Re: Epicene pronoun in english?

Joe wrote:
> 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'.
No, we use "is" all the time -- though, as with y'all, it's normally
a clitic.  The problem is that number agreement is just not very well
understood in the English speaking world.  It's not that Americans use
morphological number and Brits use semantic number:  we both say "the
United States *is*", afterall.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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