Indigofairy has commented, "I wish that English, like German, had a gender-neutral singular possessive pronoun. That would eliminate any confusion of his/her/your/their/etc.

Shall we invent one?"

I despise his/her and the correlate (s)he, but have to admit that I have no better ideas. Help!

In the prevailing climate of political correctness, the pronoun he, which had filled the role of the neutral third person singular until the 1960s, is no longer up to the job and I suspect that the neutral plural "they" will become the standard pronoun of agreement by default, much as though I dislike it.

There is historical precedent in the case of the word "you". This was originally the second person plural (thou being the second person singular). However, "thou" is now archaic and we do not shudder to use a plural pronoun for a singular.

To create a totally new word would be, I suspect, a project doomed to failure.

English speakers have been using singular generic they for over a millennium. I don't see what's wrong with that in informal English. The problem of what to do with formal English is left to the reader as an exercise. I had an entry on plural they being incorrect a while back.

I do wish there were a neutral singular possessive pronoun. I write about the "nurse," but I always have to change it to "nurses" so that I can use "their," instead of "his/her." If I don't change it, the editors will! In my field there is a whole lot of political correctness needed with the gender of the nurse. Even though 92% of the nurses in the states are women, no one wants to admit it. If I say, "nurse/she" it is a terrible faux pas; yet "nurse/he" is even worse! So, I can only say "nurses/they." The same is true with physicians, really. If one were to say "physician/he," the world would begin to shatter!

Thank heavens for "they!"

If I remember correctly, the German gender-neutral singular pronoun is the equivalent of our "it". This may be only because there is no other, better English translation, but barring any objections people may have to being referred to in the same way as refer to objects ("it,") mightn't "it" be an appropriate subject?
That's IF we can get people to use it, of course.

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Originally posted by indigofaerie:
If I remember correctly, the German gender-neutral singular pronoun is the equivalent of our "it". This may be only because there is no other, better English translation, but barring any objections people may have to being referred to in the same way as refer to objects ("it,") mightn't "it" be an appropriate subject?
That's IF we can get people to use it, of course.

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It's not a good idea to look at German as a model because grammatical gender and physical sex are quite different things. Quite apart from th fact that it would be considered ludicrous in England (and in Germany - remember gender and sex are NOT the same thing) to consider a table as male or a street as female (and a car as sometimes male but sometimes nuter depending on the specific noun chosen), there is the issue that a "young woman" while she may be decidedly female in physical attributes is grammatically neuter.

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Originally posted by BobHale:

It's not a good idea to look at German as a model because grammatical gender and physical sex are quite different things. Quite apart from th fact that it would be considered ludicrous in England (and in Germany - remember gender and sex are NOT the same thing) to consider a table as male or a street as female (and a car as sometimes male but sometimes nuter depending on the specific noun chosen), there is the issue that a "young woman" while she may be decidedly female in physical attributes is grammatically neuter.

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...and that doesn't even begin to address all the OTHER problems in looking to German for grammatical suggestions. Their verb/noun/adjective ordering is completely different from that in English, for example. Plus, their compound words - my oh my.

Since I had cited German to begin with as a positive example of a language with a pronoun of the type English could use, though, that's why I brought it up again.

I consider that it is one of our language's great strengths that it has no gender in its nouns (and thus no agreement of gender in its adjectives) - apart from the specific case of pronouns referring to male and female humans, and animals (and even animals are referred to as "it" more often than not).

To lose the last vestiges of word gender (which is mainly now confined to our singular pronouns) would probably be a good thing.

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Originally posted by Richard English:
To lose the last vestiges of word gender (which is mainly now confined to our singular pronouns) would probably be a good thing.

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So are you suggesting the use of "it" instead of "he" or "she" and "its" for "his/her"?

Being as people psychologically operate within the bounds of categories and gender (when it comes to other people) is one of the "most important," I'd guess it would be difficult to do without "he" and "she" in descriptions of people.

Quote "...I'd guess it would be difficult to do without "he" and "she" in descriptions of people...."

As things stand at present, yes. But it's only a linguistic habit. Even now we can't use too many pronouns in any sentence because it becomes confusing and we find phrases like, "...So Fred said that he (Charlie) ought to pay for the next round..." just to make it clear who the pronoun refers to.

I would think that we would be able to do without personal pronouns quite easily once we got out of the habit. After all, every personal pronoun refers to a person with a name or other reference. We use the person's name and the neutral prounoun "you" when speaking to another; it's only when we use the third person that gender-specific pronouns are used.