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Subject:Standard English pronouns , now [and] "then" From:"Janet M. Swisher" <swisher -at- enthought -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Wed, 13 Jul 2005 11:47:55 -0500
"Bonnie Granat" wrote:
>
> > From: Kathleen [mailto:keamac -at- cox -dot- net]
> >
> > But I thought I saw a note
> > recently that
> > "they" can be used in the singular and plural--was that
> historically
> > speaking or a recent development?
> >
> > OTOH: I don't agree with using "they" as singular; the sentences
> don't
> > make sense.
> >
>
> I believe there's historical precedent for it back in the 14th and
> 15th centuries, but if it was standard usage then (and I don't know
> that to be the case), that certainly seemed to have changed by the
> time you and I turned up.
There was no such thing as "standard" English usage in the 14th and 15th
centuries. The upper classes, clerics, and scholars in England were just
getting over using French and Latin. They were starting to use English
more commonly, but it was primarily spoken by the lower and uneducated
classes, so nobody had gotten around to trying to standardize it at that
point.
And while "standards" regarding singular indefinite "they" may have
changed in the last 6 centuries, the usage is still quite common in
spoken English, which is why it's still an issue. One could make a case
that the loss of either the singular second person (thou, thee, thy) or
the second person subjective case (thou, ye) constitutes a loss of
precision equal to or greater than that posed by singular indefinite
"they", which is far more restricted in scope. However, those forms have
completely disappeared from common use, so nobody makes a fuss over them
anymore. The Quakers made a political/religious point of using "thee",
starting in the 1630s, and the usage persisted as an in-group marker for
about 3 centuries. But the unselfconscious use of "thee" among Quakers
appears to have died out with my grandparents' generation. (In recent
times, it's "thee", never "thou", because of the general trend of
dropping the subjective case.)
> I just know we're going to be talking a bit more about this now. ; )
But of course :-) Indefinite pronouns in English were part of the focus
of my bachelor's thesis, many years ago.
I generally try to avoid singular "they" in formal technical
documentation, because it's not accepted as standard. But personally,
I'm in favor of it. I recently edited a role-playing game manual that
had singular indefinite "they" all over it. It sounded natural and
conversational, and rewriting it to plural, to my ear, would have
sounded stilted.
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