I’m curious to learn: if “they” is being added to style guides as a way to refer to a singular human without implying any gender, is “it” the same or is there a somewhat different meaning behind the usage?
"It" is not generally used in English to refer to people, and generally carries a dehumanizing or even pejorative connotation when used to refer to a person (it's not unheard of to see "it" used as a slur against binary trans people, for example-- using "it" in place of preferred pronouns).
Use "it" if someone specifically requests that "it" be used to refer to them. Don't if they do not.
"They" has been used as a singular pronoun as far back as the late 1300s, but for the case where you didn't know the gender of the person or the gender was not relevant. Using it for someone whose gender is gender is known but is not male or female is much newer.
Here's an article with details [1].
The problem of what pronoun to use for someone who is neither male or female is not new, of course. That article says:
> There have always been people who didn’t conform to an expected gender expression, or who seemed to be neither male nor female. But we’ve struggled to find the right language to describe these people—and in particular, the right pronouns. In the 17th century, English laws concerning inheritance sometimes referred to people who didn’t fit a gender binary using the pronoun it, which, while dehumanizing, was conceived of as being the most grammatically fit answer to gendered pronouns around then
I'll add that while the OED dates the singular they to the mid-14th century (betw. 1335-1361), use as to avoid gendering an individual is found from ca. 1450; the OED also gives earlier attestations for them (1429) and their (1398) of the same usage.
>Hasn’t it always been the case that you could use “they” as a way to refer to a singular human without implying any gender?
Yes, since Shakespearean times.
For example: "I saw someone walking down the street the other day, they were carrying a guitar" -> a normal use of they as the 3rd person singular pronoun.
No, and it’s frustrating for people who had it hammered into their reading and writing habits all through school. I can’t read a singular “they” without mentally tripping on it.
> No, and it’s frustrating for people who had it hammered into their reading and writing habits all through school. I can’t read a singular “they” without mentally tripping on it.
If you mean "no" in the sense that this specific sentence isn't true:
> Hasn’t it always been the case that you could use “they” as a way to refer to a singular human without implying any gender?
then you are mistaken, as sibling comments point out. Certainly there is a history of teaching people not to use singular 'they' (I don't know how long, but I was certainly taught it), but people have actually been using singular 'they' for a long, long time, and usage trumps fiat at least in English.
I once saw someone who goes by “it” explain that it liked “it” because it has a sort of ungendered quality to it, whereas “they” is instead gender-neutral. It explained that we use “they” to refer to humans because we assume humans are gendered, and the implied gender is the quality that makes “they” (or for that matter “he” or “she”) implicitly refer to a human. But it rejects the notion humans must be gendered, or that humans without gender are not human.
I'm not sure I agree with that argument, but it got me to think. It blends the linguistic and the philosophical.
Grammatically, “they” and “it” are the same gender, they differ in number.
Semantically, the difference in their singular use (prior to very recent evolutions) is that they was rarely used for specific known humams, and it was never uses for humans (but frequently for living things with sex and to whom grammatical gender corresponding to sex could also be used, in cases where the sex was unknown or unimportant, similar to the use of “they” for humans.)
So, while I find the idea of “they” as gender neutral but “it” as emphatically ungendered conceptuallt interesting, I don't really think it reflects historical usage differences.
OTOH, I suppose there could be debate about different presumptions of social gender vs grammatical gender here, too.
Should we overhaul all languages that use gendered language? I speak French and often think in French (le/la, etc), obviously I speak English, but a lot of modern English comes with heritage from cultures, languages, hell even concepts of thought (yes thinking in differently languages gives unique perspectives of the world).
Of all the most useful projects to humanity (diverting asteroids, developing free energy, curing cancers, solving childhood poverty, etc) in any top-3 list I'd put "having a single common language that is super-simple to learn and master and which everybody is taught from childhood".
Let's not change English or French then, but leave them as "classical" languages, but teach kids the new easy/expressive/explicit one. No gendered nouns, no phrasal verbs, no reported speech markers, etc.
Completing this initiative makes all the other ones easier to complete. And it's not like it's much more complicated than the other complicated things we donate to and try to push forward every year.
No - please do not use "it" as a catch-all pronoun for an unknown person. "It" is generally a dehumanizing term for a transgender person - though a minority use it as a pronoun (in those cases, go for it).
I’m not asking if they’re interchangeable. Just if “it” differs from “they” in some way in the above context where it sounds like that’s the individual’s preferred pronoun?
Yes, calling someone “it” has been a ridiculously offensive thing to do in my life experience.
It would be such a shame if groups that pride themselves on inclusivity had a socially acceptable reason to exclude lower-class and neurodivergent people...
It's really not that hard to keep a mental lookup table for each person and their custom pronouns and declensions.
Another pretty elegant solution I've found if there's too much confusion amongst our team is to suggest people switch to learning Hungarian which doesn't have gendered pronouns. A few years of intense study is a small price to pay so that we can avoid the catastrophic mistakes of accidentally calling someone who's not in the room the wrong gender
Unfortunately I tried that. After 3 years of Hungarian classes, I had a peer that demanded I speak to them in Klingon because they identified as hypermasculine. Now I have to start over again.
No, it's fine as is. I think you have は and が backwards but neither of them imply ドイツ語 is "doing something" even though it's the subject of the sentence. It's a pro-drop language so meanings that don't make sense are just excluded.
I was split between で or は, forgot all about が. Funnily enough I think omitting the particle altogether would have made more sense.
Edit: After further reading は seems to work fine. In this case I think both work but が places greater emphasis on the german language being the thing not understood. で however was totally incorrect :P. But due to the tacit nature of informal Japanese I think the context already informed the reader who doesn't understand what.
が marks the subject, and the subject of わかる is the thing that's being understood, not the thing that's doing the understanding.
(Maybe you meant subject in the non-grammatical way? It's confusing.)
Either way, は is fine in this sentence to the best of my understanding.
It marks ドイツ語 as the subject, and thus the thing being understood.
Bullshit. Why is a word that explicitly removes all identity connotations randomly dehumanization? Its one of the most neutral ways of indicating another, In the same way that "comrade" is.
> explicitly removes all identity connotations randomly dehumanization
It's not randomly dehumanization, the neuter gender that the pronoun system preserves has always communicated inanimacy (read: nonhuman-ness) against the masc/fem animate genders. Etymologically, this distinction has been more primitive than the masc/fem distinction. One feature of the neuter gender is the use of the object form in languages that distinguish it from the subject form, hence he/him, she/her, but it/it.
I sympathize with questioning but this is pretty harsh. The explanation is fairly simple. “It” is how we refer to most inanimate objects and “subhuman” creatures in the English language. Debates on how appropriate it is to be addressed in this way or desire to be addressed in this way aside, it’s certainly not random or a stretch to imagine why some might be uneasy with the idea if they feel it somehow associates the person with the aforementioned categories.
No, 'it' is not the same as 'they' here. To refer to a person of unknown pronouns, they/them/their/theirs/themself should be used. However, if one's pronouns are specified to be either they/them/their/theirs/themself or it/it/its/its/itself, use those preferred.
