Re: Epicene pronoun in english?

Tom Wier:
> From:    And Rosta <a.rosta@...>
> > I don't know whether all the epicene
> > pronoun fuss is due simply to prescriptivism or whether there
> > is genuinely a dialect difference with AmE here, such that AmE
> > lacks the BrE solution. (It's hard to tell, what with AmE
> > being so much more prescriptivist in the first place.)
>
> I'm just curious:  on what grounds are you making this
> assertion? Have you noticed that American students of
> yours are more likely to make reference to standards of
> language use than your British students?  (This is not
> to say that one cannot make generalizations about cultures,
> but I wonder whether you have actually looked at some
> empirical data on this which I have not myself seen.)
I've noticed that a disproportionate amount of prescriptivism
that I encounter comes from America (-- written English, this
is). Not that your average American is a prescriptivist,
but rather than your average prescriptivist is an American.
(within the anglo world, of course)

A quasiempirical test would be to look for things like
newspaper columns and books with prescriptive aim & compare
their sales and availability on either side of the Atlantic.

> Besides which: it seems a little dubious to speak about
> "American English" and "British English" except in the broadest
> terms.  I know that within America there certainly are people
> for whom "one" is completely unacceptable as an everyday
> epicene except in the most formal of registers, so it wouldn't
> surprise me is there are people who have difficulties with
> "them" as epicene, too.  Yet for me, both are quite acceptable.
I'm happy to speak about BrE, but I have much less exposure
to the full variousness of AmE, so I avoid generalizing
about English in general or AmE in particular.

--And.

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