Re: Epicene pronoun in english?
From: | Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...> |
Date: | Saturday, March 6, 2004, 9:33 |
Joe wrote:
> >"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'.
I would never use "is" either, I just wasn't sure if "is" was used or
not in dialects that used singular they more frequently ("themself" also
sounds exceedingly awkward to me, but I understand that it's quite
common in some other dialects, so I didn't know if that
"singularization" also extended to verb forms). At any rate, my point
was, I would never use "they" in that situation, only a gendered pronoun
or avoiding pronouns all together.
> I wonder if, eventually, they will come to represent the whole third
> person, the way 'you' did the whole second person.
Probably. And then a new pronoun will have to be invented for third
person plural. :-) Perhaps "them-all" or "those guys" (analagous to
"you guys") or "th'all" (by analogy with y'all).
In one of my future English attempts, I had just that. Singular epicene
(I can't remember if I retained he/she/it) "they" plural "all'm" (<
all'em < all-them < all of them)
--
"There's no such thing as 'cool'. Everyone's just a big dork or nerd,
you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." -
overheard
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