Interesting… The amount of views is approximately the same whether I add new content or not. Conclusion: You’re all coming from Google and looking for something completely different… Yeay! My whole blog is spam.
Anyway, I’m not gonna let you down or anything, here’s a new dose of spam. The linguist in me found it interesting (and just a little bit horrible) when I first stumbled upon the use of “they” referring to a single person – or, at least, to an unspecified number. “A person can’t help their birth.” Huh?
Wikipedia’s got more information.
2 responses so far ↓
Cori // September 28, 2009 at 22:37 |
I’m always using this form, since I find it very inconvenient to write “he or she” and to furthermore struggle into the question why “he” first etc.?
w3bsh1t // September 29, 2009 at 02:11 |
Yep, that’s a functional reason for singular “they”. I knew that people had been thinking about a gender-neutral singular pronoun in English for a long time – some even tried to introduce an invented one – but as languages do it most of the time, an existing form was reused and overloaded (to use a programming metaphor) instead. It feels really, really strange to me to use “they” in that way, and apparently to many native speakers as well. But it probably beats “he/she”.
I’m curious what’s gonna happen in German – I’ve felt for a long time that sentences like “Jeder, der zur Tür reinkommt, soll seine Schuhe ausziehen” begin to sound stranger and stranger if we are talking about girls (because of the natural gender conflicting with the grammatical gender). Or imagine saying “Ich habe niemanden, der mit mir kuschelt” as a heterosexual guy. Many people feel that there is something funny about “der” here, especially if you continue such sentences – at some point you just switch to “sie” or “die”.