151962"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819784877412", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819784877412", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I'm sympathetic to that idea, Ron. You're looking to address the complaint so as to make it more easily adoptable to those less invested in gender-neutral pronouns, rather than raising the complaint to shoot it down. I'm not sure there will be a real answer to that, though, and historically the same objections were raised to ambiguous singular/plural \"you\" when that was a new issue.", "timestamp": "1477152153"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819785082002", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819785082002", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Unrelated, but did I completely fabricate that idea that you asked for examples of how \"they\" would mirror \"you\"? Or did you just delete it before I posted my response?", "timestamp": "1477152226"}, {"author": "Ron", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819785191782", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819785191782", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I deleted it, because I was confused what Jeff meant and then realized what he meant.", "timestamp": "1477152332"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819787327502", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819787327502", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Oh, I see. It was still showing up on my screen as I typed my first response. I was confused later when you said you knew that already, and somehow the thing I thought I had responded to was gone.", "timestamp": "1477153682"}, {"author": "Ginda", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819806733612", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819806733612", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I am rooting for \"theys, thems, theirs's\". I would be happy to shift to a gender-neutral set of pronouns, but I already find \"you\" frustrating and annoying in its numerical ambiguity, and also long to disambiguate the inclusive and exclusive \"we\" (an I including my audience, or simply talking about a group that doesn't include my audience) and I am very unenthusiastic about increasing the ambiguity of pronouns along dimensions I want to be able to specify.", "timestamp": "1477161057"}, {"author": "Hal", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819813235582", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819813235582", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Nearly everyone I know uses singular \"they\" when talking about a person in general, e.g. \"If someone wants to drive, they need a license,\" or a specific person of unknown gender, e.g. \"Your friend is here? Who are they?\" It occasionally leads to ambiguities, but we've actually been using it this way for hundreds of years.", "timestamp": "1477164717"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819815895252", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819815895252", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Hal: your second example is actually a lot more recently accepted than your first (which is very old)", "timestamp": "1477165903"}, {"author": "Ginda", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819826349302", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819826349302", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I would use \"it\" in the second, not \"they\". As in, \"you have a friend here? Who is it?\" Because it's a singular friend. The first one is old enough that I am comfortable with it. ;)", "timestamp": "1477171322"}, {"author": "Jonathan", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819835850262", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819835850262", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I agree with Ginda. The second may or may not be acceptable or correct--according to whoever makes the rules--but it sounds awkward and, well, wrong.", "timestamp": "1477175084"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819836583792", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819836583792", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Jonathan: The second one sounds awkward and wrong to speakers of English '92 and earlier but correct to speakers of English '04 and later. If you're still running an older version you could consider upgrading.", "timestamp": "1477175324"}, {"author": "Jonathan", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819837886182", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819837886182", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Jeff, I suspect that I am running an older version since I am an older version (I'm 61).", "timestamp": "1477175752"}, {"author": "Ginda", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819840436072", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819840436072", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Jeff Kaufman, I suspect you are right. But do you know how when you upgrade your computer it can take weeks before you get all your essential software running smoothly, and you know where to find everything and how to do stuff? Upgrading your grammar is much harder, especially as you age. I am working at not flinching at usages like your second sentence. But it may take a while.", "timestamp": "1477177129"}, {"author": "Ron", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=819887581592", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_819887581592", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Hal, when context is cited, they and you are easy as singular.
But it's the context-ambiguous instances of they that cause issues.
\"Hal went to go find the group; where are they?\"", "timestamp": "1477195197"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1477426893"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819768255722&reply_comment_id=820349046812", "anchor": "fb-819768255722_820349046812", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Elliot: That's a good example of a plural/plural use of they that many speakers will read as unambiguous. Some other examples of how pragmatics affects our coreference resolution:
\"The bareheaded swimmers asked the barefoot runners where their bathing caps were.\"
\"The bareheaded swimmers asked the barefoot runners where their running shoes were.\"", "timestamp": "1477427835"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819774612982", "anchor": "fb-819774612982", "service": "fb", "text": "Does this new release support individuals who strongly identify with a gender and are, in fact, uncomfortable and/or offended by being called 'they' instead of their pre-existing pronoun?", "timestamp": "1477147925"}, {"author": "Josh", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819774612982&reply_comment_id=819776259682", "anchor": "fb-819774612982_819776259682", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Nope. I have every confidence that they'll adapt, just like the people who were uncomfortable and/or offended by women having jobs, blacks having the vote, gays having sex, etc.", "timestamp": "1477148622"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819774612982&reply_comment_id=819776673852", "anchor": "fb-819774612982_819776673852", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Fair enough, but I can definitely think of more than a few trans women who would be super offended at being called they instead of she.", "timestamp": "1477148858"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819774612982&reply_comment_id=819777043112", "anchor": "fb-819774612982_819777043112", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Calling a trans woman \"they\" in situations where you would call a cis woman \"she\" is definitely not OK, and with individual uses of \"they\" it can be ambiguous whether you're doing this.", "timestamp": "1477149140"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819774612982&reply_comment_id=819780925332", "anchor": "fb-819774612982_819780925332", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Sky: having to work with people you don't want to is having interactions forced on you", "timestamp": "1477149949"}, {"author": "Josh", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819774612982&reply_comment_id=819781529122", "anchor": "fb-819774612982_819781529122", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Right, the metaphor is that gender-free is a positive social good, and people who want to insist on making gender distinctions (for whatever reason) are obstructing that good.", "timestamp": "1477150229"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819774612982&reply_comment_id=819783555062", "anchor": "fb-819774612982_819783555062", "service": "fb", "text": "→ So, I also want to fully get rid of gender, but I think people who want gender, and increased gender diversity should probably still be on board with switching to a system where pronouns don't have gender. Putting gender in pronouns requires lots of coordination between people about gender, which is limiting for gender diversity because just using the common he/she is easier so people are pushed that way.", "timestamp": "1477151398"}, {"author": "Josh", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819774612982&reply_comment_id=819784014142", "anchor": "fb-819774612982_819784014142", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Yeah, I agree with Jeff there: Imagine if English required you to use different pronouns for white people and black people (and had no other options). Even if you didn't want to eliminate racial diversity, you still might rather not have to use a different pronoun based on your guesses about whether they identify as black or white or neither.", "timestamp": "1477151680"}, {"author": "Divia", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819774612982&reply_comment_id=10100101260664652", "anchor": "fb-819774612982_10100101260664652", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Josh https://www.cs.virginia.edu/.../cs655/readings/purity.html", "timestamp": "1562709709"}, {"author": "Perry", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819779228732", "anchor": "fb-819779228732", "service": "fb", "text": "I thought that the movement was that anyone can self-identify with their preferred pronoun, but now I can no longer self-identify? I have to be \"they\" even though I am quite alright with \"he\"? Please clarify.", "timestamp": "1477149395"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819779228732&reply_comment_id=819781454272", "anchor": "fb-819779228732_819781454272", "service": "fb", "text": "→ The idea is to move English from being a language that has gendered pronouns, in which case we need self identification and publicised preferences, to a language like Turkish or Korean that simply doesn't indicate gender through the pronoun system.", "timestamp": "1477150158"}, {"author": "Ron", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819779228732&reply_comment_id=819783026122", "anchor": "fb-819779228732_819783026122", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Perry, this is precisely the challenge. Some people reject gender, some don't, and many people fall in between. Since gender is such a fundamental part of English, it's a bumpy road ahead.", "timestamp": "1477151009"}, {"author": "Perry", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819779228732&reply_comment_id=819783076022", "anchor": "fb-819779228732_819783076022", "service": "fb", "text": "→ So what are we telling the people who don't reject gender?", "timestamp": "1477151058"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819779228732&reply_comment_id=819785680802", "anchor": "fb-819779228732_819785680802", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Perry: switching to a non-gendered pronoun system does not require people to reject gender, just like a pronoun system that doesn't distinguish people based on race does not require people to reject race.", "timestamp": "1477152509"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819779228732&reply_comment_id=819785830502", "anchor": "fb-819779228732_819785830502", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Like, would you be making the same argument in the world of https://www.cs.virginia.edu/.../cs655/readings/purity.html ?", "timestamp": "1477152568"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1477152988"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819779228732&reply_comment_id=819792761612", "anchor": "fb-819779228732_819792761612", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Elliot: this isn't sudden, I've been advocating this for 10+ years", "timestamp": "1477155889"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1477157420"}, {"author": "Neil", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819779228732&reply_comment_id=820025694812", "anchor": "fb-819779228732_820025694812", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I don't think anyone gets upset about \"they\" as a plural pronoun for people of the same gender. That's the standard word you use for me and Jeff (or, say, Athena and Aphrodite). You could see Jeff's idea as a singular version of what we already do with the plural.", "timestamp": "1477266806"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1477150502"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819782078022&reply_comment_id=819782851472", "anchor": "fb-819782078022_819782851472", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Like civil unions, right?", "timestamp": "1477150907"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1477151233"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1477151739"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819782078022&reply_comment_id=819826419162", "anchor": "fb-819782078022_819826419162", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I think I remember Alice saying something along these lines?", "timestamp": "1477171338"}, {"author": "Alice", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819782078022&reply_comment_id=819828445102", "anchor": "fb-819782078022_819828445102", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Jeff Kaufman yes", "timestamp": "1477172253"}, {"author": "Alice", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819782078022&reply_comment_id=819830630722", "anchor": "fb-819782078022_819830630722", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Jeff Kaufman they and them are superb pronouns and I advocate their use in the singular, but taking feminine pronouns from me would be very upsetting. Very", "timestamp": "1477172938"}, {"author": "Ron", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819782861452", "anchor": "fb-819782861452", "service": "fb", "text": "I've been wondering how pronoun needs of genderqueer folks and transgender folks would collide.
I'm listening to this thread to better hear all sides and how people are thinking and feeling.", "timestamp": "1477150917"}, {"author": "Danni", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819782861452&reply_comment_id=819786104952", "anchor": "fb-819782861452_819786104952", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I, a genderqueer and transgender folk whose pronouns are ze/zir/zim and not they/their/them, am okay with they/their/them as the default pronoun as long as it's equally default for everyone including binary-gendered people.", "timestamp": "1477152840"}, {"author": "Luna", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819782861452&reply_comment_id=819810032002", "anchor": "fb-819782861452_819810032002", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Same as Danni - I always default to they with ppl whose pronouns I don't know", "timestamp": "1477162801"}, {"author": "Ruthan", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819782861452&reply_comment_id=819882387002", "anchor": "fb-819782861452_819882387002", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Ron have you met Danni? Y'all are good people!", "timestamp": "1477192930"}, {"author": "Ron", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819782861452&reply_comment_id=819886892972", "anchor": "fb-819782861452_819886892972", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Probably crossed paths at a dance? Thanks for the intro. :)", "timestamp": "1477194922"}, {"author": "Ruthan", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819782861452&reply_comment_id=819888918912", "anchor": "fb-819782861452_819888918912", "service": "fb", "text": "→ That would come as a bit of a surprise? Mostly I meant on the facebook. :)", "timestamp": "1477196165"}, {"author": "Danni", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819782861452&reply_comment_id=819888998752", "anchor": "fb-819782861452_819888998752", "service": "fb", "text": "→ hi! nope, i don't dance.", "timestamp": "1477196236"}, {"author": "Ron", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819782861452&reply_comment_id=819890460822", "anchor": "fb-819782861452_819890460822", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I guess I assumed with the multiple mutual acquaintances. Hi there!", "timestamp": "1477197030"}, {"author": "Danni", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819782861452&reply_comment_id=819890485772", "anchor": "fb-819782861452_819890485772", "service": "fb", "text": "→ hello! :)", "timestamp": "1477197093"}, {"author": "John", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819783624922", "anchor": "fb-819783624922", "service": "fb", "text": "What do you think of the notion of using \"she\" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun? I like this notion, because it feels more natural (to me) than \"they\", since I'm already using it for ~50% of the population, and doesn't hit the singular/plural ambiguity problem. Presumably cis women would like is, as would trans women. Cis men might not like it immediately, but I'm not really optimizing for us. Trans men might not like it either, but at least it treats them the same way as cis men. (Note: I'm not advocating this system, I'm just looking for feedback.)", "timestamp": "1477151448"}, {"author": "Josh", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819783624922&reply_comment_id=819783794582", "anchor": "fb-819783624922_819783794582", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I'm a cis male fan of Ann Leckie, and it'd be fine with me.", "timestamp": "1477151546"}, {"author": "John", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819783624922&reply_comment_id=819783894382", "anchor": "fb-819783624922_819783894382", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Did she suggest this? I still haven't read Ancillary Justice.", "timestamp": "1477151623"}, {"author": "Lauren", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819783624922&reply_comment_id=819785965232", "anchor": "fb-819783624922_819785965232", "service": "fb", "text": "→ The narrator of Ancillary Justice has trouble parsing gender markers (because they aren't consistent across different cultures) and so while the narrator discusses trying to use the preferred pronoun when actually talking to people (and sometimes getting it wrong because they parsed incorrectly), uses 'she' when referring to everyone in the narration.", "timestamp": "1477152734"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1477153030"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819783624922&reply_comment_id=819787636882", "anchor": "fb-819783624922_819787636882", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I think any single pronoun would be fine once people were used to it. \"She\" or a new pronoun (\"xie\" etc) would be better than \"they\" because it lets us distinguish singular and plural.
But from a practical perspective, it doesn't matter. There's a path for \"they\" to become the sole third person pronoun, by continually expanding the situations in which it's usable in the singular, a path we're already a good way along. I really don't see a path like this for \"she\".", "timestamp": "1477153827"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1477154392"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819783624922&reply_comment_id=819819992042", "anchor": "fb-819783624922_819819992042", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Elliot, while there's definitely grammatical precedent for deprecating a feminine term and using the previously masculine term as a neuter one, if anything I think that's a reason for leaning towards the feminine this time. Male/masculine is the default for many things in our culture, and though (in my mind) the end-game we're aiming for is one where the two roles are totally equal, something that leans to the feminine side could be seen as balancing the scales rather than just following the precedent.
I'm not sure that either term which is already gendered would be the best choice. If that were where we were headed, though, I would rather see she/her become everyone's pronoun set than he/him.", "timestamp": "1477168035"}, {"author": "Jenny", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819784732702", "anchor": "fb-819784732702", "service": "fb", "text": "Yay! I used they-singular in my book (2012) and put an explanation in the front for all the tsk tsk folks. Fortunately my progressive publishers didn't argue. As for singular / plural ambiguity, we've managed that with \"you\" for hundreds of years. I like the Japanese way best -- you mostly leave out pronouns altogether Thus \"went to the store\" is a complete sentence -- can be I, he, they, the dog, the truck.... but if the context is understood, you don't need a subject.", "timestamp": "1477152050"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819784732702&reply_comment_id=819816763512", "anchor": "fb-819784732702_819816763512", "service": "fb", "text": "→ In Latin, you can use the pronoun for emphasis, but it is more typically left out entirely. However, the conjugation of the verb did the disambiguation work done by the pronoun in English. It had no gender component, but you might know from the verb form used that the (non-specified) subject was third-person singular.
Is there something like that in Japanese? Does it produce ambiguity in real-world contexts (if yes, normally or only occasionally)?", "timestamp": "1477166489"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819784732702&reply_comment_id=819819323382", "anchor": "fb-819784732702_819819323382", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Latin had gender agreement with adjectives etc, though, right? So you still have the same problem.", "timestamp": "1477167638"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819784732702&reply_comment_id=819819722582", "anchor": "fb-819784732702_819819722582", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Yes, that's true. And many non-person nouns had binary genders that the adjectives had to match. However, there was a gender-neutral form easily available for all adjectives, so it wouldn't have been difficult to apply in the sorts of places we'd need a personal pronoun.", "timestamp": "1477167892"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819784732702&reply_comment_id=819819902222", "anchor": "fb-819784732702_819819902222", "service": "fb", "text": "→ As far as I know, names in Latin were reliably either masculine or feminine. (Most names in English correspond pretty well to one binary gender or the other, but not all.) Pronouns were not a driver of this issue, though.", "timestamp": "1477167983"}, {"author": "Peter", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819786973212", "anchor": "fb-819786973212", "service": "fb", "text": "I'd be happier with settling upon he, she, or it as the singular personal pronoun to use for everyone. I like preserving number and find it less jarring.", "timestamp": "1477153462"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819786973212&reply_comment_id=819788634882", "anchor": "fb-819786973212_819788634882", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Personally, I find that a whole lot more jarring, even though I like that it preserves number. \"It\" carries strong implications of \"not a person\" and \"has no gender\", rather than simply \"not specifying gender at the moment\". It's not impossible that, over time, the word could lose those connotations and become a singular gender neutral pronoun for people, but I think \"they\" is a lot closer to that today.
Also, if we went with \"it\" for everyone, it could quickly lose the \"not a person\" connotations. If we went with he, she, or it as you suggest (thereby using \"it\" ONLY for those who fall outside the gender binary), I could very easily see it becoming a pejorative. Maybe you're suggesting picking any one of those, and using that pronoun for everyone, rather than any of the three being allowable? That seems better in some ways, but going with either \"he\" or \"she\" would invalidate one gender (at least for a substantial period of time before it eventually lost gender connotations), and I think the current \"not a person\" connotations of \"it\" would prevent its widespread adoption any time in the near future.", "timestamp": "1477154368"}, {"author": "Peter", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819786973212&reply_comment_id=819790121902", "anchor": "fb-819786973212_819790121902", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Daniel I definitely meant pick one, then everybody use it. It's noteworthy that in languages close to English, pronouns do not denote animacy (the linguistic term for personhood of words) like they do in English, especially German.", "timestamp": "1477154858"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819786973212&reply_comment_id=819812981092", "anchor": "fb-819786973212_819812981092", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Yeah. I think that's better than using all three, but I still find the non-personhood implication jarring. You're right \u2014 in a lot of other languages that wouldn't be the meaning, and it is an oddity of English, but that doesn't change the fact that it DOES mean that to most native English speakers. I think changing that would be a significantly bigger hurdle than the singular/plural issue with \"they\".", "timestamp": "1477164486"}, {"author": "Linchuan", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819786973212&reply_comment_id=819832192592", "anchor": "fb-819786973212_819832192592", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Unpopular opinion: Personhood is over-rated. :P", "timestamp": "1477173414"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819786973212&reply_comment_id=819837467022", "anchor": "fb-819786973212_819837467022", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Your mom is over-rated! XD", "timestamp": "1477175676"}, {"author": "Sarah", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819788684782", "anchor": "fb-819788684782", "service": "fb", "text": "One cost to such a shift would be a significant increase in indexical ambiguity. Some of our sentences are ambiguous already, because we can't distinguish between two \"he\"s or two \"she\"s or two sets of \"they\"s. But to make all pronouns \"they\" would magnify this ambiguity by a factor of about three. This leads to either (a) more ambiguity (e.g. \"But they said they weren't coming\" could be \"A said B wasn't coming,\" \"A said A wasn't coming,\" or \"A said B &c. weren't coming,\" or \"A&B said C wasn't coming,\" etc.; or (b) clunkier language to disambiguate (e.g. replacing pronouns with names). This doesn't necessarily mean the shift is a bad idea (I'm not sure either way), but it's worth pointing out the cost.", "timestamp": "1477154392"}, {"author": "Christopher", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819788684782&reply_comment_id=819791973192", "anchor": "fb-819788684782_819791973192", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Lexical ambiguity was one of my objections. I still miss thee/you distinctions.", "timestamp": "1477155642"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819788684782&reply_comment_id=819793006122", "anchor": "fb-819788684782_819793006122", "service": "fb", "text": "→ \"miss\"", "timestamp": "1477156103"}, {"author": "Ginda", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819788684782&reply_comment_id=819806049982", "anchor": "fb-819788684782_819806049982", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I use y'all even though I didn't grow up with it, because I find the number ambiguity of \"you\" is often problematic.", "timestamp": "1477160676"}, {"author": "Ben", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819788684782&reply_comment_id=819806553972", "anchor": "fb-819788684782_819806553972", "service": "fb", "text": "→ The noun-gender hashing function has been known to have awkward collision metrics that undermined its utility. With its deprecation, committee work can start on implementing the obviative case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obviative", "timestamp": "1477161002"}, {"author": "Ginda", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819788684782&reply_comment_id=819807706662", "anchor": "fb-819788684782_819807706662", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Ooh, i really like that, and would like to have it. I wish them luck implementing it. ;)", "timestamp": "1477161437"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819788684782&reply_comment_id=819808669732", "anchor": "fb-819788684782_819808669732", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Ben: there's also Navajo-style 4th person", "timestamp": "1477162106"}, {"author": "Sarah", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819788684782&reply_comment_id=819828355282", "anchor": "fb-819788684782_819828355282", "service": "fb", "text": "→ While we're on this, we could also consider going all Homeric Greek and adding a dual as well as a singular and plural.", "timestamp": "1477172206"}, {"author": "Ben", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819788684782&reply_comment_id=819857007862", "anchor": "fb-819788684782_819857007862", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I still use the -en suffix that way, ex boxen.", "timestamp": "1477183612"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819788684782&reply_comment_id=819860046772", "anchor": "fb-819788684782_819860046772", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Ben: as a productive suffix, or just for a few pieces of jargon?", "timestamp": "1477184844"}, {"author": "Ben", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819788684782&reply_comment_id=819862491872", "anchor": "fb-819788684782_819862491872", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Mostly only on a few words. But, part of that is that I don't frequently need to refer to a pair of things.", "timestamp": "1477185936"}, {"author": "Ginda", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819788684782&reply_comment_id=819868684462", "anchor": "fb-819788684782_819868684462", "service": "fb", "text": "→ When i was in highschool i made up a lot of languages, which mostly meant making up grammar. I had a lot of genders and numbers, including single, dual, plural, male, female, unknown, and divine.", "timestamp": "1477187604"}, {"author": "David", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819788684782&reply_comment_id=820029636912", "anchor": "fb-819788684782_820029636912", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Are there any languages where 3rd-person pronouns contain an ordinal that identifies the referent? E.g., \"Alice and Bob are nice, but first-they sent a weird message to second-them.\"", "timestamp": "1477268502"}, {"author": "Peter", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819788684782&reply_comment_id=820096552812", "anchor": "fb-819788684782_820096552812", "service": "fb", "text": "→ David I've heard there is an Eastern European language with that feature, but couldn't find it with 2 minutes of Googling.", "timestamp": "1477311184"}, {"author": "Judith", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819790735672", "anchor": "fb-819790735672", "service": "fb", "text": "We don't preserve number with \"you\", having dropped thou quite a while ago. They is the same translation for the 3rd person.", "timestamp": "1477155239"}, {"author": "Sarah", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819790735672&reply_comment_id=819828395202", "anchor": "fb-819790735672_819828395202", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Exactly, and I already find it annoying to not be able to distinguish you-singular from you-plural. \"Y'all\" or \"Yinz\" don't fit into my mode of speaking; they come across as goofy from someone raised in California. I'm with Chris Green; let's bring back \"thee/thou\"!", "timestamp": "1477172229"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819790735672&reply_comment_id=819839308332", "anchor": "fb-819790735672_819839308332", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Apparently Old English had a gender neutral singular: hit. Most likely, this morphed into it, but I have no idea whether it carried the same not-a-person connotation at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar#Pronouns", "timestamp": "1477176368"}, {"author": "BDan", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819790735672&reply_comment_id=819871458902", "anchor": "fb-819790735672_819871458902", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I'm pretty sure that 'hit' could refer to people in OE, since there were also neuter gender nouns for people, e.g. 'mann'.", "timestamp": "1477189119"}, {"author": "Michael", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819799538032", "anchor": "fb-819799538032", "service": "fb", "text": "I really appreciated when they deprecated gendered articles in English 1000. Trying to teach myself German keeps reminding me how much I appreciate it.", "timestamp": "1477158075"}, {"author": "Linchuan", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819809038992", "anchor": "fb-819809038992", "service": "fb", "text": "Spoken Chinese differentiates between singular and plural, but not gender.", "timestamp": "1477162276"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819809038992&reply_comment_id=819812367322", "anchor": "fb-819809038992_819812367322", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I know this is the case for Mandarin; do you know if any of the other dialects distinguish gender?", "timestamp": "1477164063"}, {"author": "Linchuan", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819809038992&reply_comment_id=819824872262", "anchor": "fb-819809038992_819824872262", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I don't know of any dialect that distinguishes gender. There are A LOT of different Chinese dialects, but I will be moderately surprised if a commonly used one has gender. Even really different ones have this feature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokkien#Pronouns", "timestamp": "1477170803"}, {"author": "Linchuan", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819809038992&reply_comment_id=819825301402", "anchor": "fb-819809038992_819825301402", "service": "fb", "text": "→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_pronouns", "timestamp": "1477170948"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819809038992&reply_comment_id=819826943112", "anchor": "fb-819809038992_819826943112", "service": "fb", "text": "→ \"In written Chinese, a distinction between masculine human \u4ed6 (he, him), feminine human \u5979 (she, her), and non-human \u5b83 (it) [and similarly in the plural] was introduced in the early 20th century under European influence.\"
That was not something I knew! I had been guessing that the written he/she/it distinction reflected an older verbal form that also made the distinction, which is why I was wondering if maybe there were other Chinese dialects that preserved it.", "timestamp": "1477171536"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1562979335"}, {"author": "Luna", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819810635792", "anchor": "fb-819810635792", "service": "fb", "text": "Wait so are you saying don't use gendered pronouns at all? Or just default to they when you don't know someone's pronouns?
If the former, I strongly don't like that. I'm happy to see diminishing gender roles, but gender is still something I experience - regardless of social roles attached to it", "timestamp": "1477163067"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819810635792&reply_comment_id=819812272512", "anchor": "fb-819810635792_819812272512", "service": "fb", "text": "→ The former. The idea is that people still have an experience of gender, but it doesn't need to be in our pronouns. Like, people in China/Turkey/etc still have experiences of gender, they just don't use it gratuitously when talking about people.", "timestamp": "1477163993"}, {"author": "Luna", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819810635792&reply_comment_id=819813260532", "anchor": "fb-819810635792_819813260532", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I see where you're coming from, but I'm also not ok/onboard with it - it feels very erasing, and if anything I think we need more language around gender (because there's so much diversity within it), not less.
I think in the Enfglish language, we have a good balance between something like what you're describing and having a completely gendered language (like Hebrew or Latin are)", "timestamp": "1477164748"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1477165948"}, {"author": "Luna", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819810635792&reply_comment_id=819817901232", "anchor": "fb-819810635792_819817901232", "service": "fb", "text": "→ No - other cultures and languages have different understandings, constructs and experience of gender. I don't have a solid opinion on them one way or another b/c I've never experienced life as part of them. They also may not use the framework of identity the way that we do.
On the other hand, lack of gender in language makes things a lot easier. There's also a medical perspective to consider in this. And I think it's very relevant that trans people have existed in some way in cultures throughout history (whether through third gender or special social roles or having 5 different categories for genders or whatever else)
Culture and political structure plays a huge part in everything. I probably agree with your second paragraph.
Interesting question though - I'll keep thinking about it :)", "timestamp": "1477166943"}, {"author": "Perry", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819810635792&reply_comment_id=819818699632", "anchor": "fb-819810635792_819818699632", "service": "fb", "text": "→ The erasing part is the other thing I was concerned about earlier.", "timestamp": "1477167339"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819810635792&reply_comment_id=819820860302", "anchor": "fb-819810635792_819820860302", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Luna: what do you mean by \"a medical perspective to consider\"?", "timestamp": "1477168589"}, {"author": "Luna", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819810635792&reply_comment_id=819827042912", "anchor": "fb-819810635792_819827042912", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Based on different body parts/organs/etc, you're statistically at risk for different health conditions, and have different medical, nutritional, psychological (at least in this society) needs, etc
So, there is some use in being able to generalize about these things - and gendered pronouns and concepts of gender can be a decent tool for that (though they can also be used very damagingly in that respect as well)
There's probly other stuff I could come up with... feeling pretty exhausted rn tho", "timestamp": "1477171602"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819810635792&reply_comment_id=819827856282", "anchor": "fb-819810635792_819827856282", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Luna: I agree that we need a way to be able to talk about things that are based on having specific kinds of bodies, but not very commonly. Things like \"color blindness is much more common among people with only one X chromosome\". But requiring pronouns to match up with various kinds of biological markers (a) doesn't work very well and (b) isn't worth it for the small gains you get from being able to talk about body-type-specific things slightly more easily.
(I'm actually having trouble coming up with a body-specific situation where pronouns help very much. Like, you wouldn't say \"if someone tells you he has color blindness\" because color blindness isn't even a 100% one-X-chromosome thing. Maybe if you were writing a book about giving birth, and wanted to use \"she\" for the person giving birth and \"he\" for their partner? But reading books written that way drives me nuts!)", "timestamp": "1477171973"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1477175837"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1477176017"}, {"author": "David Chudzicki", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819810635792&reply_comment_id=819846109702", "anchor": "fb-819810635792_819846109702", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Using pronouns to determine medical treatment does not seem like a good idea.", "timestamp": "1477179944"}, {"author": "Amy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819822487042", "anchor": "fb-819822487042", "service": "fb", "text": "I am so happy to see that someone agrees with me about this fabulous idea.", "timestamp": "1477169499"}, {"author": "Chaos", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819831538902", "anchor": "fb-819831538902", "service": "fb", "text": "I'm sure actual linguists have real ideas about this, but i don't think \"they\" is feature-complete. Gendered pronouns let you use pronouns as positional arguments if you happen to be so lucky as to be talking about people of different genders. And there are non-person-specific use cases where we take advantage of this, e.g. \"he said, she said\". Obviously, the fact that this (sometimes) works with gendered pronouns is a hack, and we can do better. But having the same pronoun for everyone removes the cases in which we can use the hack.", "timestamp": "1477173160"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819831538902&reply_comment_id=819834468032", "anchor": "fb-819831538902_819834468032", "service": "fb", "text": "→ This hack doesn't cover many cases, and languages like Korean that use a single pronoun function quite well.
I would love to expand \"one\" into an obviative pronoun or something, but (a) I don't think this is a release blocker and (b) I think this development actually is gated on more widespread deployment of \"they\", since people don't start figuring out how to disambiguate things until they need to.", "timestamp": "1477174462"}, {"author": "Peter", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819831538902&reply_comment_id=819852172552", "anchor": "fb-819831538902_819852172552", "service": "fb", "text": "→ The solution, obviously, is to introduce positional pronouns ($1, $2, etc.)", "timestamp": "1477181662"}, {"author": "Finn", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819831538902&reply_comment_id=819855695492", "anchor": "fb-819831538902_819855695492", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Hiya! Linguist here. I see what you're saying -- and as it happens, despite being genderqueer I don't agree with the goal of the original post -- but cordially disagree with this argument. Lots of languages get by fine without this (as someone mentioned above). Lots of languages are also better at it than English. There's just a wide range of feature sets which turn out to be perfectly acceptable for use. :)", "timestamp": "1477183388"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819839517912", "anchor": "fb-819839517912", "service": "fb", "text": "I went to cape cod with my mother, my brother, and their boyfriend...", "timestamp": "1477176521"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819839517912&reply_comment_id=819839597752", "anchor": "fb-819839517912_819839597752", "service": "fb", "text": "→ \"I went to cape cod with my father, my brother, and his boyfriend\"", "timestamp": "1477176559"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819839517912&reply_comment_id=819839832282", "anchor": "fb-819839517912_819839832282", "service": "fb", "text": "→ ahh, but his is solely singular, so the convention is to apply it to the most recently mentioned person. Their is usually plural, and would then have a rather large issue as I see it.", "timestamp": "1477176685"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819839517912&reply_comment_id=819840176592", "anchor": "fb-819839517912_819840176592", "service": "fb", "text": "→ \"the convention is to apply it to the most recently mentioned person\"
Figuring out what noun-phrase a pronoun refers back to is actually really complex and context dependent. (This is called \"coreference resolution\" if you want to look it up, and I used to work on training computers how to do it.)
My sentence is ambiguous enough that I think I probably would say \"my father, my brother, and my brother's boyfriend\" instead. As \"they\" becomes more widely used in the singular, people will think of \"my mother, my brother, and their X\" as more ambiguous, and be more likely to choose alternate phrasings.", "timestamp": "1477176900"}, {"author": "BDan", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819839517912&reply_comment_id=819840271402", "anchor": "fb-819839517912_819840271402", "service": "fb", "text": "→ \"I went to Cape Cod with my parent, my sibling, and their partner.\" It sounds much more natural when you remove the other gendered words.", "timestamp": "1477176965"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819839517912&reply_comment_id=819840600742", "anchor": "fb-819839517912_819840600742", "service": "fb", "text": "→ \"How it sounds when you remove the other gendered words\" seems like a helpful way to get closer to hearing how things would sound in a world where \"they\" was more widely accepted in the singular.", "timestamp": "1477177223"}, {"author": "Finn", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819839517912&reply_comment_id=819857087702", "anchor": "fb-819839517912_819857087702", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Eh, there's lots of places already where English is ambiguous about stuff like this. You don't notice because you work around it -- saying something like \"my mother, my brother, and my brother's boyfriend\" as needed. It's totally normal to require additional words to clarify something. English also doesn't let me say, just by referring to \"my aunt,\" whether she's my mother's or my father's sister. That's fine! It usually doesn't matter, and if it does I'll use more words to specify.
I don't actually agree with the proposal in the original post, but I don't think ambiguity is a strong argument against it.", "timestamp": "1477183624"}, {"author": "Sarah", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819839517912&reply_comment_id=819943793942", "anchor": "fb-819839517912_819943793942", "service": "fb", "text": "→ The point isn't that English doesn't already have lots of ambiguity of exactly this sort or resources for coping with it, just that this move would increase ambiguity significantly. And I may be alone in this, but I for one already do notice the ambiguities and it can make language clunkier to have to disambiguate.", "timestamp": "1477232560"}, {"author": "Christopher", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819839517912&reply_comment_id=819985096172", "anchor": "fb-819839517912_819985096172", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Sarah You're not alone.
Interestingly, Chinese has very few sounds and typically only mono- or bisyllabic words, but lots of unique characters. So all the time people, especially when introducing themselves, have to resort to explaining what characters are in their name by referring to something else. In English, it would be like saying, \"I'm Bear Pear Wright. 'grizzly bear's' 'bear,' 'pear tree's 'pear', and 'shipwright's' 'wright'. Because you could be Bare Pair Right, for instance. Except in Chinese there are hundreds of other homonyms. The ambiguity amuses me, and makes for wonderful punning opportunities, but isn't very good at conveying information orally.", "timestamp": "1477250653"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819839517912&reply_comment_id=819985575212", "anchor": "fb-819839517912_819985575212", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Christopher: is this mostly a names issue, or does it come up in many contexts?", "timestamp": "1477251007"}, {"author": "Christopher", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819839517912&reply_comment_id=819986368622", "anchor": "fb-819839517912_819986368622", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Names are the most common because they are often attributes without context (\"bright\" \"elegance\" \"virtue\" \"pearl' \"health\" etc). However, it is pretty common to explain which character you mean by referring to a common word that it uses that character that everyone will know, or to describe how to write it or part of it. For instance, \"No, it's the \"construction\" jian but with with a side-person radical\". I recently read a book in which the fact that \"revenge\" and \"wish\" are same sound same tone was made into a joke.
Obviously it hasn't impeded China from developing into a global economy and most of the time it is obvious from context what someone means, but it is still common and noticeable to me when I am in mandarin environments, and is not evident in anywhere near the same levels in Russian or French.", "timestamp": "1477251347"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819839517912&reply_comment_id=820000600102", "anchor": "fb-819839517912_820000600102", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I think it is also important to recognize that certain languages are better or worse at conveying information in certain ways. So the existence of languages without gender specified words doesn't necessarily mean it is a good idea. Not that it doesn't either.", "timestamp": "1477256638"}, {"author": "Ezra", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819839517912&reply_comment_id=820007141992", "anchor": "fb-819839517912_820007141992", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Maybe just don't go to Cape Cod?", "timestamp": "1477259657"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819839517912&reply_comment_id=820096622672", "anchor": "fb-819839517912_820096622672", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Also, other languages are not simply English +/- gendered pronouns. To make the comparison to other languages requires an understanding of how sentences are actually constructed. For example, as I understand it, Korean mostly repeats the name/title where we would use a pronoun. In common speaking there have actually started to be gendered pronouns used informally to address this issue.", "timestamp": "1477311220"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=819839517912&reply_comment_id=820099252402", "anchor": "fb-819839517912_820099252402", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Jeremy: In referencing languages without gendered pronouns I've mostly just been looking up lists of languages classified as not having them, and then picking languages I think people will have heard of. The only language in this category that I've learned is (Mandarin) Chinese, where you use \"ta\" for \"he/she/it\" and \"tamen\" in the plural. When writing there are different characters for \"he/she/it\", which were added to the written language in the early 20th century in response to western contact.", "timestamp": "1477313032"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1562979833"}, {"author": "Ben", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820056777522", "anchor": "fb-820056777522", "service": "fb", "text": "Do you object on similar grounds to other languages incorporating formality into personal pronouns?", "timestamp": "1477279814"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820056777522&reply_comment_id=820057426222", "anchor": "fb-820056777522_820057426222", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Formality seems different to me, because it's about a relationship, between the speaker and the person being spoken to/about. Similarly if a language had a pronoun distinction based on whether a person owed you a favor that would be just a different and interesting way of doing language. Even a different pronoun for people in one job class would be pretty much fine, as long as it was very clear to everyone who was in that class and this division was accepted society-wide.", "timestamp": "1477280095"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1477284955"}, {"author": "Ben", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820056777522&reply_comment_id=820064102842", "anchor": "fb-820056777522_820064102842", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Formality could mean adult/child, but it could also mean high status / low status, which sounds like something we may not want to bake into pronouns. I think one could reasonably find it more objectionable than gendered use", "timestamp": "1477285457"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820056777522&reply_comment_id=820095544832", "anchor": "fb-820056777522_820095544832", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Elliot: If it were part of some dystopian caste system then I'd probably want to get rid of the caste system and the pronouns as well. I was imagining something like a very religious society that uses a different pronoun for priests. The idea is that since if you're a priest everyone knows this about you, and everyone is very clearly either a priest or not, then it's ok. But this is pretty hypothetical, and I have trouble imagining how I would feel about it if I were actually in that society.", "timestamp": "1477310335"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820056777522&reply_comment_id=820095604712", "anchor": "fb-820056777522_820095604712", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Ben: I was thinking of formality in the sense of T/V languages where you have two forms of \"you\" based on the level of formality of your relationship, just extended to the third person. If instead it's that we have a high status group and a low status group, and people in one group get pronoun A regardless while in the other get B, then it's not about the relationship between the speaker and the person they're referring to, in which case I think it's probably not good.", "timestamp": "1477310476"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820056777522&reply_comment_id=820097391132", "anchor": "fb-820056777522_820097391132", "service": "fb", "text": "→ For example, fourth person in Navajo has several uses including \"referring politely or impersonally to certain socially-distant individuals (e.g. when speaking to opposite-sex siblings and relatives through marriage, giving admonitions, speaking of the dead)\", which is fine with me.", "timestamp": "1477311668"}, {"author": "Ben", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820056777522&reply_comment_id=820116437962", "anchor": "fb-820056777522_820116437962", "service": "fb", "text": "→ All the efficiency arguments you make for gendered pronouns I find persuasive and applicable to T-V distinctions. Do I really want to bucket all people into higher/lower power hierarchy before deciding which term of \"you\" to use? Is there risk of not understanding the nature of a relationship and giving offense? What if I am just bad at figuring this out and it creates anxiety? What if people are choosing certain forms of 'you' to assert dominance? Here, I think English has the right idea - let's keep 'you' clean from all of that.
Your other arguments around gender are more similar to objecting to a dystopian caste system, notably \"gendered pronouns make excessive emphasis on a relatively unimportant attribute\". This argument hinges on whether or not gender is important, which is where you are getting all the pushback. It may be a good argument to make, but I would not retreat back to efficiency arguments when that point is challenged", "timestamp": "1477320426"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1562980065"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062", "anchor": "fb-820097426062", "service": "fb", "text": "A question for those linguists out there. Are there any languages that only have one 3rd person pronoun for singular/plural?", "timestamp": "1477311711"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820097625662", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820097625662", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Navajo doesn't distinguish plurality or gender in the 3rd person, though it does have a 4th person which lets you do some disambiguation.", "timestamp": "1477311808"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820097950012", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820097950012", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Jeff, yes, a fourth person would solve the \"cape cod issue.\" I think that while \"they\" for everything seems simple, to try to implement it without other gramatical changes would not be successful. Languages don't usually evolve to be less clear. I think \"they\" for when preferred gender is unknown is a great idea, but would be pretty against it as the only possibility", "timestamp": "1477312106"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820098613682", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820098613682", "service": "fb", "text": "→ There are also a bunch of languages that do animate/inanimate instead of male/female, which doesn't let help in disambiguating most kinds of lots-of-people sentences.", "timestamp": "1477312562"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820098793322", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820098793322", "service": "fb", "text": "→ i guess I see the issue I raise in the cape cod thread as actually being more about confusion between singular plural when specific singular genders are removed. I am not opposed to a single 3rd person singular pronoun, but I don't think \"they\" works", "timestamp": "1477312677"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820098828252", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820098828252", "service": "fb", "text": "→ And English also does animate/inanimate, for that matter, at least in the singilar", "timestamp": "1477312719"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820098962982", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820098962982", "service": "fb", "text": "→ As someone already pointed out, our 2nd person you is made clear because of the presence of the audience, and even with this it is a linguistic issue that nearly every English dialect \"solves\" with informal solutions", "timestamp": "1477312855"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820099052802", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820099052802", "service": "fb", "text": "→ \"Languages don't usually evolve to be less clear\"
Languages certainly do! Languages evolve in all sorts of ways, both adding distinctions and removing them, and clarity seems not to be much of a factor. For example:
* \"w\" and \"wh\" have merged for nearly all speakers, making homophones out of pairs like \"wail\" and \"whale\".
* dual and plural conjugations merged
* singular and plural 2nd person pronouns merged into just \"you\"", "timestamp": "1477312914"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820099207492", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820099207492", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Jeremy: Sure, but what I was saying is that some languages only distinguish animate/inanimate but not singular/plural in their third person pronouns.", "timestamp": "1477312962"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820099372162", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820099372162", "service": "fb", "text": "→ \"our 2nd person you is made clear because of the presence of the audience\"
People who come from languages that distinguish singular/plural for \"you\" or exclusive/inclusive for \"we\" tend to find our pronouns missing expressiveness they care about.
\"and even with this it is a linguistic issue that nearly every English dialect 'solves' with informal solutions\"
Really? There are some dialects with a y'all etc but I don't think most people speak one of those dialects.", "timestamp": "1477313123"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820099576752", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820099576752", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Is there a reason why you think merging singular and plural 3rd person is better than creating a new pronoun for one or the other? It seems that while the word itself may be easily adopted (already has been) the functionality would be incredibly difficult or impossible to get people to stop using. As you point out, people who have those specificities in other languages tend to miss them. Why would we think it is possible to get a global language community to intentionally get rid of this (sing./plu.) functionality (without going into the gender issue at all)", "timestamp": "1477313301"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820099896112", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820099896112", "service": "fb", "text": "→ \"Y'all, you all, you folks, youse, you guys, you lot (uk) ye (Ireland) yinz, you-uns, una/wunna/yinna (English Central America) etc\"", "timestamp": "1477313622"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820100150602", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820100150602", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Jeremy: There are lots of dialectical variations on you-plural, but I still think much less than half of english speakers have them in their dialect.", "timestamp": "1477313738"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820100469962", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820100469962", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Really? I think I've rarely met anyone that doesn't use one of the ones I mentioned.
Here, only RI says simply \"you\"", "timestamp": "1477313877"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820100869162", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820100869162", "service": "fb", "text": "→ \"Is there a reason why you think merging singular and plural 3rd person is better than creating a new pronoun for one or the other?\"
Practical concerns only: http://www.jefftk.com/p/an-update-on-gendered-pronouns...
(Otherwise I would want something like \"zie\"; I just don't see a path for it.)
\"people who have those specificities in other languages tend to miss them\"
The reason I brought that up was to illustrate that while we feel like our \"you\" and \"we\" are fine, there is something to them that we don't have and that feels valuable. But any time you come from one language to another you miss distinctions that your native language made easier, which doesn't mean we should have a language that makes every possible distinction.
If \"they\" gets too confusing, though, then I suspect we'll develop a singular/plural distinction, since singular/plural is the main axis our language divides things along. Probably via \"they/them all\" and then shortening.", "timestamp": "1477314006"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820101038822", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820101038822", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I guess I don't actually see any need to get rid of gendered pronouns, though would like to see they become standard for unknown persons, until preferred pronouns are established", "timestamp": "1477314155"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820101183532", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820101183532", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Jeremy: \"I think I've rarely met anyone that doesn't use one of the ones I mentioned.\"
So let's take our speech. Most of the time when we want to talk to a group of people we say \"you\", and occasionally we clarify that we mean you-plural and not you-singular by saying \"you all\" / \"you guys\" / \"you people\" / etc. I've been thinking of this as having a single 2nd person pronoun, with the normal possibility of making it clear what you mean by adding extra words.
Similarly, while I think it would work fine to generally say \"they\" for both singular and plural, in cases where we need to disambiguate I expect many strategies including things like \"they all\".", "timestamp": "1477314296"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820101657582", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820101657582", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Jeff, someone who knows more can correct me on this, but i think that most linguists actually consider this kind of construction to be a pronoun in itself, not a pronoun plus another word. This occurs in other languages as well as in English dialect (this here table) In theory, \"they all\" would work, but it does sort of take away from the argument that people already say \"they\"", "timestamp": "1477314579"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820102081732", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820102081732", "service": "fb", "text": "→ To add in another twist (though I haven't really considered what bearing this has on the discussion) we also use \"you\" as the 3rd person indeterminate in English. \"You can't always get what you want\"", "timestamp": "1477314864"}, {"author": "Sophia", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820102730432", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820102730432", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Using \"you\" as 3rd person indeterminate seems like actually another example of a language evolving to be less clear. Especially in written language, I find I have to fairly frequently clarify \"you general\" vs \"you specific\" or risk offending people accidentally. In French (the only other language I speak) I'd just use \"on\" but in American English saying \"one\" sounds oddly formal.", "timestamp": "1477315472"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820102885122", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820102885122", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Sophia, yes, \"on\" is pretty interesting in its flexibility of usage, and that it is not limited to just 3rd person forms!", "timestamp": "1477315648"}, {"author": "Sophia", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820103049792", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820103049792", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Totally. I often wish English had a parallel to \"on.\"", "timestamp": "1477315755"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820104566752", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820104566752", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Jeremy: \"i think that most linguists actually consider this kind of construction to be a pronoun in itself, not a pronoun plus another word\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_personal_pronouns and other linguistic descriptions of english grammar have just a single entry for the second person, noting that there's a non-standard usage of \"you all\" etc. But the nonstandard usage I think it's talking about is pretty consistent use of \"you all\", not the usage of \"all\" I would have in \"are you all coming?\" One way to tall them apart is that in my \"are you all coming?\" the \"all\" gets a little bit of emphasis, while in the pronon-like usage of \"you all\" I think the emphasis is more on \"you\"?
(But this is all amateur linguistics at this point; I haven't studied linguistic anything in about ten years.)
\"it does sort of take away from the argument that people already say 'they'\"
Not really. What I care about is having a path we can follow from our current place to a place where we don't distinguish gender in our pronoun system. Something where we reduce the use of he/she and expand \"they\" until \"he/she\" are in a role like \"thee\", and also expand use of constructions like \"they all\" as needed, works fine.", "timestamp": "1477316145"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820105150582", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820105150582", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Yeah, it is definitely possible to use it in a way that is as a pronoun, but it is nevertheless a pronoun. For example, if you were at a contra dance and asked \"are you guys having fun?\" you would be using \"you guys\" as a pronoun. You obviously are not asking if all of the males in the room are having fun. This Wikipedia article refers to dialectical pronouns in the way I use them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_person", "timestamp": "1477316558"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820105559762", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820105559762", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Jeremy: I'm not sure how to think of it. Other constructions like this include \"are you people having fun\", \"are you folks having fun\", but I'm not sure we can just say \"you guys\". \"you people\", and \"you folks\" are all alternate 2nd person pronouns?
(The ambiguity between guys=men and guys=people makes this extra confusing, but we have the same pattern with people and folks.)", "timestamp": "1477316805"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820105614652", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820105614652", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Specifically on \"you all:\"
If I ask if \"are you all having fun,\" using it as a pronoun I am asking if the collective group is having fun. If I were using the all as a modifier of the collective \"you\" (with the emphasis you note) I would be asking a different question, whether every single person is individually having fun.", "timestamp": "1477316845"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820105794292", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820105794292", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I am also not totally sure, but I believe that they are actually pronouns themselves. It is most apparent to me with \"y'all\" which obviously seems like a pronoun and is used as such, but is a contraction of you all.", "timestamp": "1477316964"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820105869142", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820105869142", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Jeremy: You can get the same group vs every-member-of-the-group distinction with \"they all\". Compare:
\"Are they all (unemphasized) having fun\": are they having fun (informal)
\"Are they all (emphasized) having fun\": is every one of them having fun (formal or informal)", "timestamp": "1477317067"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820106133612", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820106133612", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Totally! I think that they all would be fine eventually, but I actually think it is harder to try to shift a 3rd person plural pronoun to singular and then create new (probabably dialectically different) plural ones than it would be to either create a different singular or create a cultural standard of using they when gender is unknown.", "timestamp": "1477317413"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820106253372", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820106253372", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Perhaps using they as a starting point instead of politicized ze? \"Dey?\" \"Tay?\"", "timestamp": "1477317493"}, {"author": "Andrew", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820336412132", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820336412132", "service": "fb", "text": "→ To answer the original question, in Georgian, third person pronouns distinguish number and closeness to speaker but not gender. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_grammar", "timestamp": "1477421199"}, {"author": "Jeremy", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820097426062&reply_comment_id=820348667572", "anchor": "fb-820097426062_820348667572", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Actually, the original question was about number, not gender", "timestamp": "1477427550"}, {"author": "Sophia", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612", "anchor": "fb-820110624612", "service": "fb", "text": "Parenting question for you, Jeff: do you use \"they\" or \"she\" for Lily and Anna? I fell into using \"she\" for Teddy without much thought but it does seem a little odd when I think about it.", "timestamp": "1477317769"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=820110978902", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_820110978902", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I use \"she\" with Lily and Anna, but I do agree it's somewhat odd. Basically, as long as \"he/she\" are the default in our circle if I decide that the pronoun for my kids is \"they\" then I'm bringing the kids into my politics in way that's not fair to them.", "timestamp": "1477317962"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=820113813222", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_820113813222", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Vivian: Harassing the kids is more or less it. Having non-standard pronouns is currently a complicated thing to communicate to other parents, let alone other children, and it (currently) needs to be one of the first things you talk about. While getting teased about pronouns isn't something I want to happen to anyone, it's also not something it's fair to me to force onto my kids.
(Lily, at 2.5y, actually is old enough to choose for herself somewhat. If I say \"papa is a boy, mama is a girl, what are you?\" she'll say \"I'm a girl\". I should try this with \"papa is a boy, mama is a girl, [nonbinary friend] isn't either, what are you?\" though to see if she's just thinking \"girl\" is a closer fit than \"boy\" and those are her only choices. Still, at this age she's probably mostly just reflecting back that other people have been categorizing her as a girl, and I don't think were yet to the age where if we had been raising her as a boy she would have elevated odds of insisting that she's actually a girl.)", "timestamp": "1477318680"}, {"author": "David Chudzicki", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=820145953812", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_820145953812", "service": "fb", "text": "→ \"\"\"
If I say \"papa is a boy, mama is a girl, what are you?\" she'll say \"I'm a girl\".
\"\"\"
Lots of questions we ask kids have a clear expectation that there's a correct answer determined by others or the external world, rather than being questions that have an answer which is up to them.
I would expect that without somehow strongly signaling otherwise, this is probably interpreted as that kind of question.", "timestamp": "1477328913"}, {"author": "David Chudzicki", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=820146422872", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_820146422872", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Maybe putting it in a series of questions of the right kind would help.", "timestamp": "1477329063"}, {"author": "David Chudzicki", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=820147066582", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_820147066582", "service": "fb", "text": "→ \"\"\"I use \"she\" with Lily and Anna\"\"\"
Jeff, do you use 'they' with most people?", "timestamp": "1477329273"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=10100101234691702", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_10100101234691702", "service": "fb", "text": "→ David not yet", "timestamp": "1562696348"}, {"author": "Julia", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=10100101252311392", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_10100101252311392", "service": "fb", "text": "→ She did tell us one time that she was a boy, and we said ok and a couple of minutes later she told us she was a girl. So she has played around with the idea.", "timestamp": "1562705114"}, {"author": "Roger", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=10100104737317412", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_10100104737317412", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Jeff Kaufman Just curious.... do/did your kids wear non gendered clothes and have non gendered toys etc.?", "timestamp": "1564857022"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=10100104740481072", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_10100104740481072", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Roger not particularly. Both seem reasonably into being girls.", "timestamp": "1564858381"}, {"author": "Danni", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=10100104752516952", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_10100104752516952", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Roger Clothes and toys only have genders if we say they do ;-) [winking emoji]", "timestamp": "1564862765"}, {"author": "Adrian", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=10100104814477782", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_10100104814477782", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Jeff Kaufman you could argue the same for deciding your kids' pronouns are he or she lol. Or for, like... Having a friend circle that defaults to he or she! Shockingly, that is unfair to a child who does not use he or she pronouns.
It's not about your politics; it's about letting your kids be themselves. It's not about your deciding their pronouns; it's about respecting the real pronouns they have.
Don't you dare tell any parent who is giving their child the right to self determination by refusing to arbitrarily pin a pronoun on them before they can speak us being unfair to that child. It sounds way too similar to the ideas that trans parents, parents of trans kids, and parents who just want their kid to not be forced into some weird gender shit and rather declare who they are without that pressure--that these parents are abusive by existing. This line of thinking directly results in trans people losing custody or parents and it is very dangerous.", "timestamp": "1564903843"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=10100104829827022", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_10100104829827022", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Adrian I definitely don't think that parents who chose to use \"they\" for their young children, before their children have expressed a preference, are being abusive or even that they're harming their children in any way. There are parents in our circle that do that, and I'm completely supportive of them.
I think whether to use \"they\" for preverbal children is a close call right now, where reasonable parents could go either way.
Pros:
* The child can stay without an assigned gender until they start feeling like they have one and request otherwise, or they can feel like they don't have a gender and continue with they indefinitely.
* Normalizes the usage of they and supports other children (and adults) for which he or she is not a good fit.
Cons:
* They are likely to get teased a lot.
* The children may disagree that using they out of caution is appropriate, and resent having their pronouns used to push their parents politics.
* It's a lot of extra work people who interact with them. In cases where the child has requested to go by they, I think all that work is completely appropriate and not a consideration, but it's also a lot of work to ask people to do out of precaution over something relatively rare. I would love to live in a world where this wasn't work for anyone, and the way we get there is people going by they and others getting used to it, but as we move along in this direction it's still hard for individuals who go by they. I don't think this is a fair thing to put on my kids.
Overall, there are ways that it's unfair to decide that their pronouns are he or she, and there are other ways that it's unfair to decide their pronouns will be they. I think this is a hard choice for parents and either choice can be a good one.", "timestamp": "1564924117"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=10100104855091392", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_10100104855091392", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Expanded this into a post: https://www.jefftk.com/p/pronouns-for-preverbal-children", "timestamp": "1564937578"}, {"author": "Roger", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=10100104870620272", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_10100104870620272", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Danni so, if Grandma gives Jeff\u2019s daughter a stay at home Barbie set complete with fully equipped dolls house, kitchen, accessories (vacuum, washing machine etc.), cook book on how to bake bread, but no shoes.... and Aunty gave the other daughter a pink Cinderella outfit complete with high heel glass slippers, wand and tiara you\u2019re going to tell them what exactly?", "timestamp": "1564946140"}, {"author": "Roger", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=10100104871498512", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_10100104871498512", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Jeff Kaufman isn\u2019t dealing with gender pronouns before you\u2019ve dealt with gender stereotypes like putting the cart before the horse?", "timestamp": "1564946620"}, {"author": "Adrian", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=10100104871812882", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_10100104871812882", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Jeff Kaufman you. are not. listening.
I am not saying that parents must use they for their children until the child can self-determine. I am saying that it is wrong to assume that parents are doing this to \"push their politics on their children.\"
It is just as political a choice to use he or she pronouns for your child. It is transphobic to say that they pronouns are political while other pronouns are not. They are not any more or less political than any other pronouns.
I am not saying that you are directly saying it's abusive to use they pronouns. I'm saying that this language is dangerous.
As for your pros, the only pro that is actually a good reason to do it is to not force a child/coerce a child into a specific gender. Using they pronouns just to normalize they pronouns defeats the purpose of respecting pronouns because of who someone is. People should use pronouns they are most comfortable with.
As for your cons:
--\"they are likely to get teased a lot\" is something that people say to pretty much anyone in any LGBTQIA+ affiliated family ever. Have two parents of the same gender? Teasing. A child comes out young? Teasing. It is not a reason to disrespect a child's autonomy. In addition, if a child is trans, they are likely to get teased a lot no matter what pronouns they use.
--As for the children potentially disagreeing that using they is appropriate, there are a few problematic pieces of logic here. One: many trans children disagree that it was appropriate to force them/coerce them into a specific gender. This includes externally determining a child's gender so that they lose touch with themselves. Two: the whole point is to *increase* a child's autonomy. As soon as a child is able to tell parents what they need/want re: pronouns and gender in general, then parents can and must listen. So, the situation where a child disagreeing that they is appropriate should not happen, or should not happen for much time, because as soon as that child voices that another set of pronouns (or no pronouns) are more appropriate, then those pronouns should be used.
--\"It's a lot of extra work\" THIS IS JUST STRAIGHT UP TRANSPHOBIA. It. Is not. Hard. To. Use. People's. Pronouns. You know what's a lot of extra work? Dealing with the childhood trauma of never being able to be yourself and then untangling all of that just to live in the world. Using people's pronouns is literally free and and not hard or lots of work at all.
Basically: this is not a conversation for you to be having without listening to a range of trans and nonbinary perspectives. This is not a conversation you get to claim unilateral decision making over. You are being way entitled to realities that aren't yours and mixing a lot of transphobia into it. Stop.", "timestamp": "1564946759"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=10100104931682902", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_10100104931682902", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Adrian \"you. are not. listening.\"
I am listening to you, but I'm also listening to other people, many of them trans and nonbinary, who don't see things the same way you do.
\"I am not saying that parents must use they for their children until the child can self-determine. I am saying that it is wrong to assume that parents are doing this to 'push their politics on their children.'\"
That isn't something I think? I think pretty much everyone who chooses to use \"they\" for their children are doing it because they think that's what's best for their children. And, as I wrote above, I support that. After considering the pros and cons I didn't think it was what was best for my children, and so decided not to do it. But since I do think that using \"they\" for my children would have been better overall, going with \"they\" would have been \"bringing the kids into my politics in way that's not fair to them\".
\"It is just as political a choice to use he or she pronouns for your child. It is transphobic to say that they pronouns are political while other pronouns are not. They are not any more or less political than any other pronouns.\"
What I mean by \"political\" here is that one belief I have is that we should massively expand the usage of \"they\". Ex: we should start using it for strangers when we don't know their pronouns yet instead of inferring pronouns from appearance. Over time I want to push the usage of \"they\" until it no longer indicates \"this is a person who doesn't want to go by he or she\" but instead just \"this is a person\". This is a political project, and if I chose to use \"they\" with my children because of that goal, that would be a political decision.
\"the only pro that is actually a good reason to do it is to not force a child/coerce a child into a specific gender\"
I agree, that's the reason that would have led me to choose to use \"they\" with my kids.
\"Using they pronouns just to normalize they pronouns defeats the purpose of respecting pronouns because of who someone is.\"
I don't understand how that applies in this case, where we're talking about preverbal children?
\"'they are likely to get teased a lot' is something that people say to pretty much anyone in any LGBTQIA+ affiliated family ever. Have two parents of the same gender? Teasing. A child comes out young? Teasing. It is not a reason to disrespect a child's autonomy. In addition, if a child is trans, they are likely to get teased a lot no matter what pronouns they use.\"
All of this is correct, and all of this is not how the world should work. If I thought my children didn't want to go by she, I would be completely supportive in whatever direction they did want to go, and try to help them as much as I could. If they have not indicated that this is how they feel, however, then putting them in a position where they would be subject to teasing etc is still something to consider as a parent.
\"As for the children potentially disagreeing that using they is appropriate, there are a few problematic pieces of logic here. One: many trans children disagree that it was appropriate to force them/coerce them into a specific gender. This includes externally determining a child's gender so that they lose touch with themselves.\"
Yes, if the child is trans then starting with \"they\" would, in retrospect, be very likely to have been the right choice. But since we don't know if the child will be trans, and only 1:200 to 1:50 people are, this isn't the only consideration.
\"Two: the whole point is to *increase* a child's autonomy. As soon as a child is able to tell parents what they need/want re: pronouns and gender in general, then parents can and must listen. So, the situation where a child disagreeing that they is appropriate should not happen, or should not happen for much time, because as soon as that child voices that another set of pronouns (or no pronouns) are more appropriate, then those pronouns should be used.\"
There are many cases where children disagree with how they were raised in retrospect, without having objected to it at the time. Children have a much more limited understanding of the world, don't know the full effects of their choices, and I've had many conversations with adults who regret some aspect of their upbringing but didn't have the understanding of the world they would have needed as a child to explain what they would have wanted instead.
\"'It's a lot of extra work' THIS IS JUST STRAIGHT UP TRANSPHOBIA. It. Is not. Hard. To. Use. People's. Pronouns. You know what's a lot of extra work? Dealing with the childhood trauma of never being able to be yourself and then untangling all of that just to live in the world. Using people's pronouns is literally free and and not hard or lots of work at all.\"
I disagree that it's literally free. It requires effort to change how you use language and to track pronouns that are not obvious from presentation. In the case of raising children it requires parents to find childcare workers that will reliably use the specified pronouns, and dealing with cases where that turns out not to be happening. It requires talking with friends and family so that they'll all use the pronouns correctly. In cases where someone has indicated pronouns this work is 100% necessary, and should be done without griping or complaining, all as invisibly to the child as possible, since as you say trans people already have far more difficult things to deal with. Doing it out of precaution, however, as in the case of preverbal children, is less clear.", "timestamp": "1564968880"}, {"author": "Danni", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=10100104948648902", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_10100104948648902", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Jeff Kaufman You aren't listening to Adrian though. You're arguing every point they raise. It's coming off like your interest here is to prove how right you are, and in a conversation between a cis person and a trans person where trans people are the ones whose lives are affected by the outcome, that is not a constructive thing for a cis person who wants to support trans people to do. Even if you 100% disagree with Adrian, even if every other trans person you've ever talked to disagreed with Adrian, what you're doing by arguing their points instead of genuinely listening to them and considering why they might be saying these things or asking questions to understand their perspective better, is harmful to trans people generally and to the specific trans person you're arguing with. If your goal here is to prove that you're as right as possible until Adrian is tired of arguing with you, then yeah, maybe you want to keep doing what you're doing...but I hope I know you better than that, I hope your objective here is to support trans people better and I would really strongly urge you to back up, stop (or at least press the pause button on) trying to respond defensively or prove points here, and think about and/or ask thoughtful questions to find out what you could be doing differently in this interaction to better support a trans person who is telling you that you're doing something that's perpetuating trans oppression.", "timestamp": "1564976533"}, {"author": "Roger", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=10100104954562052", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_10100104954562052", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Danni you never answered my question.", "timestamp": "1564981621"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=10100104971842422", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_10100104971842422", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Roger please don't hassle people to answer your questions here if they don't want to. People don't owe you a response.", "timestamp": "1565006019"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=10100104973274552", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_10100104973274552", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Danni I could nod, thank Adrian for their comments, and simply internally note the places where what they're saying conflicts with other parts of my understanding of the world. At least to me, however, that would be deeply disrespectful. Instead, I try to listen to someone's arguments, note where they do and don't fit with what I've learned from other sources (such as what other trans and nb people are saying) and try to carefully describe what I still don't understand.
This is somewhat cultural though, and you're right to point out that Adrian may be interpreting this differently. Being explicit then: I strongly value Adrian's perspective in this thread, especially where they disagree with others. Understanding the roots of that disagreement offers some of the best opportunities for figuring out what to do here.", "timestamp": "1565007322"}, {"author": "Roger", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820110624612&reply_comment_id=10100104980894282", "anchor": "fb-820110624612_10100104980894282", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Jeff Kaufman you\u2019re right. No one owes me a response.... or for that matter a straight answer.", "timestamp": "1565012354"}, {"author": "Dan", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820114491862", "anchor": "fb-820114491862", "service": "fb", "text": "I just want the they users to start using singular verb forms. \"They is\" would be a lot less confusing than \"they are,\" when speaking of a single person. My neuroplasticity isn't what it once was, so I have to work hard to adjust.", "timestamp": "1477319083"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820114491862&reply_comment_id=820114726392", "anchor": "fb-820114491862_820114726392", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Do you say \"you is\"? Or, I guess, \"you art\"?", "timestamp": "1477319243"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820114491862&reply_comment_id=820114766312", "anchor": "fb-820114491862_820114766312", "service": "fb", "text": "→ (When we lost \"thou\" and \"you\" became singular, the \"you\" conjugations stuck with \"you\" in its expanded role.)", "timestamp": "1477319298"}, {"author": "Dan", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820114491862&reply_comment_id=820115260322", "anchor": "fb-820114491862_820115260322", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Okay, point, but second vs third-person is something I've heard all my life.", "timestamp": "1477319666"}, {"author": "Dan", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820114491862&reply_comment_id=820115504832", "anchor": "fb-820114491862_820115504832", "service": "fb", "text": "→ So I'm therefore used to it, and don't have to try and figure out who the group of people in question is.", "timestamp": "1477319851"}, {"author": "Penelope", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820114491862&reply_comment_id=10100101276597722", "anchor": "fb-820114491862_10100101276597722", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I say this too", "timestamp": "1562715841"}, {"author": "Sarah", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062", "anchor": "fb-820118384062", "service": "fb", "text": "In Thai, there are particles that indicate whether the speaker is male or female used at the end of almost every polite sentence (--kaa for female, --krap for male). I don't know if it's a coincidence that Thailand has long been relatively tolerant of genderqueer identities, and the particles do follow gender rather than sex. I don't think this is actually feasible or desirable in English, but theoretically it would be an interesting hack to add such particles to English in order to allow speakers to casually cue others into their preferred gender pronouns. You can add more than two particles, of course.", "timestamp": "1477321290"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=820118648532", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_820118648532", "service": "fb", "text": "→ You can vaguely get at this by using more male-typical or female-typical speech patterns, but it's pretty noisy.", "timestamp": "1477321480"}, {"author": "Sarah", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=820119342142", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_820119342142", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Yeah. And I certainly wouldn't want to have to use female-typical speech patterns to get my preferred feminine pronouns. I think existing gendered speech patterns are some of the strongest forces entrenching current gender norms. Not that I'm about to give up my precious modals and qualifiers, even if it would make my speech more forceful and elegant.", "timestamp": "1477321756"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=820119801222", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_820119801222", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Oh, I was misunderstanding you. I thought you were saying that instead of gendered pronouns we could use gendered sentence particles, not that we could use those particles to signal our preferred pronouns to others.
For signaling pronouns you have the problem that there are up to six things you need to communicate: what to use for each of they/them/their/they're/theirs/themself. This is a lot more than you can lightly include in a sentence.", "timestamp": "1477322142"}, {"author": "Sarah", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=820134032702", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_820134032702", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Only if there aren't a finite number of standardized pronouns, which I think is necessary in any case. Letting people completely invent their own pronouns and expecting others to use them the way they want is not feasible or reasonable, in my opinion. I'm thinking a distinct set of pronouns, e.g. indicating feminine, masculine, neither, both, or whatever nonbinary options the genderqueer community could come to consensus on. I have heard some people argue we should get rid of all ways of categorizing humans, and I think this is nonsense. Making distinctions is how we think, and we are social animals, which means we think about other people a lot. Personally I think sex is too baked-in biologically to ever be conceptually ignored, though I know many disagree. Having some extra widely-known gender concepts would make things friendlier for those who don't fit neatly into male or female, but that can only happen for a finite set of gender concepts. Completely self-created genders like unicorngender and rainbowgender are never going to catch on, because concepts have to be public to be communicated. We can make more concepts more public \u2014 as the concept of genderqueer is now becoming more widely known and accepted\u2014but that takes work and can only be done for a finite set.", "timestamp": "1477325515"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=820135040682", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_820135040682", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Sarah: \"Letting people completely invent their own pronouns and expecting others to use them the way they want is not feasible or reasonable\"
This is something that's very important to some people, including some thread participants.
\"feminine, masculine, neither, both, or whatever nonbinary options the genderqueer community could come to consensus on\"
How would getting consensus on this work? There are lots of people with a lot of ideas, reasons they chose their set of pronouns, and reasons they don't want to use other sets.
(And it's not like people haven't been trying to get consensus on new pronouns!)
\"I have heard some people argue we should get rid of all ways of categorizing humans, and I think this is nonsense.\"
Removing this categorization from the pronoun system is a much weaker goal than removing all categorizations.
I'm generally in favor of having ways of categorizing people, especially ones that correspond to important differences, but that doesn't mean these distinctions belong in pronouns.", "timestamp": "1477325938"}, {"author": "Sarah", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=820141048642", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_820141048642", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I thought you were suggesting a way of avoiding the need to make all gender distinctions with pronouns, which is erasing more than my proposal would (although your proposal is also much more feasible). Or did you want \"they\" to be just a default, until one finds out interlocutors' preferred pronouns? I know that some people want others to use particular unusual pronouns, and I try to comply with this to be as respectful as I can, but I honestly don't think it will be feasible in the long term to get most people to adopt a brand new set of pronouns when they meet someone new and then use them appropriately. I apologize if this opinion is hurtful to anyone, and I am open to arguments as to why I am mistaken. It's true that we do this for names, and although it is often somewhat challenging when we meet a lot of new people at once or remeet acquaintances, we manage okay. So maybe we could do it for pronouns as well, especially if people are somewhat tolerant of others making mistakes (mistaking names is already embarrassing but common). But given the challenge of names, the added challenge of six new pronouns seems like a lot to ask of casual acquaintances. I acknowledge I am speaking from a position of cis privilege, and do not fully understand the desire to be referred to with one's preferred set of pronouns. I would like to hear from anyone who dislikes being referred to as \"they,\" \"he,\" or \"she,\" though of course that is only a request. And consensus is never easy, but some de facto consensus is necessary for mainstream language to change. If that is a goal.", "timestamp": "1477327267"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=820142565602", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_820142565602", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Sarah \"I thought you were suggesting a way of avoiding the need to make all gender distinctions with pronouns\"
Yes
\"which is erasing more than my proposal would\"
It means specifying less about gender when speaking, but it doesn't mean pretending that gender doesn't exist. I don't think, say, Athabaskan languages \"erase\" gender by not using it in their pronouns.
\"Or did you want 'they' to be just a default, until one finds out interlocutors' preferred pronouns?\"
I also want that, as an intermediate step. I don't think we're ready for that either, actually, but we're much closer to being there and in some circles we are there.
\"I honestly don't think it will be feasible in the long term to get most people to adopt a brand new set of pronouns when they meet someone new and then use them appropriately\"
Yeah, I don't know how well this will work out. I don't believe there are any linguistic examples of cultures that work this way, though people are really very flexible in their memory and linguistic ability so it may be possible.
(I'm hoping that they-for-everyone can remove the need for person-specific pronouns, so we may not find out.)", "timestamp": "1477327656"}, {"author": "David Chudzicki", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=820193618292", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_820193618292", "service": "fb", "text": "→ \"brand new set of pronouns when they meet someone new\"
We might call that a \"name\" instead of a \"pronoun\".", "timestamp": "1477345251"}, {"author": "Sarah", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=820328263462", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_820328263462", "service": "fb", "text": "→ David Chudzicki An extra, shorter name that declines.", "timestamp": "1477417545"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=820328607772", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_820328607772", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Sarah: maybe not a shorter name; it varies.
If I asked that people applied appropriate case endings to my name they would probably decline", "timestamp": "1477417609"}, {"author": "Sarah", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=820328942102", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_820328942102", "service": "fb", "text": "→ If a pronoun isn't shorter than the name of the person and isn't easier to remember/know, then why would anyone ever use it? And I would totally try to apply case endings to anyone's name who asked! Especially if there's a vocative case; there's something so charming and friendly about being called to with your name in a vocative case. (I experienced this in Czech, where -a endings become -o in the vocative, so Sarah became Saro when I was being addressed.)", "timestamp": "1477417682"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=820329286412", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_820329286412", "service": "fb", "text": "→ @Sarah: because that's how the language works? \"Jeff read their book\", \"Jeff read his book\", and \"Jeff read Jeff's book\" are all the same length.", "timestamp": "1477417832"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=820329416152", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_820329416152", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Well, not really, \"read his\" gets pronounced more like \"read-iz\", so it is a bit shorter", "timestamp": "1477417871"}, {"author": "Sarah", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=820329725532", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_820329725532", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Jeff Yes, but I don't think it would work that way for people who wanted novel pronouns. It's only more efficient with a small set of pronouns to keep track of. I could be wrong.", "timestamp": "1477417925"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1477423009"}, {"author": "Gareth", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=820345094732", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_820345094732", "service": "fb", "text": "→ (giggling at \"they would probably decline\")", "timestamp": "1477425883"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=820345199522", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_820345199522", "service": "fb", "text": "→ (pun intended)", "timestamp": "1477425934"}, {"author": "Gareth", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=820345334252", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_820345334252", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Obviously! I just thought you might be glad of explicit confirmation that someone appreciated it.", "timestamp": "1477426013"}, {"author": "Micah", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820118384062&reply_comment_id=10100104982675712", "anchor": "fb-820118384062_10100104982675712", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Delightful, delightful ambiguity.", "timestamp": "1565013659"}, {"author": "Alex", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820322075862", "anchor": "fb-820322075862", "service": "fb", "text": "News from 2031:
Summary:
Reverting abolition of singular and gendered pronouns (hereinafter taken to include accompanying possessive adjectives) due to severe regressions.
More detail:
Many cases of serious ambiguity and miscommunication resulted from the 2021 wholesale abolition of singular and gendered pronouns. Alternative speech patterns that were hoped would come in to fill the gap turned out to be cumbersome and ineffective at resolving ambiguities. Speech and writing ended up being dumbed down to accommodate this \"ambiguity tax\". Furthermore, it was found that a majority of people (cis, trans and other) disliked being called \"they\" once their gender had become known, often referring to such usage as \"misgendering\".
FAQ
Q. What went wrong with the quality control? The examples from RFC 314159 seemed to demonstrate that that singular \"they\" could easily supplant gendered pronouns without any misunderstanding?
A. There were several problems. One in particular was that most of the examples showing unproblematic uses of \"they\" turned out to be toy examples, such as: \"Jill walked up the hill. They fetched a pail of water.\" Realistic examples in the wild involving more than one person and fuzzy background information turned out to be much harder to resolve. Even the toy examples would have been seen to break if they had only been pushed a little further: \"Jack walked up the hill. Jill walked up the hill. They fetched a pail of water.\" Who fetched the water?
Q. But in most cases I can work out what is meant even if I blindly substitute they for he/she.
A. You are probably looking at very clean examples. The real world has messy missing information and people will communicate without always having shared understanding. Just being able to understand some examples is a very low bar. Yu culd prbbly undrstnd wht I wrte if I rmve randm vwls, but it puts a bigger burden on the reader and if there is any other \"noise\" in the communciation channel (such as actual noise in the case of speech) then removing a little redundancy may make the writing incomprehensible or ambiguous. Even if it works 70% of the time, that is still a serious degradation, so examples where it works are not very persuasive. Or, if you like living at the threshold of ambiguity, then removing gender and number distinction means that speech becomes a lot more cumbersome. A lot of the time you will end up repeating a long name for the referent of the pronoun, which is clumsy and slow.
Q. OK, I can see it is useful to have light-touch extra disambiguators in the form of gender and number, but why not some other arbitrary convention? Why not label each person at birth with a random bit which we expect everyone to learn?
A. Because a person's gender is immediately apparent a large proportion of the time, or apparent from other things such as their name. With gender you only have to learn the exceptions, which is much less than 1 bit of effort. Furthermore many people like to think in terms of gender categories (of other people), and many people like to be thought of in gender categories, so there is little extra mental burden for most people in using \"he\" and \"she\" compared to the random bit alternative. An alternative in case of possessive adjectives would be (as, for example, in French) to use the arbitrary bit scheme but make it depend on the type (not the instance) of the referent, so you only need to learn the arbitrary bit for each object class, not each instance. But this doesn't work for pronouns.
Q. But what about someone's race? Couldn't we equally say that there ought to be pronouns based on white/black, which is obviously absurd?
A. Gender has the advantage that there is likely to be an approximate 50/50 mix in any culture, thereby maximising the information, though this can break down in local groups. Statistically, gender is much more visually and audially obvious than race, which is more likely to be ambiguous, and doesn't translate across cultures. Of course there are people who prefer not to be categorised in one gender or another, but there are many more people who prefer to be gendered. It is much clearer in terms of ambiguity, and much better in terms of happiness, to use \"they\" only for people who actually want it, or in cases where the preferred gender is unknown, and use \"he/she/...\" for people who want that.
Furthermore, a lot of the problem with \"singular they\" turned out to stem from the singular/plural erasure, rather than the gender erasure, to which no white/black parallel exists.", "timestamp": "1477414478"}, {"author": "Alex", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820322075862&reply_comment_id=820322140732", "anchor": "fb-820322075862_820322140732", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Q. But what about \"you\"? If we have gendered and numbered third person pronouns, then why not for the second person?
A. By its nature, \"you\" is much less ambiguous since the person who is listening is also the referent of the pronoun. If I talk to you, when I say \"you\", you obviously have no trouble understanding that I mean you!
Q. But what about number erasure: we used to have thou/you?
A. Similar answer to above: the person or people being addressed will have a very good idea in most situations who is being referred to, because they themselves are the referent. Even so, some versions of English have a number distinction: some still use \"thou\" and others use \"y'all\", or will clarify with \"you guys\" or some such.
Q. But people shouldn't think in terms of gender. It is bad for them and bad for society.
A. It is hard to dictate how people should think. It may be there are intrinsic advantages to their way of thinking that you do not appreciate. In any case, the push for a gender-neutral pronoun was set back by the imposition of \"singular they\" because it erased number at the same time and let to widespread dissatisfaction. Even advocates of singular pronoun abolition now regret this, and realise that their cause would have been furthered better if they had pushed for a new singuar pronoun to replace he/she/..., and one for him/her/....
Q. I don't buy this \"ambiguity\" you have been talking about. Give me an example.
A. OK, a more-or-less random example from some coverage of the third Trump-Clinton debate way back in 2016: http://www.nytimes.com/.../politics/presidential-debate.html Jumping in the middle, as if you were skimming the page: \"Donald thinks belittling women makes them bigger,\" they said. Is Trump trying to justify belittling women because he thinks it is good for their character? And who said this? Returning to its original: \"Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger,\" she said. Ah! It's clear now. It's an accusation from Clinton that Trump belittles women to boost his own ego, but it's slightly over-egged in that it talks of Trump thinking that. Note how you would probably not understand this from the \"them\" form, because Trump doesn't actually consciously think that: that was Clinton's rhetorical flourish. The wrong reading seems more plausible.
Q. But if you added context, it would be clearer.
A. The person who said it (\"they said\") would be clearer, yes, if you read a couple of lines back. But this is already a loss as it makes the article hard to skim. And deciphering \"makes them bigger\" is rather harder, even with context. At best it is ambiguous; at worst it more strongly suggests the wrong interpretation.
Q. That's just one example.
A. Let's pick some more at random(ish) from the same page. \"Mr. Trump held forth on their signature issue - immigration ...\". - Is this the signature issue of Trump or Trump+Clinton? People who know something about Trump, would probably make the right guess, but wouldn't be sure, because it could be that immigration is also Clinton's signature issue as she can use it to highlight Trump's racism. Even if you are 70-30 sure in favour of the right interpretation, the effect is put everything slightly out of focus.
The moderator cited estimates that both candidates' plans would increase the national debt. Mr. Trump rejected that analysis, saying they could \u201ccreate tremendous jobs\u201d and construct \u201can economic machine\u201d to power growth.
- Does \"they\" refer to \"both candidates' plans\" or \"Trump\"?
Mrs. Clinton, speaking about their support for some gun control measures, said they saw \"no conflict between saving people's lives and defending the Second Amendment.\" They added that the National Rifle Association was running \"millions of dollars of ads against me.\" Mr. Trump said they were unsure if Mrs. Clinton had referenced the group's support for them \"in a sarcastic manner,\" but that they were \"very proud\" of it. - Could it be the \"they\"s mostly refer to another body, or do they refer to Clinton herself? Probably the latter, but only after some thought and context. Does \"support for them\" refer to support for Clinton, Trump or this other body? The presence sarcasm means that meanings can be inverted, so it's possible that \"support for them\" could refer to Clinton. OK, probably not, but you had to think about it quite a bit (and that's not just because you are unused to it - remember this is 2031 now), and you were still left unsure.
Note that this extra interpretative work, which sometimes at best leads to ambiguities, is predicated on a fairly good prior knowledge about Trump and Clinton. If you were coming to it afresh, then you'd have a harder time.
What actually happened as the 10 year experiment wore on, was that people tended to avoid jokes, sarcasm and complexity, because they combined with pronoun ambiguity to overloaded interpretative capacity of the reader or listener. This lead to flourishing sarcastic samizdat literature, whose topics often featured the iniquities of imposed language.", "timestamp": "1477414510"}, {"author": "Marvin", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820322125762", "anchor": "fb-820322125762", "service": "fb", "text": "Y'know, I've seen the controversy over this spill out all over the place, and I just wonder: Why is this being phrased in an autocratic manner (\"all users of English should migrate to the new system\")? I think it's perfectly reasonable for you to make assertions about what you think would be a good idea, but telling people what to do just comes off as rather presumptuous, maybe a bit condescending and dismissive, intrinsic to the phrasing. Is that your intent? Is the wording just program-language satire? I really don't understand.", "timestamp": "1477414498"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820322125762&reply_comment_id=820323547912", "anchor": "fb-820322125762_820323547912", "service": "fb", "text": "→ The wording is playing off of technical notices from things that do centralized development. I recognize that English isn't mine to dictate the future of, and that how it actually develops depends on a huge number of individuals mostly unconsciously changing their speech patterns. This post is a combination of trying to have fun and to push the evolution of English in a way I think would be an improvement.", "timestamp": "1477415365"}, {"author": "David Chudzicki", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820322125762&reply_comment_id=820324321362", "anchor": "fb-820322125762_820324321362", "service": "fb", "text": "→ \"as soon as practical\" is the rest of the bit Marvin's quoting...", "timestamp": "1477415688"}, {"author": "Marvin", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820322125762&reply_comment_id=820325499002", "anchor": "fb-820322125762_820325499002", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Um, yes David, I hope everyone read the original post; any particular reason you felt the need to restate it?", "timestamp": "1477416384"}, {"author": "David Chudzicki", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820322125762&reply_comment_id=820325998002", "anchor": "fb-820322125762_820325998002", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Marvin: yes, it sounds much more demanding to me without that bit, and I didn't remember that context when I read your comment, so it made me think the post sounded was more demanding than I remembered. So I went back to look.
I thought maybe I could save others from going through that process, but perhaps you're right that I'm just wasting people's time (in which case... sorry everyone!).", "timestamp": "1477416621"}, {"author": "Francis", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324575852", "anchor": "fb-820324575852", "service": "fb", "text": "There are languages that manage fine without a gendered third person pronoun, so complaints that it makes various things harder or humour obsolete are insufficiently informed. I welcome any move that prevents me having to think about the gender of people I am referring to.", "timestamp": "1477415826"}, {"author": "Alex", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324575852&reply_comment_id=820335164632", "anchor": "fb-820324575852_820335164632", "service": "fb", "text": "→ You may be right, but unless you are a fluent speaker of such other languages, I don't think you are in the best position to gauge how fine they manage. And such other languages may have compensatory structures and conventions that English lacks. I don't think it's enough just to look up a list of languages that have genderless pronouns without a full understanding of how they work.", "timestamp": "1477420277"}, {"author": "Andrew", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324575852&reply_comment_id=820337110732", "anchor": "fb-820324575852_820337110732", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I am a speaker of Georgian, one of those languages, not fluent but basic level and I've spent a fair amount of time in Georgia with Georgians. Lack of gender pronouns does not create obstacles in understanding, any more than I have difficulties distinguishing my children in English (who are all male and therefore share English 3rd person pronouns). There are clearly some sentences in English which, translated word for word, are horribly ambiguous in Georgian; the ambiguity is generally avided by the obvious device of using people's names.", "timestamp": "1477421556"}, {"author": "Alex", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324575852&reply_comment_id=820337255442", "anchor": "fb-820324575852_820337255442", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Thanks, that's interesting. But reverting to names is basically giving up, isn't it? That's an argument against needing pronouns at all.", "timestamp": "1477421760"}, {"author": "Alex", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324575852&reply_comment_id=820337395162", "anchor": "fb-820324575852_820337395162", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Also, does the pronoun distinguish between singular and plural? The proposal we are discussing would erase that distinction too.", "timestamp": "1477421826"}, {"author": "Andrew", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324575852&reply_comment_id=820337934082", "anchor": "fb-820324575852_820337934082", "service": "fb", "text": "→ In Georgian (as with a few other European languages) the verb inflection means that the subject is can be omitted so, yes, to that extent the pronoun is redundant. Georgian verb inflection also encodes the object so that's another pronoun you can omit if you want. However, singular and plural are distinguished, in both pronouns and verb inflection. There is also a distinction relating to the location of the third person you're talking about relative both to the speaker and to the person being addressed. From a Georgian perspective, European languages seem horribly ambiguous because we have the same words for \"him next to me\", \"him next to you\" and \"him over there\".", "timestamp": "1477422064"}, {"author": "Alex", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324575852&reply_comment_id=820341057822", "anchor": "fb-820324575852_820341057822", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Thanks. That's exactly what I meant. Even without pronouns, Georgian already has multiple mechanisms for disambiguating that English doesn't, so having ungendered pronouns in Georgian is not comparable (from the point of view of ambiguity, which is my main concern) to amputating singular pronouns in English.
And in general, it's not as simple as just saying that some language has ungendered and unnumbered pronouns so English should manage, without analysing how the language works as a whole.", "timestamp": "1477424052"}, {"author": "Francis", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324575852&reply_comment_id=820353018852", "anchor": "fb-820324575852_820353018852", "service": "fb", "text": "→ The point is partially taken, but when I try not using gendered pronouns the problem I have is simply habit (reminding myself to do it). I have never *in English* found any difficulty or artificaility in communicating.", "timestamp": "1477429923"}, {"author": "Alex", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324575852&reply_comment_id=820362639572", "anchor": "fb-820324575852_820362639572", "service": "fb", "text": "→ OK, fair enough. What did you make of some of the real-life examples I gave upthread that I thought were ambiguous or worse?", "timestamp": "1477434610"}, {"author": "Francis", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324575852&reply_comment_id=820368078672", "anchor": "fb-820324575852_820368078672", "service": "fb", "text": "→ \"Jack walked up the hill. Jill walked up the hill and fetched a pail of water.\" ? Seems a natural construction (to me). Was that one? I am sure there are lots of examples that can be put together where having a go to male/female distinction could allow for shorter expression, but in practice I am not sure it ever really bothered me.", "timestamp": "1477436121"}, {"author": "Francis", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324575852&reply_comment_id=820368183462", "anchor": "fb-820324575852_820368183462", "service": "fb", "text": "→ There are of course plenty of situations (and an increasing number for me) where I don't know the gender.", "timestamp": "1477436205"}, {"author": "Alex", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324575852&reply_comment_id=820378243302", "anchor": "fb-820324575852_820378243302", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I was referring to the Trump-Clinton debate examples as realistic problematic cases. (I was trying to argue that the Jack/Jill kind of examples were too artificial to be meaningful. They are toy examples. If your answer is to avoid pronouns altogether, then I don't believe that generalises very well.)", "timestamp": "1477440927"}, {"author": "Francis", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324575852&reply_comment_id=820429615352", "anchor": "fb-820324575852_820429615352", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Oh, I see, I didn't really follow them.", "timestamp": "1477465407"}, {"author": "Alex", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324575852&reply_comment_id=820437100352", "anchor": "fb-820324575852_820437100352", "service": "fb", "text": "→ OK, that's a pity. I thought they provided good evidence how horribly this proposal would work in practice, but obviously I didn't explain it very well.", "timestamp": "1477472486"}, {"author": "Francis", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324575852&reply_comment_id=820441990552", "anchor": "fb-820324575852_820441990552", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Or I didn't understand it well.", "timestamp": "1477475072"}, {"author": "Alex", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324575852&reply_comment_id=820551680732", "anchor": "fb-820324575852_820551680732", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I just pulled out some sentences and paragraphs from a recent news story, changed \"he/she is\" to \"they are\" etc, and argued that it became incomprehensible. It's possible that you could rewrite it some other way, but I think it would be hard work to do so, look clunky, and still probably be less comprehensible than the original.", "timestamp": "1477520959"}, {"author": "David Chudzicki", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324640722", "anchor": "fb-820324640722", "service": "fb", "text": "\"At this time we are recommending that in situations where some participants have only partial support for singular they that people continue to use gendered pronouns for people with traditional binary gender unless there are strong reasons not to.\"
Jeff, can you clarify what \"partial support\" means? If there are some participants for whom singular 'they' for a specific person sounds odd, is that enough?", "timestamp": "1477415885"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820324640722&reply_comment_id=820326397202", "anchor": "fb-820324640722_820326397202", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I don't know, it's fuzzy, probably?", "timestamp": "1477416902"}, {"author": "\u00c9mile", "source_link": "https://plus.google.com/100019455996021532206", "anchor": "gp-1477489994883", "service": "gp", "text": "The problem I encounter most often with any pronoun and any language is to guesstimate who or what the pronouns refer two, especially in conversations involving many actors[^actors]. I've started using variables more explicitly instead of pronouns (\nx\n) for the third person, and I find it integrates well into speech, but that may be mostly because I do a lot of math and physics in my every day life. \nx\n is useful, succinct, and fairly easy to understand, and I'm gonna be pushing for \nx\n's adoption over all other third person pronouns eventually[^necessity].\n
\n
\n[^actors]: Either people-who-act or just actors in the grammatical sense.\n
\n
\n[^necessity]: The use of a variable instead of a \"regular\" pronoun clearly isn't required here, but it's funny.", "timestamp": 1477489994}, {"author": "Harold", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=820497758792", "anchor": "fb-820497758792", "service": "fb", "text": "You mean if you have male fixtures you might not be male, and if you have female fixtures, you may not be female, so I have to use a generic plural as a singular to avoid offending you, thereby confusing everyone about what I'm saying? I guess that's clear enough. So let's ignore all linguistic conventions and history (which contrary to some old-time feminists does NOT originate from \"his story\").", "timestamp": "1477497162"}, {"author": "Kathryn", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100101256717562", "anchor": "fb-10100101256717562", "service": "fb", "text": "Love the concept, hate the choice. They already means they and I know there is some ancient British usage as a singular when the person you are talking about is known, but I find it unnecessarily confusing. People do currently use singular they when talking about someone unknown such as \"if a winner is announced they will have 1 week to respond\". I vote to keep brainstorming for a new and exciting word. How about zee, zees, zer and zem?", "timestamp": "1562707456"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100101256717562&reply_comment_id=10100101258833322", "anchor": "fb-10100101256717562_10100101258833322", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Kathryn we tried alternate words for at least forty years, and none of them really caught on. During that time \"they\" has become acceptable in a wider and wider range of cases: your example would probably have read \"he will have\" twenty years ago. I think \"they\" can work here, and inventing new terms won't.", "timestamp": "1562708515"}, {"author": "Kathryn", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100101256717562&reply_comment_id=10100102058151482", "anchor": "fb-10100101256717562_10100102058151482", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I guess we can use they and theyall, them and them'uns to distinguish plural from singular, similar to you'all and you'uns used in the south.", "timestamp": "1563172271"}, {"author": "Kitty", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100101256717562&reply_comment_id=10100105117320882", "anchor": "fb-10100101256717562_10100105117320882", "service": "fb", "text": "→ It's really not that hard to suss out singular or plural when someone uses they. People are overthinking this much too much.", "timestamp": "1565059463"}, {"author": "Kiran", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100101478503102", "anchor": "fb-10100101478503102", "service": "fb", "text": "So what do we use for the third person plural? In written communication it's often hard to distinguish.", "timestamp": "1562832468"}, {"author": "Michael", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100101478503102&reply_comment_id=10100101499156712", "anchor": "fb-10100101478503102_10100101499156712", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Kiran \"Th'all\". For large groups, \"All th'all\".", "timestamp": "1562854439"}, {"author": "Kitty", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100101478503102&reply_comment_id=10100105117530462", "anchor": "fb-10100101478503102_10100105117530462", "service": "fb", "text": "→ We don't need one, they works just fine as singular or plural. All you need is context to suss that out. And even if you do wonder for half a second in a sentence it's not the end of the world.", "timestamp": "1565059595"}, {"author": "Kiran", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100101478503102&reply_comment_id=10100105125075342", "anchor": "fb-10100101478503102_10100105125075342", "service": "fb", "text": "→ It's a serious problem if it leads to miscommunication when the context is poor. Maybe good writers should use it and bad writers should refrain.", "timestamp": "1565063203"}, {"author": "Alice", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104745585842", "anchor": "fb-10100104745585842", "service": "fb", "text": "Expressing gender is a feature, not a bug.
(For this user anyways)", "timestamp": "1564860286"}, {"author": "Adrian", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104745585842&reply_comment_id=10100104814572592", "anchor": "fb-10100104745585842_10100104814572592", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Alice same. I can't even with the cis BS here. \ud83d\ude2c\ud83d\ude2c\ud83d\ude2c", "timestamp": "1564904154"}, {"author": "Adrian", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802", "service": "fb", "text": "I use singular they all the time (I am trans and nonbinary and those are my pronouns) and I have A LOT of problems with the OP and with most of these comments.
We don't need to destroy gender. We need to destroy compulsory gender. We don't need to destroy people's genders which are in the binary (male or female). We need to destroy a compulsory binary.
We don't need to destroy gendered pronouns. We need to destroy compulsory pronouns, gendered or otherwise.
It is not. Hard. To use a large number or pronoun sets for a range of humans. It is basic respect and care. We do it all the time in trans and nonbinary spaces. There are lots of people who find joy in pronouns. There is no reason to eradicate the many many gendered pronouns (binary and nonbinary) which people use. Honoring someone's pronouns is baseline decency. Eradicating their pronouns is dangerous, disrespectful, and an unnecessary elimination of language.
There is nothing wrong with gender. There is nothing wrong with being agender. There is a lot wrong with requiring anyone to use pronouns that are not theirs, which this proposal does.
Rather than making random proclamations about things that don't affect you directly, let trans and nonbinary people speak for ourselves. And if you're going to proclaim arbitrary shit--at least have the guts to go for it all the way. You advise returning to binary gender language whenever there is a safety concern, which you seem to think is... Anytime you might actually be bucking a social norm? \ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude02 Have you even thought for a second about trans and nonbinary daily experiences? What solidarity even looks like? What risk even looks like?
Look, this is a terrible idea and I don't recommend going all in with it at all. But this entire post reeks of unexamined privilege, which you are now subjecting all of us to.
This is so out of touch with real life or any actual conversation about gender ever from humans who actually experience transantagonism that my jaw is on the floor.
Stop assuming that you are right and entitled to being right always. If you want to destroy gender based oppression, listen to people who experience it. \ud83e\udd23", "timestamp": "1564905087"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802&reply_comment_id=10100104830211252", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802_10100104830211252", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Do you think languages that don't have gendered pronouns should add them, for people that want them?
Do you think we should start using pronouns for people to choose to express non-gender aspects of their identities?", "timestamp": "1564924605"}, {"author": "Allison", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802&reply_comment_id=10100104835470712", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802_10100104835470712", "service": "fb", "text": "→ The ability to express one's gender through language use is a feature. The compulsion to express other people's genders, which one may or may not have adequate information about to express correctly... looks more like a bug to me. I'd be super interested to see English pick up gendered and otherwise inflected first-person pronouns, as in Japanese.
I'm very un-sold on the helpfulness of gendered third person pronouns. It feels like for me and other trans people I know, we can invest a lot of joy in people using them correctly for us\u2014but also experience a lot of pain when people use them incorrectly, whether intentionally or not. If our language just didn't have gendered third-person pronouns, I think we'd experience less of the joy and also less of the pain\u2014and on balance for me, it seems like that would be a better experience, particularly when we are at our most vulnerable. (Least passing, least around a supportive community, etc.)", "timestamp": "1564928039"}, {"author": "Adrian", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802&reply_comment_id=10100104852845892", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802_10100104852845892", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Jeff Kaufman sure, why not? We don't need every language to be standard. Requiring all languages to do all the same things with gender is silly. With gender, more options are better.
Allison I don't think that removing gendered pronouns will end pain for us. The problem is transphobes, not having options for words we use. It's also... Not something that can be unilaterally decided by a few people. If there is *anyone* who needs gendered pronouns for themself, or just prefers it, then we need to respect them and their needs/preferences.
Like, we don't all need to use the same name. That would be very confusing. It's better to have a variety of pronouns.
And... We can ask people, so like, we aren't required to misgender anyone. \ud83d\ude02", "timestamp": "1564936708"}, {"author": "Allison", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802&reply_comment_id=10100104860256042", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802_10100104860256042", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I think we all agree that elimination of gendered pronouns won\u2019t end all pain caused by transphobia or be implemented unilaterally.
>If there is *anyone* who needs gendered pronouns for themself, or just prefers it, then we need to respect them and their needs/preferences.
This is not how we typically treat preferences in our society. Right now it is absolutely how we need to behave with regard to gendered pronouns, because they are so present in our language use. However, we are more forgiving when others don\u2019t describe us correctly in many other ways. For example, if I prefer to describe myself as queer, but someone else calls me bi, I might explain why I prefer one term over the other, but I\u2019m not going to feel they\u2019ve committed a violation of my autonomy unless this is an ongoing and very loaded issue between the two of us specifically. At some point we might reach a situation where using gendered pronouns is much less common and much less charged, and it might operate more like some of these other self-descriptions\u2014before no one has any preferences at all.", "timestamp": "1564941327"}, {"author": "Adrian", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802&reply_comment_id=10100104872321862", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802_10100104872321862", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Allison Um it is absolutely how we treat preferences in our society. People express preferred nicknames all the time and it is seen as rude to disrespect it. Your comparison is not the same, as queer and bi have a lot of overlap (even though they are distinct terms)--and for some people it is still loaded. But with pronouns, for the most part, the majority of people only have one or two pronoun sets that work for them. So mixing it up is much worse.
Besides, proper pronoun use (along with other gendered terms) is a need for many people. I don't understand why you want to take that away. Gender, for those who have it, is joyous and awesome and having a range of ways to express it is good. I don't think eliminating words from a language is ever going to be a progressive move.", "timestamp": "1564946935"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802&reply_comment_id=10100104880590292", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802_10100104880590292", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Adrian Proper pronoun use is a contextual need. In our current society, with our current way of using language, it is a need. That's not all that useful for thinking about what people would need in a potential future world where using \"they\" was completely semantically neutral with respect to gender.
\"I don't think eliminating words from a language is ever going to be a progressive move.\"
What about a parallel to Mrs/Miss/Ms? Before the mid 1970s you needed to know a woman's marital status in order to choose Mrs vs Miss. Then Ms grew in popularity, initially as something women would request for themselves, but at this point you can use Ms in any case where you would use Mr: we recognize that marital status does not belong in titles.", "timestamp": "1564949057"}, {"author": "Adrian", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802&reply_comment_id=10100104888669102", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802_10100104888669102", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Jeff Kaufman that was from adding an option, not taking options away. People still use Miss or Mrs if they prefer them.", "timestamp": "1564951609"}, {"author": "Adrian", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802&reply_comment_id=10100104888983472", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802_10100104888983472", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Also: this is a ludicrous conversation and I'm now checking out of it. I just didn't want there to be like a chorus of mostly cis people approving of this BS without any counterpoint. I hope you change your approach to this stuff someday and actually listen.", "timestamp": "1564951709"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1564957798"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802&reply_comment_id=10100104918304712", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802_10100104918304712", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Elliot have you heard anyone go by Ms/Mr at tech companies? My experience has been that it's first names, and then full names for formality.", "timestamp": "1564962587"}, {"author": "Todd", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802&reply_comment_id=10100104956133902", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802_10100104956133902", "service": "fb", "text": "→ \"Like, we don't all need to use the same name. That would be very confusing. It's better to have a variety of pronouns.\"
This seems like a misunderstanding of the linguistic role of pronouns. Pronouns are intentionally low variance relative to names, because they aren't serving as (relatively) unique identifiers the way that names are. Rather, they're trying to get across the minimum amount of information necessary to pick out a previously referred to entity. Historically, gender carried a lot relevant signal as part of this process that could disambiguate possible referents. Now it carries much less information, and so it makes linguistic sense to simplify.
I don't say any of this as an ought/prescriptive statement, simply my view on the way that language tends to develop. My expectation is that full acceptance by society at large of gender as something that is or can be nonbinary, flexible/fluid, and a personal choice, likely entails the elimination of gendered pronouns in a cause-and-effect sense.", "timestamp": "1564982850"}, {"author": "Leah", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802&reply_comment_id=10100104978963152", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802_10100104978963152", "service": "fb", "text": "→ > Do you think languages that don't have gendered pronouns should add them, for people that want them?
I feel like the most plausible extension of this idea isn't \"all languages need gendered pronouns\" \u2014 it's \"languages should keep whatever ways they currently express gender, but should add neutral options.\"
That means languages that express gender with pronouns should get a neutral pronoun but keep the old ones as options. Ones that do it by agreement marking should get neutral agreement markers but keep the old ones as options. Ones that do it purely sociolinguistically should evolve neutral social patterns but keep the old ones as options. And so on. But if a language doesn't have gendered pronouns, or gender agreement, there's no sense in modifying it to add those things.
Since all languages have *some* way of expressing gender \u2014 yours and others' \u2014 this would mean that in any language we could talk in gendered ways about people who want that, and talk in genderless ways about people who don't. And it would get us to that goal with minimal change to any individual language.", "timestamp": "1565011397"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802&reply_comment_id=10100104988623792", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802_10100104988623792", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Leah this makes sense, but there are two meanings of \"keep\" here:
a) Third person pronouns are not inflected for gender by default, but the speaker may choose to do so in order to communicate something about the referent's gender. Speakers should not do this in a way the referent would disapprove of.
b) Third person pronouns may be inflected for gender or neutral. Speakers track the genders of people they intend to refer to, and choose the appropriate inflection.
I think (a) is a fine outcome and is very similar to a (c) where pronouns are never inflected for gender, but (b) maintains much of what is harmful about gendered pronoun use today.", "timestamp": "1565016925"}, {"author": "Leah", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802&reply_comment_id=10100104988768502", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802_10100104988768502", "service": "fb", "text": "→ If I inserted \"Speakers should not do this in a way the referent would disapprove of\" into (b), how would (a) and (b) look different? I see other differences in wording but I don't understand what practical difference they would make.", "timestamp": "1565017034"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1565017235"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1565017415"}, {"author": "Leah", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802&reply_comment_id=10100104991288452", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802_10100104991288452", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I see. If that's the situation, then the point I'm making is consistent with both (a) and (b).
Either outcome would be achieved in English by keeping our existing pronouns in the lexicon, adding personal singular \"they\" for people who don't have it yet, and adopting certain norms about how to use those pronouns (different norms for (a) vs (b)).
In Basque, there are no gendered pronouns, but there are special intimate verb forms for addressing men and women. Basque equivalents of (a) and (b) could be achieved by keeping the existing verb forms in the grammar, adding a neutral-but-intimate verb form, and adopting certain norms about how to use those verb forms (different norms for (a) vs (b)).
In Finnish, there's allegedly no grammatical gender at all. But there are lexical and sociolinguistic differences between how men and women talk. Finnish equivalents of (a) and (b) could be achieved by keeping everything about the grammar the same, and *just* tweaking vocabulary and social norms (different norms for (a) vs (b)). Those norms are carrying a lot more of the weight of \"doing gender\" than they are in English and Basque, so my expectation is that tweaking them would be correspondingly harder. But it could be done.
My point is that there's no need to add a whole gendered pronoun system to Basque or Finnish in order to achieve a Basque or Finnish equivalent of (a) or (b). All that's needed is to embrace and extend whatever ways gender is already present in the language.", "timestamp": "1565018714"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802&reply_comment_id=10100104992775472", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802_10100104992775472", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Elliot not quite, sorry! In (a) speakers use \"they\" by default with everyone. When a speaker wants to explicitly draw attention to gender in a sentence they can use the (old, some consider them archaic) gendered inflections, and in that case it's the speaker's responsibility to make sure they're using the correct gendered pronoun.
This is kind of how it works with \"someone\" now for people who use \"they\" by default. Saying \"someone...they\" is neutral, but if the class you're referring to is single gender and you want to emphasize that you can use a gendered pronoun.
(This is leaving aside that nearly all uses of that construction are harmful, because classes are almost never actually single gender.)", "timestamp": "1565019457"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1565019842"}, {"author": "Leah", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802&reply_comment_id=10100104993918182", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802_10100104993918182", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Jeff Kaufman Ah. But ok, that also seems consistent with the point I was making. I guess the maximally broad way of putting it is: \"Suppose that in addition to 'they,' people want to retain 'he' and 'she' in English for $PURPOSE. You might worry that then, achieving $PURPOSE would require adding gendered pronouns to every other human language, which seems absurd! But that worry is misplaced. The thing to do in other languages is to find the places that they are grammatically or sociolinguistically gendered, and achieve $PU$POSE by doing the same extend-but-retain move in those places.\"
And this is true, I think, basically whatever $PURPOSE is.", "timestamp": "1565020061"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104814966802&reply_comment_id=10100105000729532", "anchor": "fb-10100104814966802_10100105000729532", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Elliot right, the idea is that \"they\" would always be correct", "timestamp": "1565023672"}, {"author": "Bil", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104846294022", "anchor": "fb-10100104846294022", "service": "fb", "text": "Swahili has 8 genders, none of them refer to sex. It only has one personal pronoun.", "timestamp": "1564933169"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104846294022&reply_comment_id=10100104938728782", "anchor": "fb-10100104846294022_10100104938728782", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Swahili has six personal pronouns, corresponding to:
1st: me, us
2nd: you, y'all
3rd: he/she/it, they
It doesn't divide by gender, though.", "timestamp": "1564972060"}, {"author": "Bil", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104846294022&reply_comment_id=10100104955485202", "anchor": "fb-10100104846294022_10100104955485202", "service": "fb", "text": "→ It doesn't divide by SEX. Gender is a different thing.", "timestamp": "1564982250"}, {"author": "Julia", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104846294022&reply_comment_id=10100104982186692", "anchor": "fb-10100104846294022_10100104982186692", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Bil But gender has a technical meaning in linguistics, and from what I'm reading it doesn't seem that Swahili pronouns are gendered. Just as \"I\" vs \"we\" are different pronouns, but the difference is in number, not in gender.
But I take your point that there are languages that use many fewer (or no) markers of gender, and that seems to work fine.", "timestamp": "1565013179"}, {"author": "Micah", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/819765171902?comment_id=10100104846294022&reply_comment_id=10100105000714562", "anchor": "fb-10100104846294022_10100105000714562", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Swahili does seem to use gender for concord or agreement between nouns, adjectives and verbs, but noun gender does not affect pronouns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_grammar#Concord", "timestamp": "1565023664"}]}