> However, A would not have accepted "what did they want" as grammatical under any circumstances. Huh, so what do they use when B doesn't know Joe's gender? >

> However, A would not have accepted "what did they want" as grammatical under any circumstances. Huh, so what do they use when B doesn't know Joe's gender? > There is no such thing as this in linguistics. Well, more pedantically: in the sense that it makes determining whether a sentence is grammically correct more dependent (or dependent, if it wasn't already) on random details of the outside world that shouldn't matter until we check for semantic correctness. > is certainly not the weirdest or most arbitrary-seeming way of assigning noun classes Of course not, natural langauges (actually by definition) are 'designed' by pseudo-evolutionary processes; if anything, it's surprising they aren't worse.