Re: CHAT: use of "they"

Baba wrote:

> Personally I always use "they" as a gender neutral. It's got a
> long history in english, and it comes naturally to children too :-).
>
> It's most useful when using "generic" or "collective nouns" but there
> is a dialect difference between british and american english here in that
> generic and collectives are plural in british but singular in american!
>
> EG: BRIT: "The Government *are* taking action".
> EG: USA:  "The Government *is* taking action".
>
> I must admit this throws me a bit. An example was a US Fire-Drill
> poster which said "Make sure all personnel is outside and accounted for".
> or the sentences; "Which one of them is a doctor? None of them is."
> In both cases I'd expect "are" not "is".
That is the case only for some people I think.  In the above example,I would never use a
singular verb for "personnel"*, because to me
personnel represents a loosly grouped collection of distinct individuals,
whereas the "government" could easily be seen as something above
and beyond those who make it up -- the whole is greater than the sum
of its parts.  (Members of a government more or less devote that section
of their lives to their job, while personnel are otherwise not so devoted)

*(Strangely, though, I would find using the plural morpheme -s strange
also.  Dunno how to explain this, save that perhaps the historical origin
disallowed the plural, and then later, I or my dialect considered it as
distinct enough to warrent a plural verb)

In the case of "none", it's because syntactically, "none" is composed of
"not + one" in the speech of most present day speakers.  For those who
do, I'm sure they do it because the word is no longer analysable for them
as "not + one", but as a seperate lexical entity.

> So I think the singularisation of generic and collectives in the US
> dialect makes harder to integrate the use of gender neutral "they" in
> that dialect. BTW; I'm *not* saying this usage is wrong, far from it,
> just pointing out the difference. In Jamaican English there is no "she"
> at all; everyone is called "he"!
I think it is far easier to explain the resistance to the pronoun "they"being used as a
gender neutral singular by saying that in both
countries, the US and the UK, the population has long been
indoctrinated in prescriptivist linguistics, not in descriptive linguistics.
Prescriptivists resist change usually even when the change would
be beneficial, as in this case (though they might counter it could
lead to confusion of number, the facts to the contrary).

In fact, I would say that it's the prescriptivists who are confused
with things, as they seem to think that the historical nature of
things somehow necessitates certain facts about the present
day language, which is clearly not the case.  As I said before,
it happened in other languages, like German, something almost
directly parallel: a pronoun of one number gets extended in usage
and meaning to something very different (_sie_ "they" --> [also]
_Sie_ "you [formal]").  Because of this, I think the relationship
between them should be formally from here on thought of as
purely historical, not as synchronically useful, particularly.



=======================================================
Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: Deuterotom
Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

We look at [the Tao], and do not see it;
  Its name is the Invisible.
                 - Lao Tsu, _Tao Te Ching_

Nature is wont to hide herself.
                 - Herakleitos
========================================================