Sorry if this is too off topic, or too political. But those interested in CAS might possibly share his interest in old-fashioned English. Also, I will try to work in references to weird fiction whenever I can.

We hear alot about pronouns lately. One of the things I keep hearing is that the "singular they" has a long tradition, going back to the 14th century. I suspect this is misleading at best.

For instance, I have seen it claimed, in an online article of the Oxford English Dictionary, that the "singular they" occurs in the Middle English poem "William and the Werewolf". The OED website explains:

‘Hastely hiȝed eche . . . þei neyȝþed so neiȝh . . . þere william & his worþi lef were liand i-fere.’ In modern English, that’s: ‘Each man hurried . . . till they drew near . . . where William and his darling were lying together.’

[public.oed.com]

(The benevolent werewolf shows up at this point, and decoys the searchers away).

But there is nothing "singular" about this "they". A large group of people are searching for William and his love; and they are the people that the word "they" refers to in this instance. All that has happened is that someone has somewhat arbitrarily chosen to connect the clearly conceptually plural "they" with the arguably singular antecedent "each wight", meaning "each person". I would have made more sense to say that the phrase "each wight" and "they" both refer back to the same group of people, already established in the poem.

(Irony of ironies, in updating the text, they replaced the gender-neutral "each wight" with the gendered "each man").

Chaucer has also been accused of the "singular they", in the following passage:

And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame,
They wol come up and offre in Goddes name,

Which can be updated as:

"And whosoever finds himself without such blame
They will come up and offer in God's name."

(Context is that the pardoner is a sort of traveling preacher; and he is here explaining one of his tricks, which is to tell his listeners that anyone guilty of certain particularly shameful secret sins will be rendered incapable of donating money in God's name; meaning that everyone in the crowd must donate money to prove their innocence to their neighbors.)

[hillsdaleforum.com].

But, again, this is not singular. It is conceptually plural. It refers to a large number of people falling for the scam, to show that they are "out of swich blame". What this really is, is a mismatch between a plural pronoun, and a technically and semantically singular antecedent.

Shakespear has also been cited as using the singular they. I can't find examples at the moment, but from what I recall, the examples followed the above pattern, in the sense of not being truly singular.

By the 19th century, if not earlier, grammar pedants had been preaching that one must match singular pronouns with singular antecedents; and match plural pronouns with plural antecedents, and that all else was bad grammar. The pedants maybe had a point, to the extent that if the goal is clarity of writing, matching pronouns with antecedents certainly cannot hurt. The modern attitude towards these pedants is to mock their rules, while at the same time relying on them. After all, it is only by relying on this pedantic rule that moderns were ever able to conclude that a plural pronoun matched with a singular antecedent must also be singular.

One writer who failed to follow these rules, and has now became known for her use of the so-called "singular they" was Jane Austen; who frequently used "they" and "their" in conjunction with antecedents such as "anybody" and its negative "nobody"; neither of which are conceptually singular, even if they are singular semantically. This article lists a large number of examples:

[www.pemberley.com]

Some of Austin's examples are more ambiguous than the Chaucer example, but none are truly singular in my view. In the best examples, the antecedent is conceptually indefinite in that "they" refers to somebody(ies) that might be singular or plural or negative. In none of the examples is "they" unambiguously and conceptually singular. I have not, for instance, been able to find any examples of the phrase "somebody left their book " or whatever, in the 19th century.

Austin did not use "they" because it was gender neutral, and neither did anyone else at that time, as far as I can tell. The language already had two gender-neutral singular pronouns: "it" and the generic "he". The former was disfavored for adult human persons; but was fine for animals and nonhumans. In E. Nesbit's fiction, the psammead and phoenix were both highly dignified nonhuman persons of unknown sex being harassed by 5 annoying children, but neither took offense at the pronoun "it".

It has long been argued that the generic "he" is sexist, and excludes women. Which I'm not sure is completely and unambiguously true. One way of looking at it is to ask the question: does it really harm girls if the boys have to share their pronouns with the girls; but the girls have a pronoun all to themselves? Maybe in some contexts. But maybe not in others.

The generic "he" continued to be used well into the 20th century. I found one example by Clark Ashton Smith's "An Adventure in Futurity": "no human being is so individual that he does not possess obvious ear-marks that place him immediately among the tribes of mankind."

But by the time I got to grade school, in the 70s, teachers would correct the use of the generic "he" and force hapless students to write "he or she" instead. This project was doomed. The entire point of pronouns is brevity and efficiency, and if you have to replace one with a 3 syllable substitute, one might as well not bother with them at all.

But though the project was doomed, it may have not been without effect. I suspect it caused a further evolution towards the singular "they" with people saying "somebody left their book" just to avoid saying the cumbersome and ridiculous "somebody left his or her book".

This is still a far cry from the true, modern, singular "they". But I won't carry the story further. Ultimately, I think the function of pronouns is brevity, efficiency and reasonable clarity; which means that in the long run, though usage may evolve, it is not easily subjected to top-down ideologically driven tinkering.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 16 May 22 | 09:49PM by Platypus.

I am not a student of historical English, but I know that English is a Germanic language and used to be more complex than it is today. There were formal and informal pronouns. "You" can be singular or plural. The formal form of you is "you" with informal forms being thee and thou even though these sound more formal to the modern ear. A royal personage may call himself "we." Could something like this have been going on? At any rate not all writers in the past were overly concerned with proper grammar. Many wrote simply to reflect how people talked. Thus they could have said "they" for convenience just as people do now.

I was told in school when young to always use "he" when the sex of the unknown person could be male or female and that it was no more "sexist" than "mankind" is sexist. I was told to avoid "he or she" as it was needlessly long. Of course there are ignorant people now who think that mankind only meant men.

weorcstan Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> A royal personage may call himself "we."

I'm not sure that is truly "singular". A monarch who talks this way only does so on formal occasions, and does not merely speak for himself.

A "singular we" that is a closer analogy to the historical examples I described would be a semantic mismatch between pronoun and antecedent. "The next time one of us goes to the post office, we should pick up the package."

> Thus they could have
> said "they" for convenience just as people do
> now.

Well, yes. Pronouns are always for convenience. But that does not mean there are no rules, that form a basis of common understanding, in the context of whatever time, place and dialect. Pronouns would be less useful if different pronouns did not mean different things. And traditionally, what makes "they" differ from other pronouns, and hence makes it useful, is the fact that it is plural.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 16 May 22 | 11:39PM by Platypus.

Here are the Shakespear examples that get cited:


There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend
-- A Comedy of Errors

And every one to rest themselves betake,
Save thieves, and cares, and troubled minds, that wake.
-- The Rape of Lucrece

Obviously, it is a HUGE stretch to say that there is anything singular about Shakespear's use of "they". In the first example, "their" refers to all men the speaker meets; and in the latter "themselves" refer to all people except thieves and insomniacs.