WI Masculine Pronouns Were Never Used To Include Females

A good deal of awkwardness (and "he or she"/"his or her" etc. *is* awkward, while "he/his" though it *legally* and according to the grammar books, refers to both men and women, nevertheless does in real life suggest a man) could be avoided if we simply used the words "they" and "their" as, for example, Caxton, Shakespeare, and Chesterfield did: "Each of them should...make themself ready." (Caxton) "God send everyone their heart's desire." (Shakespeare) "If a person is born of a gloomy temper, they cannot help it." (Chesterfield) According to the article "Language and Gender" in *The Linguistics Encyclopedia* the use of masculine pronouns to include females "only became a general rule in 1746 when John Kirkly [sic--it's Kirkby--DT;see https://books.google.com/books?id=VaBgAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA117 for the rule in question] made it the twenty-first of eighty-eight grammatical rules, on the ground that the male pronoun was more comprehensive than the female. Later grammarians added to this feeling the notion that the use of *they* violated rules of number agreement--a consideration, which, as we have seen above, did not concern Shakespeare, and one which appears to make the unwarranted assumption that number agreement is more important than gender agreement..." https://books.google.com/books?id=OZ-HAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA349

H.L. Mencken's comments in *The American Language* are still interesting:

"The American pronoun does not necessarily agree with its noun in number...At the bottom of this error, there is a real difficulty: the lack of a pronoun of the true common gender in English, corresponding to the French *soi* and *son*. *His*, after a noun or pronoun connoting both sexes, often sounds inept, and *his-or-her* is intolerably clumsy. Thus the inaccurate plural is often substituted. The brothers Fowler have discovered 'anybody else who have only *themselves* in view' in Richardson and 'Everybody is discontented with *their* lot' in Disraeli, and Ruskin once wrote, 'If a customer wishes you to injure *their* foot.' I find two examples in a single paragraph of an article by Associate Justice George B. Ethridge of the Supreme Court of Mississippi: 'We should keep it possible for anyone to correct *their* errors' and 'No person can be happy in life if *they*'; and another in a war speech by Woodrow Wilson: 'No man or woman can hesitate to give what *they* have.'..." https://books.google.com/books?id=cIPoCHsgATUC&pg=PA460

(As Mencken observes, this is the line as Wilson spoke it, according to the newspapers reporting it. It was later "corrected" in the written version. https://books.google.com/books?id=G-WrlQMn8OYC&pg=PT676)
 

Benevolent

Banned
Singular they is quite wonderful, I've been using it for years so now it's quite normal. It helps that it's normalized within the circles I run in.

But anyways the implications of singular they in my opinion opens up our notion of gender, neutrality is never truly neutral politically or socially, so to bring forward that word also brings up new ways of seeing and relating to gendered bodies.
 
I am personally a fan of spivak's neologisms ey/em/eir/emself as singular versions of they/them/their/themselves. They're gender-neutral but also singular so as to not upset the grsmmatians.

But, back to the original question, I doubt that having a gender-neutral singular in the English language would have made too much of a difference. Sexism and binary genderism would still have been a thing. Although things could have been interesting the other way around: earlier feminism (or with an earlier POD, completely different gender categories) might have led to a situation in which 'he' never was thought of as referring to both men and women.
 
Interesting, I never thought about it. Then again Dutch, like German and French has male, female and neuter, even though in modern Dutch there only seem to be (and de facto are) two definite articles de (male/female) and het (neuter).

In any case thanks for learning me something new, it made me want to look, how their Dutch counterparts developed.
 
I don't see a reason against singular they. It's been in use since the 14th Century. I would say that makes it a part of the language, prescriptivists be damned. But as others have said, politics will still be politics.
 
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