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English already has a perfectly good singular, gender-netural pronoun: "it". We're just not used to using "it" for non-child people: When the baby is hungry
by kbutler 11y ago
English already has a perfectly good singular, gender-netural pronoun: "it". We're just not used to using "it" for non-child people:
When the baby is hungry, it eats.
When the person is hungry, it eats.
If you adopt "they", you have to either adopt plural verbs, or allow "they" to be associated with singular verbs:
When the person is hungry, they eat.
When the person is hungry, they eats.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> If you adopt 'they', you have to either adopt plural verbs Which we already do with semantically singular uses of the first-person and second-person grammatically-plural pronouns in English, so that's not really a big deal. (And already do with semantically singular uses of "they": its been "adopted" in English-as-actually used for over half a millennium.)
- warfangle 11y ago"it" comes with the linguistic/cultural baggage of being associated primarily with inanimate objects, which I think you can understand is rather disconcerting to those who are genderqueer and very much alive.