Wednesday, September 15, 2021

The Oxford English Dictionary blog has a good long post on "they"

Me, I've been using singular "they" for perhaps twenty years. An expert discusses the history:
Singular they has become the pronoun of choice to replace he and she in cases where the gender of the antecedent – the word the pronoun refers to – is unknown, irrelevant, or nonbinary, or where gender needs to be concealed. It’s the word we use for sentences like Everyone loves his mother. <p> But that’s nothing new. The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375, where it appears in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf. Except for the old-style language of that poem, its use of singular they to refer to an unnamed person seems very modern. Here’s the Middle English version: ‘Hastely hiȝed eche . . . þei neyȝþed so neiȝh . . . þere william & his worþi lef were liand i-fere.’ In modern English, that’s: ‘Each man hurried . . . till they drew near . . . where William and his darling were lying together.’ <p/>Since forms may exist in speech long before they’re written down, it’s likely that singular they was common even before the late fourteenth century. That makes an old form even older. In the eighteenth century, grammarians began warning that singular they was an error because a plural pronoun can’t take a singular antecedent. They clearly forgot that singular you was a plural pronoun that had become singular as well...

3 comments:

SB said...

That Middle English quote isn't unambiguously using "they" for a singular: you could easily read the "they" as referring to _both_ or _all_ of the men, rather than "each" of them. Although I don't know what's hiding in the ellipses; that could make a difference.

Anyway, if the point is that singular "they" appears in written English way far back, that's almost certainly true. It still bothers me every time I hear it, but I admit that it's become the preferred gender-neutral singular pronoun for people (since "it" carries too strong a connotation of non-person-hood), so I'll have to learn to live with it.

Phil Paine said...

Anglo-Saxon [or Old English]employed both Grammatical Gender and Natural Gender. In Grammatical Gender,all nouns had one of three assigned genders --- masculine, feminine or neuter --- that did not have to correspond to biological gender. For example, the word "wif" [wife] was Neutral in Gender. Natural Gender refers to the assignment of biological gender to a noun. Modern English uses Common Gender, in which Grammatical gender disappears except in forms where Natural Gender used to apply, and the Neuter gender has been eliminated. The pronoun "it" was re-purposed from Grammatical Gender role into a Natural Gender role. The re-purposing of the pronoun "they" in exactly the same way is a perfectly logical, and in fact has been a common practice in spoken English since the period when Old English transformed into Middle English. However, more conservative written forms did not always make the transition, and subsequently influenced spoken English to codify it back into existence. Grammarians always wanted to reinforce any form that resembled Latin, and while they couldn't reverse the loss of the case system or the transition to Common Grammar, they could at least promote the retention of assigned Natural Gender in pronouns as a kind of "last stand" --- even though it caused chronic confusion. Thus, the weird, twisted logic that Grammarians used to justify enforcement of illogical rules, reaching a peak in the 18th Century, when literacy was spreading wildly in English. The bulk of normal speech was easily dismissed as "illiterate" and "low class", and most of all "rural". "They" used as a gender-neutral pronoun is actually both traditional and logical in the evolution of English.

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