• Kleysley@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    As a non-native speaker, referring to a single teacher as “they” is not very intuitive (although correct)…

    • zaros@zaros.club
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      1 year ago

      I very much agree. Learning English as a foreign language, it feels very wrong to use plural for a single person. I’m still not quite used to it! Although, had I been taught that early on, I doubt it would feel any weirder than using “you are” for a single person.

      • SolarNialamide@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Funny, English is also my second language but in my first language ‘she’ and plural ‘they’ are the same word, only distinguished by the verb, so it never seemed that weird to me.

      • sauerkraus@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I find it most inconvenient when “they” is used to refer to one person and a group in the same paragraph.

        • CoderKat@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Is that any different than when you have two people of the same gender and suddenly can’t use plain old gendered pronouns to unambiguously refer to the two people?

          Eg, if Susan took Anna’s apple, it’d be confusing to say “she took her apple”.

          • sauerkraus@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yeah pronouns can get really messy. I try to avoid them as much as I can in technical writing so I can follow my own sentences lol.

      • DevilishOxenRoll@lemmy.kyryli.uk
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        1 year ago

        And that’s actually a pretty recent development. Less than a decade ago, I remember getting marked down in English class for using “they” as a genderless singular pronoun, as my elderly teacher grew up only ever using “they” to refer to a group.

        • CoderKat@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

          This use of singular they had emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they.[4][5][2] It has been commonly employed in everyday English ever since and has gained currency in official contexts. Singular they has been criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who consider it an error.[6] Its continued use in modern standard English has become more common and formally accepted with the move toward gender-neutral language.[7][8] Though some early-21st-century style guides described it as colloquial and less appropriate in formal writing,[9][10] by 2020, most style guides accepted the singular they as a personal pronoun.[11][12][13][14]

          Your teacher was just one of those purists and it was never something with strong consensus for being wrong.

          • potpie@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            And Chaucer split infinitives, but I was always told it was “wrong” in gradeschool. That’s the problem with pedantry: language is a fascinatingly complex and beautiful set of patterns. Boiling it down to rules is at best a handy style guide for formal writing, but at worst it gets weaponed as a way to discriminate against people who use lower prestige dialects.

          • DevilishOxenRoll@lemmy.kyryli.uk
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            1 year ago

            That’s true, and there is evidence of “they” being used as a singular as far back as over 700 years ago, but only within the last few decades has it been formally accepted by style guides, like the APA or the Chicago Manual.

      • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        It’s not plural though. It’s just the third person neuter pronoun. Singular “they” has been a thing in English for centuries, and has only been controversial among a small segment of the population for a very short time.

        Think of it a bit like French “vous”. That’s a “plural” (second person) pronoun, but is also used in the singular. In the French case, it’s used as a singular formal second person pronoun in addition to a plural second person pronoun. Nobody in France is getting up in arms about how you shouldn’t use “vous” when talking to one person.

        • zaros@zaros.club
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          1 year ago

          I’m aware it’s a thing and not really a plural. What I was trying to say is that it looks plural and since I didn’t learn about this part of English until several years into my studies as a kid, it isn’t as well established in my mind as “you are” is (that also looks like a plural, but I’m used to it).

          “They are” for a single person catches my mental error filter the same way as “I are” or “you is” would, which is highly annoying.

          • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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            1 year ago

            as “you are” is (that also looks like a plural, but I’m used to it)

            Okay this actually touches on something interesting, but before I get to that, I think it’s perhaps a sign that your intuition with English is very much at odds with (not merely different from, but directly contradictory to) the broader English speaking community. Most English speakers would be either 100% okay with “you” being either singular or plural, or would be more likely to interpret it as more singular. That’s why some dialects have developed terms like “y’all” or “yous”, and why phrases like “you all” or “you guys” get used.

            But the really interesting thing here is that etymologically, you are much closer to the mark. Historically English has had a number of different second person pronouns. You, ye, thou, thee. “You” was, in fact, the plural objective second person pronoun. Today, English never distinguishes between subjective and objective pronouns in the second person, even in common informal use. But it used to have “thou” and “ye” as the singular and plural (respectively) subjective pronouns, and “thee” and “you” as the objective. And I find it kinda funny how that’s basically flipped in modern usage.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      is not very intuitive though

      Yes it is. It’s completely intuitive. Native English speakers do it all the time every day. The singular “they” is used literally without conscious thought. The only time it becomes controversial is with transphobes talking about specific people who do not identify with their gender assigned at birth. Even transphobes use singular “they” without thinking in contexts like this OP where the gender is unknown. (Which is why their “but it’s bad grammar!” arguments fall flat.)

      • zaros@zaros.club
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        1 year ago

        I’d say what’s intuitive is very subjective. Most of a language tends to be intuitive to its native speakers, no matter how unintuitive it seems to someone else.

        To me the intuitive genderless option for “he/she” would be “it”. Coming from Finnish, it seems much more natural to have “it” include people instead of using “they” for both singular and plural. Or if using “they”, it would feel intuitive to say “they is” instead of “they are”.

      • Kleysley@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Just because people with years of experience with something don’t have to think about it, doesn’t mean it’s intuitive.

        As a non-native speaker, I don’t find it intuitive at all, even though I don’t have to think about it anymore. And as you can see by their post, OP didn’t find it intuitive either.