BlackOtaku,

BlackOtaku:In a lesson on common grammar mistakes my sophomore English teacher pointed out 'singular they' specifically as a grammatical error, and that he/she should be used instead. He wouldn't allow me to argue the point.

Most uses of singular-they are incorrect because people still use it like a plural noun. Compare:

"He is baking a cake"
Right: "They is baking a cake"
Wrong: "They are baking a cake"

"She writes software for a living"
Right: "They writes software for a living"
Wrong: "They write software for a living"

Most people find the gramatically correct forms mentally jarring, and the better sounding (and incorrect) forms drive grammarians up the wall

JulietAwesome:BlackOtaku,

BlackOtaku:In a lesson on common grammar mistakes my sophomore English teacher pointed out 'singular they' specifically as a grammatical error, and that he/she should be used instead. He wouldn't allow me to argue the point.

Most uses of singular-they are incorrect because people still use it like a plural noun. Compare:

"He is baking a cake"
Right: "They is baking a cake"
Wrong: "They are baking a cake"

"She writes software for a living"
Right: "They writes software for a living"
Wrong: "They write software for a living"

Most people find the gramatically correct forms mentally jarring, and the better sounding (and incorrect) forms drive grammarians up the wall

I don't think that's right at all. Otherwise we'd be happily saying "you art". "Are" isn't necessarily stuck to only being plural either, since it's ultimately just a borrowed form from Old Norse (why "are" didn't replace the silly irregular "is" though is a bit strange, so unfortunately there's no "am art are are are are" ).

----

As for the examples you gave before, they look semi-alright to me ("Bob went to the mall with his friends. He/They bought some shoes" sort of irks me though, but I'd normally write it as "Bob went to the mall with his friends and/to buy some shoes", avoiding a pronoun). For cases where we need to use a gender specific pronoun, well we've already got them so we can easily switch out of being "they-ists" , and for those with unconfirmable/irrelavent genders or genderqueer, "they" I feel would be more suitable than chucking in a new label. Sort of like Martin Luther King Jr's comments about a colour blind society, I don't feel it particularly beneficial to the language or to those referred if we make up a new untraditional term to refer to them when we can use a traditional term (subverting any thoughts a traditionalist as far as sexuality and gender go might have, since "they" does not have extra connotations)

ceigered:I think in English, "he" was at one point gender neutral (after inflection and pronunciation had both been degraded leaving feminine forms virtually non-existent)

Do you really mean to call "he" gender-neutral? Maybe you meant to say that the two gendered pronouns became so close in pronunciation that people were no longer able to distinguish between them, so they created a new pronoun. Because that's more or less what I read in the OED's (excellent and relatively detailed) discussion on this matter.

It isn't that "he" was ever gender-neutral; it was that in some dialects, people no longer clearly pronounced the difference between hē (he) and heo (she). So they started using sēo, the feminine demonstrative pronoun, as a word for "she". Maybe this is what you were saying.

erinja:Do you really mean to call "he" gender-neutral? Maybe you meant to say that the two gendered pronouns became so close in pronunciation that people were no longer able to distinguish between them, so they created a new pronoun. Because that's more or less what I read in the OED's (excellent and relatively detailed) discussion on this matter.

It isn't that "he" was ever gender-neutral; it was that in some dialects, people no longer clearly pronounced the difference between hē (he) and heo (she). So they started using sēo, the feminine demonstrative pronoun, as a word for "she". Maybe this is what you were saying.

Where can one find the OED "discussion" you mentioned? I have a subscription to their online dictionary, if that's where you found it.

Yes, I found the discussion in the OED online. Go to the entry for the word "she" (pron.). Then click on the "show more" link under the etymology heading.

The OED online is totally my best friend. Love their etymology and historical references.

erinja:It isn't that "he" was ever gender-neutral; it was that in some dialects, people no longer clearly pronounced the difference between hē (he) and heo (she). So they started using sēo, the feminine demonstrative pronoun, as a word for "she". Maybe this is what you were saying.

That's probably it, although I heard that the "merged" form was closer to "he", but either way there was a push by authors to "split" them up later.

Anyway, English pronouns have a messy history don't they? Changing forms about a thousand times, being traded off for Norse ones

trojo:

erinja:I looked up the 'singular they' in the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) one time. The earliest example phrase showing use of the singular 'they' was from 1526.

It's a hardly a newfangled form used only by these modern-day degenerate youth.

Indeed. Singular they appears in the King James Bible and also Shakespeare. It is the opponents of singular they who are the relatively recent (1800s or so) reformers, arbitrarily declaring half a millenium of English usage and literature 'wrong' for no reason at all other than the fact that that's not how it works in Latin. (Latin was seen as the language of the educated elite in the 1800s and before, and its rules were therefore considered normative even for non-Latin-based languages like English).

It's true that the "singular they" has a long history as a replacement for general statements about people, but I think it is relatively new to use it about a specific person whom one knows. That's not to say it shouldn't be used--I have heard it used, un-self-consciously, to refer to a specific person who was not "gender-queer".

I've heard of ri, also of hi as masculine pronoun exclusive, then li would be gender-inclusive. I'm OK with gxi and tiu as gender neutral. I'm a li, but if someone calls me gxi, I'm not in the least offended.
What about the name of the gendered persons themselves? Vir-ino sticks in my throat, as does patrino. Femoj seems the best way to refer to the majority of homoj on this planet. Objections to that? The short root fem- does exist in femala and feministo. Why for pity's sake can't I use matro instead of patrino? Matr- exists in matrono, and derives from a proto-indoeuropean root and perhaps from a prelinguistic root, that is, ma -- which is present in many language families.
Of course the celo of Esperanto is being understood. IMHO femo and especially matro would be understood by more than half of humankind.

Femoj seems the best way to refer to the majority of homoj on this planet.

The root hom/ has always been gender neutral - still is. It is equivalent to the German Mensch and Russian chelovek, neither of which imply gender.

Why for pity's sake can't I use matro instead of patrino?

Well, "just because that's the way the language is"... I'd like to gently suggest that this question would sound odd if asked in the context of any language other than Esperanto.

Why can't I say "zhenschina" in English where other people say "woman" (let's suppose I really didn't like the sound of the word "woman" ). Presumably because there is a large risk people won't understand me, and even if they figured it out, my language use would just stick out as weird.

IMHO femo and especially matro would be understood by more than half of humankind.

I would understand both of those words only with some difficulty, and I would wonder why the writer/interlocutor was not using the normal words "homo" and "patrino" like everybody else, perhaps to such an extent that I would miss anything important that person had to say.

Tempodivalse:

Why for pity's sake can't I use matro instead of patrino?

Well, "just because that's the way the language is"... I'd like to gently suggest that this question would sound odd if asked in the context of any language other than Esperanto.

I will say, I feel it was an oversight to even give nouns gender. There is no grammatical agreement that must be maintained, so making all free of gender and adding a notion of "real" gender through a pair of suffixes would have been more forward thinking. La Doctoro can hardly be blamed for not having anticipated feminism, but the asymmetry is still without merit. It is hard to express parent, spouse, child, etc. without it collapsing on father, husband, son, etc. It is odd that tablo is masculine and that tablino is possible, but nonsensical. These quirks should have been avoided at the language's inception.

However, if you find that oversight unpalatable, and plenty of people do, then you are not going to be an Esperantist for no other reason than they are codified into the language. You can't say "matro" to refer to mother for the same reason I can't say "xiolek" to refer to mother in English. It simply isn't a word.