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While it's possible in English and we do it a lot now, there was a lot of argument against it for a long time. It still sounds weird to me, but I've accepted t

While it's possible in English and we do it a lot now, there was a lot of argument against it for a long time. It still sounds weird to me, but I've accepted the necessity. Perhaps German should just do the same? Or invent a new neutral pronoun that doesn't break the rules.

simias 7y ago
I believe that singular "they" is fairly ancient in English, it's not really novel even though it's become a bit of a hot topic over the past couple of decades with the broader arguments over gender in society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Older_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Older_usage When it comes to bringing the same grammatical features over other languages you have to keep in mind that English grammar is pretty un-gendered compared to German or Romance languages for instance. Maybe it would be possible for German to start using Sie in the singular if people try hard enough (after all they already do it for polite 2nd person, but that might actually make it more confusing instead of less) but that would be a dead end in Romance for instance since we have feminine and masculine "they" (and no neutral) so it wouldn't solve anything. Beyond that in English grammatical gender is basically limited to pronouns, whereas in other languages adjectives, nouns and even sometimes verbs have to agree so the churn is much higher if you decide to tweak those rules. Some francophone people champion "l'écriture inclusive" for instance in order to solve this problem but the changes in grammar are much more invasive than merely s/<s?he>/they/.