Re: Pronouns (please bear with me)

[Alexandre François Garreau]

Le jeudi 5 mars 2020 18:54:18 CET, vous avez écrit :
> On Thu, Mar 05, 2020 at 07:59:13AM -0800, Per Bothner wrote:
> 
> On 3/5/20 2:34 AM, John Darrington wrote:
>      > Singular they is extremely confusing, and just wrong.   When I
>      > see it I
>      > think who are these people that we're talking about.
> 
>      It's only been used since before Shakespeare.  It is less confusing
> than the alternatives.  Time to get used to it.
> 
> Much of Shakespeare is also confusing (at least to me and I'm a native
> English speaker).   Many constructs in language have been in use for
> a long time (eg double negatives) but that doesn't mean they are correct
> or indeed useful.
> 
>      > There is a perfectly good gender neutral pronoun in the English
>      > language, viz: "one".   If that's not appropriate for any reason,
>      > then
>      > either choose "he" or "she" or if you want to be politically
>      > correct,
>      > write "he or she".
> 
>      As you say, "one" is not always appropriate. For example:
> 
>         When you arrive, introduce yourself to the receptionist at the
> front desk. They will explain where to go.
> 
>      "One" should not be used in this context.
> 
> 
> In this instance I would have used a relative clause.  Thus a relative
> pronoun can be used:
> 
>        "When you arrive, introduce yourself to the receptionist at the
> front desk, who will explain where to go."
> 
> When people use singular they, even when I know what they (plural) mean,
> I find that I have to stop and think - and that distracts from the flow
> of the text/dialogue. It hinders useful communication.

This is likely a reason of habitude.  The native way in which you 
internalized your native language makes you so.  But maybe other english 
natives have internalized it more? I’m unaware of that fact among english 
natives…

Anyway that doesn’t seem to lessen to me the point that this is already 
what happened to the pronoun “you”, as well as there are other languages 
without plural at all (such as japanese), and they can be really clear…

Plural is likely a question of personal and cultural taste within 
anglophony.  It could disappear, at least within pronoun, or not, 
depending on what people prefer.

Here as far as I know most people prefer to keep any distinction whenever 
possible, for the sake of potentially helped clarity.

> Singular they has been denounced by many in the English speaking world
> for various reasons. Here is just one example:

I’m unsure this is the best example as it is pretty academically elevated 
as well as politically oriented (to right-wing)… maybe someone less 
opinionated and more representative would better reflect the point of them 
being “many”?

> https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/01/they_is_destroying_the_
> english_language.html

TL;DR: right-wing scholar disagree with the fact not to purport gender in 
places and way it was traditionally purported (because this is a thing 
which ought to be purported, otherwise it would “deny reality”).

The author-alleged example of insufficiency of proof of “singularity” within 
“they” is “Everyone likes their dogs.”. To me this is a simple example of 
semantic inconsistency toward number within the english language (it would 
look more logical to say the, I guess incorrect, “everyone likes his/her/
per dog”, as I would naturally, but likely incorrectly, as a non-native), 
as well as something natural in the development of a natural language 
(that hence naturally comes with natural inconsistencies), and a proof 
that, apparently, “plural” is sufficiently complex a concept to be done 
wrong in a widely used language.

The author also asses that a language is made for clarity while I’m unsure 
of that.  Many languages, and especially inconsistencies of them, are made 
not to be understood of others (there are even theories about the 
importance of that for a national/ethnic language/dialect).  If a language 
was to be perfectly clear, it would lack inconsistencies that would 
provide ways to get it wrong, and then be more regular… hence maybe even 
lacking a concept such as “plural” at all (something that apparently gets 
less and less important in international languages such as english and 
french).

Another issue with that writing is it is pretty constructed against the 
concept of “sexually-confused individual” (and the hypothesis that 
singular use of “they” was made for and about it).  To me someone who 
reclaim changing pronoun-usage for oneself seems bold enough not to seem 
really “confused”, and I know several such people who are hardly confused 
ones…  Though they may surely be, it is a common practice of smokescreen 
of amalgamating a whole group with its most blurred and “confused” 
boundaries such as to discredit it.  This actually could pretty well work 
for free-software movement as well: if we’re aiming for clarity this is 
clearly a good example of what *not* to hold.  If you disagree with 
something state it clearly, not confusingly.