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they can be singular
by stewartmcgown 5y ago
they can be singular
- bradleyjg 5y agoIs “They is tall.” a grammatically valid sentence?
- franciscop 5y agoOnly if "They" is their given name and not a pronoun. If used as a pronoun, you can say "they are tall" in singular: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/grammar/singular-they#:~:text=Here%20are%20some%20tips%20to,%E2%80%9Ca%20person%20are%E2%80%9D https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/grammar/si...).
- bradleyjg 5y agoSeems like a violation of the strict aliasing rule.
- andrepd 5y agoHow so?
- CyberShadow 5y agoBecause you use a "multiple" of pointers to refer to a single entity. (It's a C joke.)
- mdp2021 5y agoThat page you link to uses very ideological content - not philological as one could expect. Not all will agree with those guidelines, they are far from universally acceptable.
- andrepd 5y agoHow so philological? Language changes all the time due to practice. People don't need to justify their speech with philological arguments.
- moomin 5y agoYes, although in the case of singular they, its usage goes back to Chaucer, so it’s more established than most practices in modern English.
- mdp2020 5y agoI believe they do. Practice must have a reasonable reference. People are free to contribute to the language - but with some competence.
- PavleMiha 5y agoThink about it this way, we're playing Guess Who, and you haven't asked about gender yet. You ask "Do they have dark hair?". It's obviously a question about a singular person, and that's the correct way to structure that question in English.
- mdp2020 5y agoCertainly. But I referred to the presented guidelines, collectively - not to "singular they". I wrote and intended that _those linked guidelines_ are "not universal".
- vidarh 5y agoSingular they in English usage dates back 600-700 years. People can disagree with those guidelines all they want - they will have to deal with the fact that people choose to use singular they and they can get worked up over it or get used to it.
- bradleyjg 5y agoDo you feel the same way about generic he? It too has a long history.
- scatters 5y agoIs "You art tall." a grammatically valid sentence? Obviously not; don't be silly.
- andrepd 5y agoNo, but "They are tall" is, which is gramatically plural but semantically singular.
- jraph 5y agoIs it grammatically plural? In "You are tall", "you" can be singular, and then so should "are" be, if I am not mistaken. (I'm not a native English speaker)
- umanwizard 5y ago“You” was exclusively plural (singular equivalent was “thou”), but its meaning shifted to be either singular or plural a few hundred years ago. So “are” was indeed a plural-only conjugation until that shift happened. Now “you” is shifting again: in formal English it is still singular or plural, but in colloquial American English — at least where I’m from — it can only be singular. The plural form is “you guys” or “y’all”, depending on dialect. (The “guys” in this pronoun shouldn’t be confused with the noun “guys”, which is usually only used for boys and men; “you guys” is used to refer to groups of any gender).
- andrepd 5y agoExactly. There's loads of examples of such shifts in other languages, for example in Portuguese the formal you is conjugated in grammatical third person despite being semantically second person, arising from people being formally addressed in the third person ("Does the Right Honourable gentleman agree that...").
- umanwizard 5y agoSame is true in Spanish, where "usted" ultimately derives from "vuestra merced". For a completely different example, "on" in formal French means something like "one" in English: a pronoun for a general, unspecified person; as such, it takes singular conjugations. However, in colloquial speech, it means "we" and has almost completely replaced "nous" as a subject pronoun. Thus: "il est" (he is); "on est" (we are, colloquial language); "nous sommes" (we are, standard language)