Re: Epicene pronoun in english?

Nik Taylor wrote:

>And Rosta wrote:
>
>
>>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.)
>>
>>
>
>At least in my idiolect, "they" is still pretty iffy.  It can be used
>(indeed, is almost obligatory) with words like "someone" (when it's
>actually an unknown or hypothetical; if it refers to a specific
>individual, as in "Someone bought this for their wife", it's
>ungrammatical in my idiolect, especially if spoken by the person who
>sold it, but I've heard it from others), but is ungrammatical, or at
>least questionable, with words referring to specific individuals.  Like,
>the following exchange would be completely ungrammatical:
>
>"A friend of mine is visiting tomorrow" "Are (is?) they coming for a
>specific reason?"
>
>

Really?  That seems a very odd situation.  No wonder you Americans have
all this fun trying to invent epicene pronouns.  You would never use
'is'.  Just as you use 'are' for 'you', and not 'art', you use 'are' for
'they'.

I wonder if, eventually, they will come to represent the whole third
person, the way 'you' did the whole second person.

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