Why does English use singular they instead of making up a new word for this? [closed]

Why does English use singular they instead of making up a new word for this?

In my native language there’s a word dia which has the same meaning as he/she, but it doesn’t give information about the gender of that person.

I’ve seen questions close to this, but they don’t provide the reason for not making up a new word for this distinct meaning.

Solution 1:

People have created new gender-neutral pronouns. (A good list of currently used ones can be found on Wikipedia.) Furthermore, the move to create gender-neutral pronouns in English is quite old. However, none of these pronouns were ever very successful. Few people are even aware they exist. Currently, these new pronouns are usually confined to the transgender community, but even there singular they is preferred by the majority (for those who don’t use he or her), as found by The Trevor Project and Nonbinary Wiki’s surveys.

(There’s one more option: no pronouns. This means that you use a mix of the person’s name and perhaps also other context-defendant nouns such as “your friend”. The downside is that it can feel clumsy and repetitive if you have to keep saying the person’s name. It’s not uncommon to see this as a “pronoun” choice in the transgender community, and it's also used online, by people who want anonymity but aren't transgender. It’s also an extremely common technique to employ when telling a story to someone, when a third party’s name is mentioned but not gender.)

People often say they don't like the way these new pronouns sound (example from Reddit). Pronouns are used very frequently, and it's definitely jarring to not hear what you're expecting. It's even worse when speaking, having to think and make a conscious decision to switch every single time you use a pronoun. This is mentioned in the book What is Morphology?:

One generalization we can make is that while content words are an open class and it is possible to coin new ones, function words are a closed class. A person cannot easily invent a new preposition or conjunction. Perhaps most telling is the long history of people trying to invent a gender-neutral singular pronoun for English. Suggestions have included co, et, hesh, na, e, and thon. Some linguists have recently proposed tey (on the analogy of plural they, which is gender-neutral), with further forms tem and ter (modeled on them and her). None of these novel words has caught on, while novel content words like modem and cell phone enter the language relatively smoothly.

The Guardian has a very good summary of the history:

Baron’s blog walks you through all the failed attempts – starting with the mid­ 19th century’s ne, nis, nim, and citing sci-­fi’s contributions of neologism: co; xie; per; en. As early as 1878, Napoleon Bonaparte Brown argued that the need for a new pronoun was “so desperate, urgent, imperative that ... it should long since have grown on our speech”.

In 1884, thon, hi, le, hiser and ip were variously suggested. Thon – a blend of that and one – was coined by Philadelphia lawyer Charles C Converse and Baron demonstrates how it was the closest thing to a successful attempt at entering the vernacular; it was accepted by two major dictionaries and even adopted by some writers. But it was grammatical pedantry, not feminism, that motivated Converse. He wanted a “beautiful symmetry” in English and to avoid “hideous solecisms”.

The second closest thing to enter the vernacular was named after American mathematician Michael Spivak; initially e, es, em (e wrote; es eyes are blue) later ey, eir, em (ey wrote; I like em). Other sources attribute these pronouns (formed by dropping the th from they, their and them) to a competition run by the Chicago Association of Business Communicators, won by a Christine M Elverson in 1975. The Spivak pronouns are used today by some in the genderqueer and gaming communities.

Further proposals – hes, hem, ir, ons, e, ith, lim, ler, lers – sprang up, often suggested by newspapers. Readers suggested portmanteaus: hiser; himer; hasher; shis; shim; heer; hie. Humanist lexicon suggested hu, which can occasionally sound like the Kiwi accent (hu wrote; I like hum). Jayce’s system, meanwhile, suggested jee, jem (jee wrote; I like jem). You can find these, and many more, listed at A Chronology of a Word that Failed.

Why has a need for such a short and simple word been so unsuccessful? One opponent of the “bastard word form” portmanteaus, wrote in the New York Commercial Advertiser in 1884 in response to the idea of thon: “All attempts in this direction have failed, partly because it is always exceedingly difficult to introduce new forms into a language, unless they spring up naturally and, as it were, spontaneously.”

The polite pronoun

As it turns out, English went through an extremely similar transition before, with the other plural to single pronoun: you.

The Oxford English Dictionary summarizes the change (you can also read their entry for "you" for free):

The use of you as a ‘polite’ form of address to a single person progressively encroached on thou (originally the singular pronoun) until by 1600 thou (and its objective case thee) was restricted to ‘affective’ (both positive and negative) uses (i.e. so as to be intimate or disparaging). By the late seventeenth century you had become normal in almost all contexts and thou and thee were limited to the Bible and religious use, the Quakers, and regional dialects.

Indeed, the Quakers of old especially rejected singular you:

• George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, wrote an entire battledoor (i.e. a textbook) on the subject (1660).
• William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania, dedicated a chapter of his book to the subject (1669).

• It was first ascribed in way of Flattery to Proud Popes and Emperors; imitating the Heathens vain Homage to their Gods; thereby ascribing a Plural Honour to a single Person; as if One Pope had been made up of many Gods, and One Emperor of many Men. For which Reason, You, only to be used to many, became first spoken to One.

  • (↑ In the first person, this describes Royal we.)

Frequency of use

I decided to do some corpora research to see how popular different pronouns are. To make it easier, I decided to just look at the -self form, which allows me to use a single search. I used this iWeb search, and then searched the results. Here's what I found:

• Themselves: ??? (Potentially the most popular, but there's no easy way to sort out plural from singular)
• Themself: 5369 hits
  • I did not sort through this, so this number may include some plural usage and duplicates
  • An additional 15-20 or so hits come from typos and similar nonstandard versions such as theirself, thereself, and themeself.
• Hirself: 40 hits (excludes quotes of older sources which meant "herself")
  • 23 different websites
• Emself: 43 hits
  • 6 different websites (most hits are from a single site)
• Xirself: 35 hits
  • 1 website
• Xemself: 6 hits
  • 4 sites
• Zirself: 5 hits
  • 3 sites
• Perself: 3 hits
• Xumself: 1 hit
• Xyrself: 1 hit
• Ximself: 1 hit
• Zeself: 1 hit
• Zieself: 1 hit

Also note:

• There were several different variations of himself/herself, but I didn't make a list of them
• Humself: This showed up, but all the hits were typos for "himself"
• Zemself: The one result is a rant about gender pronouns
• I went through the entire list by hand, but I didn't look at the context for everything, so I may have missed some words.

Solution 2:

Mostly, because they already have singular they. It's been in the language since the 14th century. Prior to that, there was generic he, which continued to also be used until the 20th century and is still found. There are also the inclusive doubles "he/she" and "s/he" ("inclusive" though not as inclusive as we might want, on which more below).

The earliest reasons for wanting an alternative to both singular they and generic he that was an explicitly third-person, singular, gender-neutral pronoun came not so much out of sexual politics (whether to ignore gender where it isn't known or relevant, or to describe non-binary people) but the 18th century dislike of words that did not neatly fit; They being grammatically plural and he also having a specifically masculine use that wasn't clearly distinguished from its generic use upset the same sort of people that got upset by less being used of both countable and uncountable terms while fewer could only be used of countable.

This encouraged people to desire such a pronoun, but it wasn't a pressing need.

Later, the undesirable ability of generic he to carry an assumption of masculinity with it made it increasingly unwelcome, especially when the political implications gained more attention, such that it is now largely obsolete, but they and "he/she" still served enough that most people didn't feel any need to adopt ze, thon,* or other suggested pronouns.

In particular, if someone wanted to specifically indicate singularity and also wanted to be neutral as to gender, but were not considering genders other than male and female (which tended not to be considered until relatively recently) then "he/she" filled that gap. Meanwhile they continued in informal use in almost all forms of English, as much as it was considered improper by some.

Conversely, while people are beginning to be more respectful of other genders, the argument against grammatical plurality being used with singular antecedents has lost favour. As such a reason why people may have favoured he over they 150 years ago or "he/she" over they 50 years ago is no longer as strongly with us.

That they is the pronoun preferred by a great many non-binary and gender-queer people today continues to reduce the pressure to do otherwise. While those who do favour an explicitly singular gender-neutral pronoun will lead us to use ze of zir, or thon of thon, it doesn't lead to a strong pressure to replace they and them in other uses.

In all, while we've had different reasons to be unhappy with the position of they, he and "he/she" over the centuries, we haven't had any reason to be happy with any particular alternative.

*Note also that thon is a variant of yon in some dialects, or of meaning something yet further away than something yon, which wouldn't have been a big pressure against adoption, but would still have been a slight pressure. There are of course plenty of homonyms in the language, but being a homonym does add resistance to adoption of new terms.

Solution 3:

Because creating a new closed-class word is a hugely invasive change to people's way of speaking.

It's much more drastic than creating a new noun (euphemism) for an old (derogatory) noun. The difference is that you can to a certain degree choose which noun you use to describe people or concepts, but you can't opt out of using a pronoun because there is only one for one feature combination.

Also, to get a new pronoun adopted, the speech community would have to adjust processes that are much more automatic and ingrained than to adopt a new euphemism. This makes people liable to view it as unjustified interference in their personal affairs and hate every new proposal on principle (often rationalizing their opposition on grounds such as "it sounds ugly").

Ultimately, people are likely to get on board with such a change only if they view the underlying agenda for social change as justified - and sexual politics is a divisive issue on which large segments of the population have quite irreconcilable views. In general, using language as an instrument of social change has a bad historical record as opposed to bringing about the change and then watching language adapt.

Solution 4:

There's no authority for English, even for a single major English-speaking country, so there's no-one to mandate the existence of a new word, never mind its use. Such authorities tend to move slowly, and prefer established words to creating new ones in the same niche, and there are arguments for he as well as they as a gender-neutral singular (linguistic arguments that miss the point). So we consider the situation where ordinary people want to use gender-neautral language.

If someone tried to coin a new word to replace singular they, they'd have trouble even getting people to recognise that the mystery new word is a pronoun. Then this new word gets flagged up by a spell checker if someone tries to reuse it, so hardly anyone bothers; they rephrase the sentence instead. Fundamentally though, it's just not necessary, people have been using singular they for years, they¹ just don't realise it – did you on reading this paragraph?

Or to rewrite that with one of the more common alternative suggestions:

If someone tried to coin a new word to replace singular they, ze'd have trouble even getting people to recognise that the mystery new word is a pronoun. Then this new word gets flagged up by a spell checker if someone tries to reuse it, so hardly anyone bothers; ze rephrases the sentence instead.

Some constructions, like (s)he, are clear enough, but are only gender neutral on the assumption of two traditional genders, and there's a feeling that if we're going to make an effort to be neutral, we should do it properly.

When used in writing, it's often not clear how such a word would be pronounced, when spoken, (assumptions of mishearing aside) it's not clear how they'd be spelt.

¹ OK, that one's plural.

Solution 5:

A lan­guage is not made by “think­ing of a trans­la­tion” for a word. For ex­am­ple, it’s not like you have the Ja­panese word kon­nichi­wak and then ask your­self “How do we say this in English?”, and fol­low­ing that then an­swer your­self “Oh let’s use the word hi”.

That’s not how it works – be­cause there is no English word for kon­nichiwa. It be­longs only to the Ja­panese lan­guage and to the Ja­panese lan­guage alone. If you want to trans­late text into English, you’re not sup­posed to trans­late it word by word. The goal of trans­la­tion is in­stead to con­vey the mean­ing of the orig­i­nal rather than to trans­late its text word by word in a me­chan­i­cal fash­ion.

For in­stance, English has a lot of ad­jec­tives. Not all of these have their own trans­la­tion in other lan­guages. Again the goal of trans­la­tion is to con­vey the orig­i­nal mean­ing. It so hap­pens that when I say kon­nichiwa in Ja­panese and when I say hi in English, they both con­vey a greet­ing.

Another ex­am­ple: when some­one asks if you want to go out for cof­fee, you could an­swer I’d love to. But if you trans­late that to a dif­fer­ent lan­guage, in Filipino you could say oo. Three sen­tences trans­lated into one word? If you trans­late it word by word in­nto English, you’d get oo ini­ibig ko – which is hon­estly not very nor­mal in Filipino. So you could just use oo, which is just as sim­ple as yes is. The pur­pose was to con­vey the mes­sage that you wanted tea, no more and no less.

Un­less it’s pointed out that you have to em­pha­size that you’d love some tea, then you could say ay oo gus­tong gusto ko – which ac­tu­ally also trans­lates dif­fer­ently; word by word, it would be “Oh yes, I do want tea.”

So it’s not that they don’t want to cre­ate a new word for it: it’s just that its mean­ing is con­veyed dif­fer­ently in English than it is in the orig­i­nal. They could cre­ate a new word for it, but be­cause it can al­ready be prop­erly con­veyed with­out one, they feel no press­ing need.

So in my opin­ion I don’t think there is any need to cre­ate a new word for this.