Learning French it just seemed normal to use singular they
Vous
Vous is the 2nd person plural pronoun. Only for when you’re speaking directly to someone, which isn’t gendered anyway (2nd person singular pronoun is Tu).
French doesn’t have a gender neutral 3rd person pronoun. It’s il or elle. Which is unfortunate. There have been attempts to create a gender neutral 3rd person pronoun but none have really taken off. Most French non-binary people who prefer gender neutral pronouns in English will use the pronoun in French that most closely align with their presentation. Il for mascs, elle for femmes. I’m hopeful for this to change honestly.
Sounds like you’re mad for the sake of being mad
Singular they is the same in English
I am bilingual and have been speaking French every day since I was 4. I work every day entirely in French. I am correcting you on a fundamental aspect of the French language.
Vous is equivalent to saying “you all” in English. It can also be used as a 2nd person singular pronoun, equivalent to “you” in English. You’ll note that “you” isn’t gendered.
“They” is a 3rd person pronoun. It’s used when referring indirectly to someone else. “He” and “she” are also 3rd person pronouns. “You” is the 2nd person singular pronoun in English. We don’t have a dedicated 2nd person singular pronoun (not since like the 17th century), so when referring to 2nd person to a group of people, we say “you all” or “you guys” etc.
Pronouns in French go like this:
Person Singular Plural first Je Nous second Tu Vous third Il/Elle Ils/Elles In English the equivalents are:
Person Singular Plural first I We second You “You all/guys” etc third He/She They People’s preferred pronouns in both English and French are third-person ones (at least when referring to these kinds of pronouns, there’s others like Sir/Ma’am). French does not have a gender neutral third person pronoun by default.
Spanish is pretty similar, but we have a dedicated formal “you” (usted/ustedes). Its technically second person, but its conjugated the same as third
Person Singular Plural first yo nosotros second tú vosotros third él/ella/usted Ellos/ellas/ustedes
Fun fact: there has been more time between the first use of singular they and today than there was between the first use of plural they and the start of the criticism of singular they
If they’re here, then why am I alone 😓
But when the World needed him most, he vanished.
Tom Scott has a page of reflections and corrections for that video from a few years ago. He’s a good ally but I think we all envy past Tom’s optimism.
I also appreciate the thoughtfulness he showed when he found out someone he had recently collaborated with had made transphobic comments in the past.
You’re never going to appease everyone, and I appreciate that he shared the thinking that led him to his decision. I just regret not finding out about the incident until like a week after I ordered her book.
Every time I read “he or she” I think “YOU COULD HAVE SAVED FIVE CHARACTERS!!”
mad respect for counting those spaces
Every byte is sacred
code.golf approves
Programmer brain go brrrrr
{s,}he
He/she
s/he
(s/t)he(y)
length(“s/he”) == length(“they”)
It also just sounds awkward to say he/she
es he
Gender neutral pronouns are just so much more convenient; I tend to use them even when I know someone’s gender. I do wish English had some common-use ones that were explicitly singular, though.
I believe I read somewhere that the singular for “they” used to be “thy”, but that makes language sound terribly old. Doubt it’ll get picked up in the mainstream
‘Thy’ is the disused informal ‘your’. There’s ‘thou’/‘thee’ but that’s still second-person.
Interesting! Do you have any etymological sources that go into this more? I’d be curious to learn
I do wish English had some common-use ones that were explicitly singular, though.
In the long run I predict that “they” will follow the same path as “you” - it’ll become increasingly more associated with the singular, until it’s the default interpretation. I also predict that both “they” and “you” will eventually require a pluraliser to convey the plural.
“Vos” (you, singular) in Rioplatense Spanish followed a similar path.
If that’s correct, eventually there’ll be explicitly singular second and third person pronouns.
my prediction is for th’all and y’all or just thal and yal in the long run
I have a soft spot for ‘yous’, personally.
Not outside of the US…
My first bet is roughly in this direction, too.
Do we currently have an explicit pluralizer for they?
We can thank Harry for this one
Theys
I think that “all” is evolving in this direction. It was already used as an explicit pluraliser for “you” (alongside “guys”, -s, and others); and now I’m seeing “they all” more and more across the internet, even in situations where the “all” clearly does not convey “every single one of them”.
Just keep in mind that this is anecdotal from my part, not backed up by hard data.
Dude is supposed to be gender neutral and singular.
Still, maybe don’t. Not everyone agrees with the gender neutrality of “dude”. How many dudes have you slept with?
i think there is alot to be said about the influence of patriarchy on masculine words becomming applied to everyone. men being seen as the norm and all that…
Four. Will be five if my Grindr match pans out tonight.
Whoah! That’s a personal question I don’t feel like would reflect accurately my life if someone knew. There’s more to me than my body count. I contain depths and multitudes outside of the number of people I have slept with!
280ish. But there’s more to me than that!
Ahah, you changed it plural which genders it. It’s dudes and dudettes in that case.
Did you see that dude I slept with last night?
Totally different now that it’s a singular.
Yeah language sucks.
nah i still see “i slept with a dude” as “i slept with a man”, sorry
maybe it’s the article that makes it seem masc? A dude, vs “hey, dude!”
I think it’s the difference of referencing another person using the word “dude” vs talking to a person and calling them “dude”
Well contextually you would know who the person was talking about…
If you saw a woman and confused it with a man because of word, that’s on you mate. There’s another gender neutral and singular term.
In my area “dude” is really gender neutral in most cases.
Regional dialects and all that.
Funnily enough so is “man” in a lot of cases.
For example: “Man I don’t know what’s going on anymore.” In this case “man” is less a reference to anyone in any specific way and more like an exasperation (like fuck, shit, hell, etc) and is a really common usage.
Edit: As an example of it’s gender-neutralness, “Fuck man, chill it’s just the wrong order.” In this case “man” is often used in a gender neutral way when referring to a specific person. Also man in this case can be swapped with “bro” and “dude”.
Regional dialects can get really weird in some cases, we use the same words but the meanings can be so different.
Language is a beautiful tangled knot that depending on which side you’re looking at it from it can change so much.
Yeah, I hate “xer” and “xe”
I would totally use xe/xer if doing so wouldn’t be hugely distracting from whatever topic I’m actually talking about, those words have a nice scifi vibe to them.
Totally agree. I think half the problem is that English is a stupid language at times. I have no problem with gender neutral terms but the plural nature of “they” makes my 54 yo brain hurt. I have the same issue with the word data. “The data are” sounds awkward to me.
i think its mostly an issue with not being used to it. “you” is both singular and plural as well and we manage fine. “we” is plural but it does not distinguish between inclusive and exclusive “we”. arguably those cases are more rarely relevant, and honestly id prefer if all of them had solutions, but i think we can handle it once we are used to it, or solutions will develop.
btw not trying to be antagonistic here, just sharing my thoughts :3
No I totally agree. This really wasn’t a thing for my generation so it just feels weird. And I’m talking about the language aspect only. I’m totally cool with people being who they are.
I just wish there were better alternatives to convey the same meaning without these overloaded English terms. English is just an amalgamation of weird grammar and vocabulary from at least three major languages plus I’m old and change is hard.
You use singular they every single day or at most every single week and you have for your entire life and so did all of your English speaking ancestors including middle English.
'how far out is the pizza guy’s ‘they’re 15 minutes out’
‘my coworker was a pain in the ass today’ ‘what they’d do this time?’
‘i think my doctor is famous’ ‘oh what’s their name?’
They was singular before it was plural, and it’s singular use is still one of the most common pronouns in English.
Every example you provided was extremely unambiguous and without anything that might require distinction between singular and plural. Often language isn’t that simple. For example, “Fion had finally joined the party and they were happy about it.” Who does “they” refer to in that context? Yes, you can write/speak your way around it, but that adds extra difficulty that isn’t suited for casual speaking/writing. That is why people (who aren’t transphobes) don’t like it as a pronoun and would rather have a new word.
In your sentence they unambiguously refers to fion. It’s really not that hard for a fluent speaker. I’m not a native and this shit is simple, it’s unwritten but innately known like the order of adjectives when multiple are present.
When I was writting that, I assumed it was about the party, so clearly not so unambiguous. It could conceiveably refer to either - doubly so in casual speech where rules are bent. Fill up a books worth of text about a character using they/them pronouns (esspecially written by a bad writer) and you get confused often.
To be clear, in ideal English, its easy to use. Most English is not ideal, with words being changed, dropped, reordered, ect. based on the speaker or writer’s whim in the moment. All that is before factoring in regional varients of English.
Tom Scott is so jacked in that video!
Removed by mod
“There’s somebody at the door”
“What do they want?”
The real world uses gender neutral pronouns all the time, all over the world.
I could hear you breathing through your mouth as you typed that.
It doesn’t matter how weird a pronoun sounds to me, it’s just a word, and I shouldn’t bother so much with it, because at the end of the day,
Komi can’t communicate.
