Louis Menand’s recent NYkr review essay (archived; ostensibly a review of Stefan Fatsis’s Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary) has some good things to say, but on the whole it irritated me, so (as is my wont) I will share my irritation here. Mind you, this is the same Menand who so sharply took Lynne Truss to task for her idiocy about language, so it’s not that he’s ignorant, in this essay he just doesn’t pay attention to what he’s writing beyond making sure it sounds clever. At any rate, I’m going to go through and pick out idiocies to flog, much as I did with Simon Winchester back in 2004; I do not regard Menand as a terrible writer tout court, like the egregious Winchester, but that’s all the more reason he shouldn’t have perpetrated this stuff.
There was good money in the word business. Then came the internet and, with it, ready-to-hand answers to all questions lexical. If you are writing on a computer, it’s almost impossible to misspell a word anymore. It’s hard even to misplace a comma, although students do manage it.
What? Words are misspelled and commas misplaced all the time; I guess what he means is that if you care about such things and pay attention to the squiggly red lines, you can avoid many mistakes, but if you care about such things you weren’t going to make many mistakes in the first place. Has he ever looked at internet sites other than carefully curated ones like newyorker.com?
As Fatsis tells the story of his lexicographical Bildung, he makes genial and informed digressions into controversies in the dictionary racket, some possibly overfamiliar, like how to label ethnic slurs and whether to include “fuck,” others more current, like the crusade to come up with a gender-neutral third-person-singular pronoun (after many failed launches, we appear to be stuck on “they,” which seems kind of lame) and whether or not large language models can create a dictionary (so far, not). He has a section on our contemporary speech wars, showing that many of the most radioactive words—“woke,” “safe space,” “microaggression,” “anti-racism”—are much older than we might assume.
We’ll let the pointlessly exotic Bildung slide, but what on earth does he mean by “which seems kind of lame”? Does he mean it seems like a normal word? Yeah, that’s the point. And what does he mean by “radioactive”? Is it just a fancy would-be synonym for, say, “contentious”? Frankly, the only thing that unites those words is that they were created by progressives, which, well, I will be charitable and not be mean about. But I wrinkle my brow.
Most free online dictionaries (the free merriam-webster.com was originally based on the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate; the company also has a subscription site) are not heavy on lexicographic detail. They are mainly for people who enjoy playing with words. Definitions and correct spellings are no longer the principal attraction. Websites feature a “word of the day,” crossword puzzles and word games, lists of emojis, trending slang, usage tips (“Is it ‘nip it in the butt’ or ‘nip it in the bud?’ ”), translation programs, and, of course, ads.
What does he mean by “not heavy on lexicographic detail”? The online merriam-webster.com gives exactly as much lexicographic detail as the physical dictionary; yes, it also features fun stuff “and, of course, ads,” and the reason for all that is that they have to pay the bills, as he acknowledges in the next paragraph (“It needs eyeballs to survive”). So the choice is between an online site with lexicographic detail, fun stuff, and ads, or no site at all. Which would he prefer?
Merriam-Webster is now owned by Encyclopædia Britannica, another big print-era brand—the original edition was published in Scotland in 1768—that is struggling to compete in an online realm dominated by the nonprofit Wikipedia. Britannica has been losing market share since 1993, when Microsoft released its digital encyclopedia, Encarta. Fatsis quotes a Britannica editor comparing Wikipedia, disparagingly, to a public rest room—a comparison that’s not entirely wrong. It’s not the most elegant website, but everyone uses it.
What the fuck does he mean by “a comparison that’s not entirely wrong” and “not the most elegant website”? Here’s Wikipedia and here’s Britannica: is it obvious which is more elegant? The “public rest room” thing is slander, pure and simple, and shame on Menand for quoting it approvingly.
On the attacks on Webster’s Third New International Dictionary:
The flash point was the inclusion in Web. III of “ain’t.”
But “ain’t” was in Web. II as well — you can see it right here on p. 54! And Web. III doesn’t present it as standard usage: “though disapproved by many and more common in less educated speech…” Like all attacks on Web. III, this was sheer elitist know-nothingism dressed up as educated disapproval. Come on, Menand, this ain’t hard to check. (N.b.: I had to chide him for his remarks on Webster’s Third and “disinterested” back in 2011.)
I don’t want to give the impression that Menand is a prescriptivist like DFW — his heart is in the right place — but he seems to be writing on autopilot and not paying much attention to whether what he says holds together or even needs saying. Here’s an extended passage about an ever-interesting question:
Of all the words that human beings use, publicly or privately, written or spoken, which ones belong in a dictionary? Does a frequency threshold need to be crossed for a word to make it lexicographically? Does it have to be accepted first by whatever gatekeepers may still be out there—professors, editors, podcasters . . . influencers? And does a particular level of disuse have to be reached for a word to be dropped into the lexical dustbin? Fatsis reports that the Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, from 1944, has five pages of terms starting with “buffalo.” Today, you could probably find many “cyber” words and “bro” words. How much longer will these combinations be in use?
Looking at online dictionaries, you can see plenty of selection going on, but it’s hard to grasp the principles that are guiding it. Take “groyper,” a name for followers of Nick Fuentes, the white-nationalist Svengali. (“Svengali” is in the O.E.D. and Merriam-Webster, but not in Cambridge.) “Groyper” has popped up a lot recently, because Fuentes was in the news. But the word is reportedly eight years old—and it has still not made it into the online O.E.D., Merriam-Webster, or Cambridge dictionaries.
It does have an entry in Wikipedia, whose policy of giving entries to everything helps it keep ahead of the dictionaries. It can also operate quickly because it’s crowdsourced. It does not employ experts. Having found the definition for “groyper” somewhere, you might care to know how to spell it. In Wikipedia, the word is capped as a proper noun, but the Washington Post lowercases it in most uses. Normally, you’d look to a dictionary to tell you which is correct, but, since most popular online dictionaries do not recognize “groyper” as a word, this can’t be done. Welcome to the desert of the virtual.
On the other hand, the free Merriam-Webster online does list “cheugy,” a word meaning uncool, used especially as a put-down of trends associated with millennials. It is possibly related to the excellent Australian word “daggy,” but the coinage is credited to one Gaby Rasson, who is supposed to have used it with her friends at Beverly Hills High School in 2013. Not exactly Dr. Johnson territory. “Cheugy” has no etymology. It’s a nonsense word. Rasson said it just sounded right. “Cheugy” is pretty niche. It’s missing from Cambridge, the O.E.D., and even the American Heritage Dictionary, and it seems to have lapsed into disuse. It is also missing from the latest print edition of Merriam-Webster—the twelfth, which was released in November—and will presumably proceed to disappear down a lexical memory hole.
It’s not really “hard to grasp the principles” — a word has to be used a lot and exhibit staying power to be considered. Take “groyper” indeed: “the word is reportedly eight years old—and it has still not made it into the online O.E.D., Merriam-Webster, or Cambridge dictionaries.” Well, yeah, it’s only eight years old! If you want to know what flash-in-the-pan words like that mean (and I’ll bet cash money that one will be forgotten in another eight years), that’s what Google is for. He goes on to ramble about scientific and medical terms, product names, and the like, but all he does is basically say “dictionary A has word X, while dictionary B doesn’t.” So what? There is no theoretical discussion, nothing that would clarify your thinking about the topic. (Oh, and “Washington Post” is plain wrong — if you’re going to italicize the names of newspapers it has to be Washington Post.) And check out this paragraph:
Seventy-five per cent of English speakers speak it as a second language. They are likely to mix languages, even in the same sentence, or to speak a hybrid dialect. What about Spanglish? Or Ebonics, a.k.a. African American Vernacular English? Is that a separate language? How many Yiddish terms are in the English lexicon? Cambridge does not recognize “mishegoss,” which seems like an oversight. It does list “schmo” and “schmuck,” but gives them the same definition: “a stupid or silly person.” Those words are not synonyms. We can empathize with schmoes but never schmucks.
The last point is a good one, but he doesn’t bother to explain the difference between the two words; other than that, it’s just a salad of random thoughts. And this paragraph, the penultimate, really angered me:
Dictionaries rely on the belief that the word is the basic unit of linguistic meaning. It is not. The basic unit of meaning is the sentence, or, sometimes, especially in speech, the phrase. You can memorize vocabulary, but if you can’t make a phrase you can’t speak the language. This is not simply a matter of grammar, of syntax and morphology. It’s ultimately a matter of cultural literacy. The dictionary is like the periodic table: it can tell you what the elements are, but not how to combine them. Words take a lot of their semantic coloration from the words around them.
Dictionaries “rely on” no such belief; you just made that up! And who are you to say what the “basic unit of meaning” is? Is you a linguist? No! You is a pontificator! Once again, I am depressed by how eager people are to expound on language as though anyone who can talk knows all they need to know. Get a grip, people! Language is a subject just like physics, and you’d better learn something about it before you ascend the podium!
I assume by lame he means that “they” doesn’t work well for many speakers because it has a different meaning that many of us find fairly central to our use of language, and that the distinction that is the point of the existing usage (plurality) is lost with the new usage.
I said this once here, but I made the mistake of saying it didn’t feel “natural”, which must have sounded like an uglier argument about gender than I was trying to make.
To overcome the lost plurality issue, I tried out singular they a few times (“they is” / “they walks”) with friends of my kids, (that being the context where it sometimes comes up) but I end up sounding like either a goofy white person failing to speak convincing AAVE; or like Gollum.
I would favor a resurgence of “one” as a one-time singular program that is now rare enough that using it wouldn’t blur any useful, current meanings, but that seems unlikely to happen.
I’m sort of resigned to “they” but agree with Menand that it’s lame.
That’s because you’re not used to it. Do you find singular “you” lame? No? That’s because you’re used to it. Once again I insist that it’s fine, indeed inevitable, for us all to have our personal reactions to words and usages, but that’s all they are — personal reactions. They are not objective judgments, and it is a serious mistake to act as if they are.
On “Washington Post”: certainly you’re right and he is not for present-day conventions. However, wasn’t that a more common convention in the past, when people would refer to it as “the Post”, and likewise to the NYT as “the Times”, etc., with the city added only as necessary for dismbiguation? Exceptionally, “The London Times” seems not totally objectionable even today.
I will be charitable and not be mean about
Ooh! Ooh! Can I be mean about it? Somebody should.
[The Wikipedia thing alone is quite enough to justify the copious application of meanness.]
The point is that the name of the paper is The Washington Post (website), while the name of the London paper is The Times. It is therefore incorrect to omit the “Washington” in the first case, as it is incorrect to include the “London” in the second. Sure, you can casually refer to “the Post,” but if you’re including the city in the name both parts have to be ital.
Can I be mean about it?
You can indeed!
Sure.
But it is absolutely objective to state that the preponderance of mere personal reactions is how language usages are settled. It’s a more serious mistake to pretend they don’t matter.
You didn’t even seem to recognize a mere personal reaction so common that Menand mentioned it and his editors saw no reason to clarify it. While I do use “they” when I find the need, I think it is less likely to reach normative use because it contradicts a core part of how many people employ the word.
And something like 10% of the country does reject the loss of the 2nd sing./pl. distinction, so they replace it. (though still another group uses the replacement term as a blanket term.)
You didn’t even seem to recognize a mere personal reaction so common that Menand mentioned it and his editors saw no reason to clarify it. While I do use “they” when I find the need, I think it is less likely to reach normative use because it contradicts a core part of how many people employ the word.
Of course I recognize it; it’s inevitable. I simply discount it, because in the end it won’t matter, any more than the equally natural resistance to pretty much every language change — people will get used to it and move on. I don’t mind singular “they,” but I hate counter-to-fact “may have” with a passion. So what? Nobody cares, and my hatred will change nothing.
Singular they has been perfectly grammatical for centuries. All that’s changed is that there are more good reasons to use it nowadays.
Being Old, I find that in several syntactic contexts this more frequent usage is not something that comes completely naturally to me. So I’ve been practicing to get better at it. And I’m succeeding!
Ambiguity? Pfui. I do not grammaticalise any singular/plural distinction in the second person when speaking English and the sky has not yet fallen in. Moreover, so extensive is my vocabulary that I find I can actually disambiguate utterances when necessary by adding More Words. (I wonder if I could monetise my advanced disambiguation techniques on Youtube?)
“Singular they” covers a variety of uses in different situations, some of which are indeed extremely “natural” (i.e. all but the most prescriptivist Anglophones will sometimes use them unselfconsciously if their superego is not actively prescriptivizing) and others of which are more novel and more awkward-seeming to many (although unlike hat I’m neutral about which way the arrow of causation points). A good dictionary should distinguish among these.
I wonder if by “lame” Menand is expressing disappointment that some more novel option like xe/xem/xyr is not sweeping the field?
They does suffer a deficit that you doesn’t, which is the lack of known conventions for re-establishing number akin to you guys or y’all (excepting perhaps them lot for right pondians). A fully general third-person pronoun is unlikely to last as such for long, so taking one on is basically waiting (or hoping) for another shoe to drop.
There’s also a bit of a bait-and-switch with they, because activists will argue from the immemorial use of it for indefinite persons (which wasn’t contingent on unknowability of gender, pairing naturally with antecedents like somebody even where only one gender was possible) and treat the innovative, definite uses as if they’re one and the same: people know intuitively that there’s a distinction but lack the grammatical concepts to explain it, which tends to leave them feeling vaguely confused and can draw them into overbroad denunciations of singular they as a whole. In my experience even those who make an effort to follow the more deliberate uses of they manage it only with, well, deliberate effort, and tend to backslide as soon as they let their guard down.
I wonder if by “lame” Menand is expressing disappointment that some more novel option like xe/xem/xyr is not sweeping the field?
I suspect that that is indeed his “point.” Of course, the “lameness” of which he complains is, in fact, naturalness, which is the exact reason why “singular they” has succeeded at the expense of doomed-from-the-outset inventions like “xe.” He’s either too dense to understand this, or simply wanted to preen, as with his halfwitted dissing of Wikipedia, or his “edgy” nonsense about expressions like “anti-racism” being “radioactive.” What a prannock.
There’s also a bit of a bait-and-switch with they, because activists will argue from the immemorial use of it for indefinite persons (which wasn’t contingent on unknowability of gender, pairing naturally with antecedents like somebody even where only one gender was possible) and treat the innovative, definite uses as if they’re one and the same
Good point. I think the main awkwardness comes from using singular “they” anaphorically to refer to a definite specific antecedent, as you imply, and I think you’re quite right that this is an actual innovation. I think “bait and switch” is not an unfair characterisation of the Argument from Shakespeare version that people put forward.
So my “all that’s changed is that there are more good reasons to use it nowadays” was wrong.
I’d still say it’s a pretty natural extension of usage, though.
In my experience even those who make an effort to follow the more deliberate uses of they manage it only with, well, deliberate effort, and tend to backslide as soon as they let their guard down.
My experience is more complicated. In the case of one of my younger relatives, their father does “backslide” sometimes, but their mother never does. My daughter invariably uses “they/them/their” for one of her close friends: I’ve never once heard her “backslide.”
I wasn’t actually joking when I said I “practice” these things. As with other habits, those who claim that some linguistic habit is immutable often turn out to have ulterior motives (not always conscious) for claiming that real change is just not possible.
Ignorant or just not paying attention, either way Menand demonstrated in the Toni Morrison’s Genius Affair of 2003 that he couldn’t admit to his own mistakes when he was called on them, so I don’t trust him much on this topic.
That said, Menand could have done a lot worse here; at least he seems to regard Dwight Macdonald from a distance, as a voice from the past, not expected to be recognized as infallible today.
I’d still say it’s a pretty natural extension of usage, though.
Yes, and if it doesn’t last and people devise another solution, good for them! Let a thousand pronouns bloom!
That said, Menand could have done a lot worse here
My reaction as well. I hope no one mistakes my grumpiness for wholesale condemnation. I just enjoy being grumpy! (Also, Menand is, like, six months younger than I am, so I won’t let him get away with playing the old-fart card.)
Grammatical errors get squiggly lines of different colors — and not all writing software has grammar checks.
Nowadays, one can ask an LLM to check one’s writing, and it will note issues with grammar and punctuation. But I wouldn’t trust it
Trying to imagine a rest room where the owners can declare some graffiti to be semi-protected. And will erase nonsense and false claims, and scrawl [citation needed] next to dubious ones, and otherwise demand sources of claims.
Winces in “I’ve probably read too much legalese” — “slander” is spoken, “libel” is written, and “defamation” covers all possibilities.
Eh, I’d guess “chewy+oogy”
I posted Rosten’s three distinct definitions of “shmuck” from The Joys of Yiddish, of which #2 certainly seems to me to be roughly equivalent to “schmo”, while Menand seems to think that only #3 exists (besides #1), and perhaps, is the only meaning that ever existed (the forgotten meaning of schmuck?).
The Times, the London one, may have presented itself as THE Times, and the Washington Post, in its better days at least used to allow it was not the only Post, and though the New York Times lately sometimes refers to itself as the Times, which for internal reference shorthand I can abide, the NYT photographers and editors being let loose to present vibe (?) news photos without identifying pertinent individuals nor dates seems relatively closer to signs of the apocalypse.
Per its inventor, cheugy has no etymology: “There was a missing word that was on the edge of my tongue and nothing to describe it and ‘cheugy’ came to me. How it sounded fit the meaning.”
(According to the article, “Things that are decidedly un-cheugy, according to its progenitors: thrifting, making your own clothes, handmade products, Levi’s jeans, Birkenstocks [!], home decor not found at Target.” Are Kids Today turning into… hippies? That your punk parents should have lived to see this.)
There have been several occasions in the recent past when I’ve had to explain to non-native English speaker colleagues why the word “they” appears in this context that they never studied. This includes young colleagues.
Yes, singular “they” was there hundreds of years ago, in Chaucer for example, but it wasn’t ever a common usage. For the last several hundred years, English, like many other Indo-European languages, has used masculine forms as defaults for mixed or unknown groups, with no evidence of widespread confusion or exclusion in comprehension.
So it’s lame in the sense of being a manufactured language innovation that doesn’t improve or accomplish anything. Rather, it introduces an ambiguity regarding plurality that wasn’t there before.
So it’s lame in the sense of being a manufactured language innovation that doesn’t improve or accomplish anything.
It replaces the earlier “he or she” which was much worse.
Has Menand not hear of ‘autocorrupt’?, which turns correct spellings into misspellings, especially when coupled with nervous cluelessness about (say) its vs it’s.
They does suffer a deficit that you doesn’t, which is the lack of known conventions for re-establishing number akin to you guys or y’all …
Could they’all become a thing? I suppose risk of confusion with they’ll. them’all?
For the last several hundred years, English, …, has used masculine forms as defaults for mixed or unknown groups,
Hmm. I hear ‘the customer … she …’ when talking about groceries; ‘the customer … he …’ when talking about hardware.
For the last several hundred years, English, like many other Indo-European languages, has used masculine forms as defaults for mixed or unknown groups, with no evidence of widespread confusion or exclusion in comprehension.
You might want to survey some women about that.
For the last several hundred years, English, …, has used masculine forms as defaults for mixed or unknown groups,
I oppose this manufactured language innovation on the grounds that it introduces an ambiguity between “human male” and “human being” that was previously absent.* The ambiguity can only be resolved by awkward and ugly periphrases: how much better not to introduce it in the first place!
* In KONGO (the font of all languages) this unfortunate confusion does not arise.
There’s a lot to be said for the Ghanaian English solution: using “he” and “she” in free variation, regardless of biological sex. No “they” number-awkwardness! No outlandish neologisms! What’s not to like?
Re “devise another solution,” the “singular they” solution is in at least some degree of use as a “solution” to multiple and distinct “problems,” and while it is perfectly understandable why it might plausibly be extended from one to the next there may also be forces pushing in the other direction toward (at least implicitly in the practice of a speech community, not necessarily always via self-conscious reformers/advocates) having different solutions for different problems to avoid certain potential ambiguities, not to mention possible disagreements about whether particular situations are indeed problems in need of a solution in the first place.
Why, there may still be some place even for the deprecated-by-hat “he or she.” Consider, by way of imperfect parallel, how sometimes people say “sons [and/or] daughters” and other times (or maybe other people trying to say more or less the same thing) “children,” rather than universally substituting the latter for the former. The former involves more syllables but some find it more suitable in some contexts, so we let them bloom such flowers as they will.
Perhaps another solution might be to keep the gender distinction, but to make it speaker-oriented, so that a speaker who indentified as female would refer to all singular human beings as “she”, a presenting-as-male speaker would use “he” throughout, and anyone who couldn’t be bothered with all that would just use “they.”
Damn, now I’m wondering if there really is a language like that somewhere …
I am in the process of rewatching Inspector Morse saga and in one of the episodes (Last bus to Woodstock something like that) there is an elderly woman who is a very enthusiastic witness but cannot identify a person of interest as a man or a woman (dark, rain, raincoat, unisex clothing…). And she (yes, her, woman) settles on “it”, but it’s a whimsical choice.
other than that, it’s just a salad of random thoughts
Not quite. What Menand is grasping toward is a definition of Standard English. A language model that deliberately excludes some words and word variants of some speech communities. This is a usual second prong to the “word has to be used a lot and exhibit staying” desideratum. It should be used widely or at least widely enough.
The Talodi Kordofanian language Lumun has an elaborate system of noun classes marked by singular-plural prefix pairs, much like Bantu. Greenberg (bless his cotton socks) held that this feature of (some) Kordofanian languages, by itself, proved that the Kordofanian languages were in fact genetically related to Bantu, despite the total absence of lexical correspondences.
And I have to say that although the books dutifully line up Kordofanian noun class prefixes with Bantu ones and assert that they are cognate, a certain degree of lively faith is needed in order to actually perceive the cognacy …
I bring up this sad tale because the Lumun “human” class goes like this:
pʊl “person”, ʊl “people”
pamɪ́t “traditional healer”, amɪ́t “traditional healers”
However, in the light of this discussion, I now realise that the Lumun singular-human p- must be cognate with proto-Bantu plural-human *ba-. It is evident that proto-Niger-Kordofanian had a masculine-feminine distinction, just like respectable European languages do, but in an excess of wokery the original male/female noun class prefixes were replaced by originally-plural *ba- > p- in Kordofanian.
There is clearly a lesson for English speakers here. Excessive wokery leads to being displaced to remote mountainous areas in Sudan.
using “he” and “she” in free variation, regardless of biological sex
I had wondered for a while how non-binary people deal with Hebrew, wherein gender is marked on pronouns (third and second persons) but also verbs, nouns, and adjectives, which makes it hard indeed to avoid, and where a new gender would require extensive reconstruction of the grammar. And then I saw an article about someone non-binary, in which the author went and alternated the gender markers between male and female wherever they occurred. It was a bit vertiginous, but it worked. I don’t know how common that is, or what others do.
Back in the 7th century, Khan Asparukh and his Bulgar warriors swept southwest from the steppes into Moesia and defeated the troops of Constantine IV, speaking to each other in their extremely woke Turkic language that had been carefully scrubbed clean of any gendered pronouns. Alas, they settled down, diluted their wokeness, and were eventually beguiled by the gendered pronouns of the unenlightened Slavs they had subjugated. (The subsequently-invading Magyars did better in this regard.)
> what on earth does he mean by “which seems kind of lame”?
Also
> Of course I recognize it
Whatever
> it’s lame in the sense of being a manufactured language innovation that doesn’t improve or accomplish anything.
I don’t believe that nor does Menand. I use it because it is accomplishing something, allowing people not to be forced to pick a gendered pronoun. But I don’t think it’s a great outcome. I tend to agree that if it does catch on, we will likely see the development of a disambuguator along the lines of y’all.
it’s striking to me, reading this thread, just how much all of the griping about “they” as an ungendered singular pronoun that i’ve ever heard, including here, seems to go elaborately out of its way to ignore the basic prescriptivist principle of attending to actual people actually speaking in actual ordinary situations. in a quarter-century or so* of very regular use (and attention to others’ use) in contexts ranging from neighborhood dive bars to academic conferences** to union meetings to a right-wing gala dinner at the Pierre***, there have been vanishingly few times that any of the straw-man confusions or uncertainties that are so constantly trotted out**** have made any kind of appearance. these aren’t actual confusions or problems that actually happen, any more than any of the problems with “Ms” that william safire and his ilk trotted out were. they’re purely ideological objections, framed for palatability.
.
the ghanaian solution DE proposes would be lovely! but for it to work, we need first to actually get rid of the social system of gender, so that the people being referred to won’t have reason to care about which category they’re being put in.
(or we could just not structure grammatical elements based on social hierarchies, which english does a pretty decent job of aside from its singular personal pronouns)
.
* i’m hedging towards the conservative side, since my circles tended to lean towards other options until a ways into the 00s.
** by far the most hostile space, precisely because of that industry’s willingness to indulge straw men, even when the straw men are being used exclusively to apply improbable quantities of tar and feathers to the specific people indulging them.
*** we got thrown out (not a surprise); the lifetime ban on returning doesn’t seem to have stuck.
**** they’re always the same ones, too, from a very small repertoire. if i were making up straw men, i’d at least want them to be new and exciting.
Reconsidering, I actually think “you guys” is the more common 2nd s./pl. disambiguator, it’s never used in a reambiguating way (the way y’all now needs “all o’ y’all” in some dialects), and interestingly, no one seems to notice that it’s another instance of male synecdoche.
Who knows what Menand is really banging on about, but on going back to the block quotes hat provides to see what exactly he had said other than “lame,” I was struck by the phrase “the crusade to come up with a gender-neutral* third-person-singular pronoun,” because I was struck by the notion that in his rather snarky register “crusade” was likely to be an inherently pejorative label. Although it is I suppose perfectly possible to be in favor of the wide availability of a gender-neutral third-person-singular pronoun while thinking that a “crusade” is a suboptimal or counterproductive way to get there?
*Possibly a more ambiguous specification that often thought? Maybe perfectly synonymous with rozele’s “ungendered” or maybe not?
> these aren’t actual confusions or problems that actually happen, any more than any of the problems with “Ms” that william safire and his ilk trotted out were.
Hey cool, show me where Safire said he was happy to allow the need for something like Ms and did use it, but wished there was another solution. I think you’re painting with too broad a brush.
And if there aren’t actual confusions in blending sing and pl why does English keep spinning up new pronouns like y’all, youse and you guys, despite the fact that the antecedent of a 2nd person pronoun is usually being spoken to, so the need for disambiguation is much lighter?
@Ryan: I’m not sure it’s exactly a male synecdoche. It’s just an interesting fact about words like “guy(s)” or “dude” that at present they usually seem to specify gender when used in third-party reference but are magnificently indifferent to gender when used in direct vocative address, at least in certain contexts. A good dictionary should explain this!
My wife is sometimes addressed with vocative “bro” by one of our sons, but that may still be too novel a use for the dictionaries. But maybe in five years hat will be telling everyone they don’t like it just because they’re not used to it and Change Is Inevitable?
Ryan says no one seems to notice that it’s another instance of male synecdoche.
In my circles they do, and have tedious arguments about it or just switch to “y’all”.
Yeah, I’ve been watching arguments go back and forth over whether “guys” does or should include girls for most of my life, since at least the 1980s. Search “you guys” site:languagehat.com, you’ll find discussions about that from the early days and the last few years.
It seems to have been overlooked that Ryan’s idea of “singular they“, as given in the very first comment, involves usages like “they is” / “they walks”. I would be surprised if that’s what other commenters mean by it, so there may be crossed wires in this discussion.
@jwb
Would your wife prefer “Sis”? I think not.
@Carlos:
Singular-reference “they” takes plural agreement on verbs, just like that regrettable manufactured language innovation, singular-reference “you.” The trick is not to confuse form and function.
Mooré does the honorific-plural thing for both second and third person, which always strikes me as overdoing it somehow. So you get e.g.
La nebã yaala bãmba.
and people.the mock them
“And the people mocked him [Jesus.]”
The resulting ambiguity has not, so far, led to the collapse of the Mooré language into outright incomprehensibility.
Fatsis quotes a Britannica editor comparing Wikipedia, disparagingly, to a public rest room
1. The earliest source I found for this is a Time magazine article— “An Encyclopaedia Britannica editor once compared Wikipedia to a public toilet seat because you don’t know who used it last”—published in May 2005. I hope that Fatsis, unlike Menand, makes clear that the quote is at least 20 years old, from when Wikipedia was in its infancy.
2. Do you really need that “disparagingly”? Even if you don’t observe the compare-to vs compare-with distinction, it’s obviously not a compliment. Maybe it’s too-subtle irony.
[ETA- apparently it was Robert McHenry in 2004, six years after he left Britannica. ]
“Dictionaries rely on the belief that the word is the basic unit of linguistic meaning. It is not.”
The word, or more accurately the morpheme, is indeed the basic unit of linguistic meaning. A sentence is not a basic unit. Sentences derive their meaning from the combination of words, grammar, syntax, and context.
(Word, like Potter Stewart’s pornography, is a tricky thing to define and is unreliable as a category. Dictionaries tend to also include morphemes that are not words as such, like affixes, combining forms, and set phrases.)
the author went and alternated the gender markers between male and female wherever they occurred
Stephen Jacobson does something rather like this in his teaching grammar of Central Alaskan Yup’ik (which has no gender at all, either “natural” or grammatical): when the reference is to people, he uses “he” or “she” in the English glosses, alternating by chapter.
for it to work, we need first to actually get rid of the social system of gender, so that the people being referred to won’t have reason to care about which category they’re being put in
I think this is the real issue. Language reflects culture: nobody actually decreed in the seventeenth century that “you” would henceforth oust “thou”: the change came about because of changes in society. Singular “they” will get established as an unremarkable feature of English once the people who think people who don’t want to be referred to by a gender-imposing pronoun should just suck it up are all dead.
However, it works in Ghana, not because Ghana is a feminist paradise, but because not one of the fifty-odd indigenous languages grammaticalises biological sex. It’s really just like the problem Russians have with using articles: it’s hard to internalise a distinction which is just completely lacking in your L1. The incomer languages, English and Hausa, have been adjusted to fit the norm.
The free-variation he/she thing in Ghanaian English is odd, though. Ghanaian Hausa just generalises the original masculine forms, so you say e.g. Ka zi ko? “Do you understand?” to a woman instead of “proper” Hausa Kin ji ko? The English-lexifier creoles do that too: there’s no gender at all, but the actual third-person pronoun forms go back to English “he/him”: A si am “I saw him/her/it.”
Dunno what happens in Burkina Faso French, now I think of it. All the people I spoke French to in Burkina seemed to use “elle” just like Parisians; but that may reflect the fact that the linguistic ideologies associated with French and English in West Africa are rather different. And I met far fewer French speakers in Burkina (outside Ouagadougou) than English speakers in Ghana: the colonial language hasn’t percolated down the socioeconomic hierarchy as far, or been so indigenised.
My wife is sometimes addressed with vocative “bro” by one of our sons
“bra(h)” would work better, IMO
To be fair to Menand, the weird italic choice on Washington Post was probably a fiat from The New Yorker’s quirky style editor.
Reminds me of buying from a bookstore a new hardback of The Island of the Day Before, with its unresolved mysteries. Turned out, the book contained fingerprints of a previous reader who was eating strawberry ice cream. But, before the book went to the Salvation Army, I figured that the fingerprints were not the fault of Eco.
the basic prescriptivist principle of attending to actual people actually speaking in actual ordinary situations.
Say what? That’s not any prescriptivist principle I’ve ever noticed; in fact, it reeks of descriptivism.
I was struck by the phrase “the crusade to come up with a gender-neutral* third-person-singular pronoun,” because I was struck by the notion that in his rather snarky register “crusade” was likely to be an inherently pejorative label.
Oh, it definitely is, and I should have pointed that out. Why are people so hostile to that idea? (I know, I know, sexism. It’s comparable to the indignant responses people used to have to the idea of gay marriage — or indeed of gay hand-holding in public — indignation unsupported by any actual arguments other than that if allowed to flourish unchecked it would somehow destroy “normal” marriage.)
@David Eddyshaw:
Quite, but maybe you meant to address Ryan, who wrote the comment I referenced?
I was taking your cue not to overlook it.
Eighteenth-century English distinguished “you was” (singular) from “you were” (plural), but Victorian prescriptivists spoiled this excellent distinction.
It is excellent, and I’m glad to be reminded of it.
A solution to part of the problem is to use plural nouns, for example, “All candidates must submit their applications by 31 December 2026” instead of “Each candidate must submit her or his application by 31 December 2026.
It’s hard for me to understand why a word is not “the basic unit” of meaning.
Tree! Statue! Elephant!
Having said that, he follows with: no, “without sentences you can’t speak the language”.
But “can you speak the language? ” is a different question than “what is the basic unit of meaning?” Isn’t it?
Re the pejorativeness of “crusade” noted above, that would be a good lexicographic project for someone to dive into the corpora and trace when and how “crusade” and related words like “crusading” and “crusader” (all as used by extension to refer to contemporary phenomena rather than the 11th or 12th century) came to be felt as inherently pejorative/snarky/ironic for many (maybe not all) AmEng speakers. I think it’s a development of the last several decades – back in the Seventies a reference by a perfectly secular writer in a perfectly secular context to e.g. Woodward & Bernstein as “crusading journalists” would not, I think, have been understood as presumptively snarky or ironic. And indeed it was in the Seventies that former Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker published in his old age a three-volume autobiography in which the period leading up to him first becoming PM is “The Crusading Years,” followed by first “The Years of Achievement” and then “The Tumultuous Years.”
@rozele: Once in a while I run into a problem with “they” when I’m talking about a group of people and a person of unknown gender or a non-binary person, in which case “they” is ambiguous. There wouldn’t be a problem if I used “he or she” or an invented pronoun like ey/em/eir (my favorite), but I go along with almost everybody else and with explicit prescriptions and use “they”. Next time it happens, I’ll try to remember to post it here. However, for me the man is not made of straw.
By the way, this answer by Erik Painter at Quora confirms something I’ve been told: that some older Navajos also use the Ghanaian pronoun solution when speaking English.
There are two rather different problems with taking “word” as the basic unit of meaning.*
One is that it is difficult to come up with a cross-linguistic definition of “word.” Martin Haspelmath has a go here:
https://www.academia.edu/91869514/Defining_the_word
In individual languages, there are actually problems even with Haspelmath’s solution, because both what counts as a “compound”, and the distinction between affixes and clitics, get very slippery once you start looking at the details.
https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/ZPCliticsInfl.pdf
The other is that words can have very different meanings in different constructions. In English, for example, there is really no way of getting the meaning of “put up with” from the meanings of “put”, “up” and “with”, even though all three are surely “words.”
None of this means that “word” is not a vital concept in the expression of meaning: as Haspelmath points out, realistically you end up having to use the term in practice, no matter how problematic it can be. But the calling a word the “basic unit of meaning” is at best an approximation.
What, exactly, is the meaning of the word “of” in English? Descriptions of its use in context, as supplied by good dictionaries, do not actually suffice to give “of” a meaning, at least in the sense that “cat” (sometimes) “means” an individual specimen of a carnivore of the genus Felis.
My own feeling is that if there were only One True Path here it would be
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar
which links meaning and form all the way down, including words, which are constructions too in this framework.
* There is an even more radical difficulty in that the “picture” theory of meaning doesn’t work, so even content words like “cat” don’t simply connect unproblematically to something in the extralinguistic world. But that’s a whole other can of Wittgensteinian worms.
Eighteenth-century English distinguished “you was” (singular) from “you were” (plural), but Victorian prescriptivists spoiled this excellent distinction.
I’d think the culprits were earlier prescriptivists. I just confirmed a vague memory of Sense and Sensibility that only the Misses Steele say “you was”, and they also say “an’t”.
A whole ‘nother ‘stein of worms.
Indeed.
here is McHenry’s November 2004 hitpiece, as cited by Wikipedia’s own article “Reliability of Wikipedia”. The relevant quote is at the very end:
@F: I too am in contact with circles that deprecate “you guys” including non-males, though not enough to see discussions about it. The friend who I heard that from said “y’all” was recommended. I go with “you folks” when the unfortunate disappearance of “thou” requires some disambiguation, since being a white northerner, I don’t want to say “y’all” despite the recommendation. That preference helps me sympathize with people who don’t want to stress “insurance” on the second syllable, for example, since they’re not part of the groups that do that.
A difficulty I’ve had in trying to do comparative Oti-Volta work is that some of the dictionaries are in French and some in English, and most of the dictionaries just provide glosses on individual words for most lexemes, without giving examples. So, in deciding whether words are cognates, you have to decide whether a French word corresponds to an English word.
With nouns, this is (mostly) fairly unproblematic, but the semantic range of many common French verbs does not match that of any single English verb at all: the mismatch is great enough to be a genuine problem sometimes in deciding whether lexemes are cognates. It doesn’t help, of course, that many Oti-Volta verbs have semantic ranges that do not closely match those of any verb in either French or English.
Niggli’s Mooré dictionary has glosses in both French and English, but precisely because that dictionary actually is pretty good, and gives many example sentences, you quickly find that a surprising number of the English glosses are actually wrong, and have just been mechanically translated from the French ones without taking enough account of the context.
Cork English has retained ye and extended it from accusative to nominative, so that you is singular only. An advantage over other second-person-plural pronoun options is the concomitant possessive yeer, IMO more elegant that y’all’s or the like.
I like that.
From wiktionary:
Usage notes
Ye was originally used only for the nominative case (as the subject), and only for the second-person plural. Later, ye was used as a subject or an object, either singular or plural, which is the way that you is used today. In modern Hiberno-English usage, ye is used as a subject or an object in the plural, to contrast with you (singular).
Antiently, nominative-plural “ye” could also be used vocatively, of course. Come, Ye Thankful People, Come. Come, Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy. Etc.
basic unit of meaning
Language is not physics and it doesn’t have to have a unit for something. But tellingly, in practice, dictionaries are not dictionaries of words but of “units of meaning”. If there is a prefix or a suffix with reasonably well-defined meaning it deserves a place in a dictionary alongside abbreviations, idioms and word compounds with distinct meanings. It’s just happens to be that the vast majority of these “units of meaning” are some basic forms of words in English and many other languages.
Yes, I think Menand is basically strawmanning in this particular criticism of dictionaries. You can’t accurately deduce the meaning of a sentence simply by looking up all the words in a dictionary, but nobody except very linguistically-unsophisticated people actually supposes that you can: that isn’t what dictionaries are for.
There’s an interesting real linguistic question at the back of this: how far languages even can be separated into morphosyntax and lexicon. Ultimately, the answer is that they can’t, and any boundary you pick will turn out to be extremely fuzzy and porous, but you can get quite a long way nevertheless by glossing over this awkward fact and still produce extremely useful reference works, especially if you exhibit lots of examples of words used in different contexts rather than falling into the trap of trying to encapsulate the “meaning” of a word completely in a few short phrases. Good dictionaries do exactly that: that’s what distinguishes them from mere glossaries or vocabularies.
This works better in some languages than others, too: and English has tens of thousands of words whose meaning is more or less unaffected by context, and lend themselves readily to the dictionary approach. In fact, the less common the word, the more likely this is, so dictionaries are a great resource for L1 speakers flummoxed by an unfamiliar word.
On the other hand, it’s deeply misguided to consult a dictionary for a word like “of” or “if” or “the” or “they” or “be” or “have”, even though the big dictionaries feel obliged to have a stab at them. And nobody can learn a foreign language just from a dictionary: but then, who would be so silly as to try? That’s not the purpose of a dictionary.
Shimon Iakerson says that when he wanted to learn Ivrit in Leningrad ca. 1970, he had only Hebrew-Russian dictionary to work with and he proceeded to learn 40,000 words of Modern Hebrew (the dictionary itself claims that it has 28,000 words. Whatever, I guess). He later found some people to talk to and some grammar, but the dictionary was his primary source of information.
He also tells an amusing story, that when visiting Israel for the first time (late 1980s) he gave a lecture in Hebrew (he is an expert on Hebrew incunabula), but because his studies were so haphazard, he gave his lecture in a mixture of Biblical, Medieval and Modern Hebrew.
Well, if a dictionary is all you’ve got, sure …
I myself have spent many an hour ploughing through dictionaries of Oti-Volta languages to collect information about derivational morphology (and in the case of verbs, even flexional morphology) – while cursing the fact that I was forced to do so because there were no adequate grammars available.
This happens quite a lot with African languages. The speakers themselves tend to be uninterested in grammars of their languages (not unnaturally), but keen on dictionaries, while the organisations sending the linguists tend to want to see Bible translations as the outcome, not grammars. Any published linguistic papers tend to be about phonology or discourse-level phenomena, with nothing in the middle, or (even now) written mainly to demonstrate the author’s Chomskyan street cred, or to illustrate some other temporarily trendy general linguistic topic.
Of the thirty or so Oti-Volta languages, only about half a dozen have anything even approaching an adequate grammatical description out there, but there are Bible translations for at least twice as many, and about as many dictionaries. Three of these dictionaries are pretty good, in the sense I was talking about before. (Though I admire those who produce even less-stellar dictionaries: lexicography is definitely not part of my own skillset, and I could never achieve what they have done.)
As Carlos pointed out, no one uses anything but “they are,” “they walk” for singular they. I did, however, have a nonbinary friend tell me they prefer “themselves” as the reflexive because “themself isn’t a word,” and that sits wrong with me. I held my tongue, but if they’re going to be a rank prescriptivist about “themself,” surely I’m entitled to a little etymological fallacy, as a treat?
I am late to this party, but I have a few points to add:
(1) Tell me again about New Yorker’s awesome fact-checking. I’ll try not to laugh.
(2) Any critique of singular “they” that does not include a discussion of singular “you” is at best unserious. You can make the argument that this thing that happened before and the world still spun on its axis is not really the same as this thing you are complaining about, but you have to make the argument. Otherwise the most generous conclusion is that you don’t know about this other thing, which is to say that you are grossly unqualified to make a a serious argument on the subject.
(3) Not discussed in the comments, but I think a big deal is the point about “ain’t” and Webster’s Third. This was from the start a ridiculous argument, made only by people too lazy or stupid to check Webster’s Second, or affirmatively disingenuous. This has been pointed out many times in the decades that followed. Dredging it up in The Year of Our Lord 2025 once again results in the generous interpretation being ignorance of the subject matter one is discussing with a tone of authority.
Agreed on all points.
To return to another newish word mentioned in the OP, “cheugy” (said to have been coined in 2013) sounds remarkably similar to the non-pejorative https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/choogle, usually claimed to have been coined in the 1960’s. I guess the different orthographic representations of the GOOSE vowel are consistent with the idea that this is happenstance and they are not actually etymologically related?
That and the fact that there is no semantic connection.
The sufficiently imaginative etymologist can always propose a semantic connection!
Indeed. The words must have been associated in Celtic mythology.
Cheugus a non cheugendo.
Something many people do and/or should run away from screaming. Feels normal to me.
I hadn’t encountered that before and found it hilarious. Google directed me to Quora:
Se non è vero…
Depends on the field, I suppose. The biggest one I go to annually has for a few years required people to wear their 3sg pronouns on their nametags.
Perhaps not, because such terms of address have a tendency to become expressions of exasperation that are not addressed to anybody. This happened to “old one (m.)” in Vienna – borrowed from dialect into mesolect and routinely spelled oida (lowercase because it’s not a noun anymore).
Aren’t most hobbits supposed to do that, too? 🙂
I have a colleague who goes by that! Ey take eir parrot* with em to conferences. ^_^
* Ellie the Dinosaur (she/her); nametag on the cage
Ey take eir parrot* with em to conferences. ^_^
* Ellie the Dinosaur (she/her); nametag on the cage
“Ey takes” in my C21 English.
May I suggest Meine Name sei Ellie?
Stephen Goranson: “the weird italic choice on Washington Post was probably a fiat from The New Yorker’s quirky style editor.”
This appears to be true; at least, they were completely consistent on “Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe” on the dozen or so pages I checked, even as far back as 1973. (But “Wall Street Journal”, not “Wall Street Journal”.) This is weird and un-CMOS, but it must be on purpose — another of those bits of branding that reminds you that you’re reading The New Yoörker. So it’s not on Menand.
Thanks for that; I like to distribute my imprecations fairly.
/blushes abashedly for having thought “descriptivist” and typed “prescriptivist” while ranting/
/and again for not having caught it before our gracious host/
“Wall Street” is a metonym for the subject matter, not the place of publication; otherwise it would be Avenue of the Americas Journal. One would not write “Financial Times”
Good point. And I deprecate the practice; I don’t mind the diëreses, but “New York Times” is just stupid.
Ah yes, the periodic table. Famously useless for advice on how to combine elements.
(?!??@!??!@#!%#%#?)
I’ll actually have to ask.
Heh. Sure, except der Name (he/him/his), so mein.
I agree; it looks like a desperate excuse for calling The Times “the London Times“.
The New Yorker does in fact write “the London Times” about as often as it writes “the Times of London”.
Sure, except der Name (he/him/his), so mein.
Thanks, I need to check more carefully.
I don’t think they’re necessarily self-consciously aping The (London) Times, but there’s been a boom in recent decades in the U.S. of newspapers (to the extent still alive) eschewing toponyms in their name. I think the usual motivation is “regional” papers that result from consolidation/merger and aren’t “from” any municipality in particular because naming one would make them unattractive to residents of others in the target area. Indeed, the “local” paper where I live in the suburbs north of NYC is the (Nowhere-In-Particular) _Journal-News_, formed in the 1990’s by merging the old _Rockland Journal-News_, whose name indicated it was from the other side of the Hudson, with a bunch of smaller papers under common ownership associated with toponyms on this side of the Hudson. Details here, and note that a bunch of those smaller papers had (like the Journal-News itself) compound names that almost certainly reflected prior mergers, e.g. the Herald Statesman and the Standard-Star.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Journal_News#Mergers
“𝑂𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝐼 𝑖𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑠𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑖𝑡’𝑠 𝑓𝑖𝑛𝑒, 𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒, 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑢𝑠 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑡𝑜 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑑𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑢𝑠𝑎𝑔𝑒𝑠, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡’𝑠 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑎𝑟𝑒 — 𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠. 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑜𝑏𝑗𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑗𝑢𝑑𝑔𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑖𝑡 𝑖𝑠 𝑎 𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝑚𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑎𝑐𝑡 𝑎𝑠 𝑖𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑎𝑟𝑒.”
If you’re referring to the singular “they” used to refer to indefinite antecedents like “anybody” “someone”, then I agree with you. I don’t; however, agree with the gender-neutral use of they, which can only create confusion and lack of clarity, and that’s an objective judgement.
The subsequent sentence demonstrates the use of a gender-neutral third-person pronoun:
𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑙𝑒𝑠 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑐𝑒𝑒𝑑 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒊𝒓 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑡 𝑢𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑙 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒚 𝑑𝑜𝑐𝑢𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑤𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑤𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒚 𝑏𝑒 𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑑.
The sentence is too ambiguous; the ambiguity is caused by the forced use of “they”. For better clarity it requires explicit name changing, role substitution or pronoun reference as in:
“𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑙𝑒𝑠 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑐𝑒𝑒𝑑 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑡 𝑢𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑙 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒚-𝑪𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒍𝒆𝒔-𝒅𝒐𝒄𝒖𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝑖𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑤𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑎𝑔𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑦 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑑.”
But once you have to explain the pronoun inside the sentence, the pronoun has failed.
I’m not resisting change; I’m identifying a syntactic collision. Singular “they” works well in isolation and when no plural actors are present. My example sentence cannot be made clear while retaining “they” without adding explicit nouns.
.
“such terms of address have a tendency…”
@DM, I think you mean things like English “man.” I first came across it when I was 35, a very fluent reader but inexperienced in using English for communication. I was Surprised.
If you do it in German I’m suprised again, and I wonder WHERE do they have this tendency.
1. After a whole thread of y’all, it pleases me see this comment include my most familiar 2nd person explicitly plural option (youse), even though I usually stick to ‘you’.
2. I don’t at all see why the need for disambiguation is in general lighter with the second person. Confusion over whether a person being addressed is the referent or only part of the referent is common enough, and the practical and/or emotional impact of a misunderstanding is probably heavier than for a similar 3rd person mixup.
(There’s also the fact that we’re all used to 3rd person pronouns giving us relevant disambiguation in some situations and not others on a fairly arbitrary basis. The effect of shifting those lines is easily overstated.)
Uh, yes, but if Charles is a “he” and the complainant is also a singular “he”, you have the exact same problem, and yet everybody just lives with it.
In other words, such ambiguity is real; it’s just not bad enough to require a solution in practice.
Yes! Good example!
I don’t; however, agree with the gender-neutral use of they, which can only create confusion and lack of clarity, and that’s an objective judgement.
Nonsense. There’s “confusion and lack of clarity” everywhere if that’s what you’re looking for; humanity specializes in that stuff. Let’s replace your fictional Charles with an actual person:
Is that confused or unclear?
Incidentally, an ironic consequence of this thread is that I have started reading my copy of Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, which my late mother-in-law gave me a couple decades ago. So far I’m greatly enjoying it!
Alphonse and Basil got into a brawl. A police officer, Chuck, came, separated the two and issued them court summons. The judge, Dennis, listened to the depositions.
According to him, he had told him that he had started the fight. He, however, insisted that it was him who had started, and that his statement to him was false. Having heard all testimonies, he decided that his version was true, and imposed a fine on him, while letting him get way with a warning. He thanked him for his services. Both him and him later stated that the whole thing should have been avoided.
Clearly the English gender system is terribly inadequate.
which can only create confusion and lack of clarity, and that’s an objective judgement
German has collapsed into terminal ambiguity on account of using “they” as honorific second person singular. This explains why the German language is now only spoken by the Amish.
Similarly, the cause of the collapse of the Aztec empire in the face of an assault by a relatively tiny band of Spanish brigands was that in Nahuatl clauses with two third-person animate noun core arguments, there is no unambiguous marking of which is the subject and which is the object in either morphology or word order. Obviously the Mexica were doomed as soon as their enemies had a SVO language to call on.
And plural. University professors sometimes resort to the intimate second-person plural pronoun to make sure it’s clear they’re addressing their whole audience, not a single member; everyone else just lives with the ambiguity.
Has anyone suggested a campaign to normalize they is for the ungendered singular?
Why? Do you use you is for a singular second-person referent?
Yuval: “Ah yes, the periodic table. Famously useless for advice on how to combine elements.”
Good one. And if Menand had bothered to think for a few seconds, he might have remembered that a dictionary *does* tell you how words combine — that’s what parts of speech are. If he’d actually known what the periodic table is, he could have made a better analogy, e.g. “The dictionary is like the periodic table: it tells you what the elements are and the basics of how they combine, but not all the possible compounds and all their reactions with each other.”
I do give Menand credit for a strong last line: “If we cannot have one dictionary for everything, then let us have a thousand.” True, and always has been.
Yes, he has the right attitude, which is why his idiotic remarks are so infuriating.
Uh, yes, but if Charles is a “he” and the complainant is also a singular “he”, you have the exact same problem, and yet everybody just lives with it.
But as I mentioned, if instead we had a consensus on a separate ungendered third-person singular pronoun, we wouldn’t have that ambiguity, assuming that in the original sentence Charles is non-binary and a group of people are complaining.
In other words, such ambiguity is real; it’s just not bad enough to require a solution in practice.
Seems to be the way things are going.
@Jerry F.: The thing is, though, that the fairly recently-popular desire for a specific pronoun for “non-binary” referents seems to me to be fairly distinct from the long-standing desire for a pronoun for human referents likely in principle to be either M or F on more careful inspection, but being referred to in a context where the speaker either doesn’t know which or does know which but thinks that detail so non-salient as to be distracting to specify. It’s not crazy to use the same pronoun for all of these situations, but it’s likewise not the only solution. That the same pronoun is used for different situations can in principle create ambiguity, although as noted above pronoun-induced ambiguity would not be a new phenomenon.
“𝐴𝑛𝑦 𝑐𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑞𝑢𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑢𝑙𝑎𝑟 “𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦” 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑙𝑢𝑑𝑒 𝑎 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑢𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑢𝑙𝑎𝑟 “𝑦𝑜𝑢” 𝑖𝑠 𝑎𝑡 𝑏𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑢𝑛𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠.”
The discussion would not be analogous. “You” is a second-person pronoun that serves as both singular and plural, while “they” is a third-person pronoun traditionally plural. “You” addresses the listener(s) directly. It isn’t ambiguous because it universally refers to the listener(s). It became the established use for all second-person address; making its single-person use clear by default. The historical shift from plural to singular, which replaced “thou”, made it essentially dual-purpose; the context always clarified meaning.
“They” traditionally refers to a plural group, using it for one person can obscure whether you mean one or many. It lacks established singular context, especially when gender-neutral usage adds more ambiguity to plural/singular context.
“You” is a second-person pronoun that serves as both singular and plural, while “they” is a third-person pronoun traditionally plural.
But “you” was traditionally plural as well; it’s only the passage of time that makes the ambiguous use seem natural. Your sense of what’s “ambiguous” or “obscure” is entirely dependent on what you’re used to.
the context always clarified meaning.
I think you’re placing an unfair burden on context there. Say there’s many people present. The speaker might wish for different purposes within one utterance to address one in particular, a sub-group, or everybody. They’re all you. (And there’s a similar ambiguity with we.)
In a face-to-face context, the speaker might point or sweep the hand. Whatever context-clarifying mechanism can be deployed with you or we, can equally be deployed with singular vs plural they.
“𝑁𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑒. 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒’𝑠 “𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑓𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑘 𝑜𝑓 𝑐𝑙𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑦” 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡’𝑠 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢’𝑟𝑒 𝑙𝑜𝑜𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑜𝑟…”
No, it’s not nonsense, and confusion and lack of clarity is not ubiquitous when referring to standard English, which facilitates clarity.
𝑀. 𝐺𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑛 𝑖𝑠 𝑎𝑛 𝑂𝑝𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑐𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑚𝑛𝑖𝑠𝑡 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑇𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠. 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑤𝑜𝑛 𝑎 𝐺𝑒𝑜𝑟𝑔𝑒 𝑃𝑜𝑙𝑘 𝑎𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑜𝑝𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑤𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑛 2024. 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑎𝑢𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑟 𝑜𝑓 11 𝑏𝑜𝑜𝑘𝑠, 𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑙𝑢𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 “𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐹𝑢𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝐼𝑠 𝐻𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑦: 𝐻𝑜𝑤 𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑠𝑚 𝑅𝑒𝑐𝑙𝑎𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑑 𝑅𝑢𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑎,” 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑐ℎ 𝑤𝑜𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑁𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙 𝐵𝑜𝑜𝑘 𝐴𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝑖𝑛 2017.
𝐼𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑓𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑑 𝑜𝑟 𝑢𝑛𝑐𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑟?
Your M.Gessen example does not demonstrate ambiguity because he is the only antecedent in the sentence and it’s pretty straightforward. It’s self-explanatory who “they” is.
The example I presented: “𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑙𝑒𝑠 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑐𝑒𝑒𝑑 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑟 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑡 𝑢𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑙 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑑𝑜𝑐𝑢𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑤𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑤𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑏𝑒 𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑑.”
My example sentence is confusing because of pronoun inconsistency and unclear reference. As I said, the sentence cannot be made clear while retaining “they” without adding explicit nouns. The reader is forced to guess based on context, which is exactly what good grammar is supposed to avoid.
That is not an opinion. It’s a function of how English encodes agency.
Conversely, if I used non gender-neutral language as: “𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑙𝑒𝑠 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑐𝑒𝑒𝑑 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑡 𝑢𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑙 ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑜𝑐𝑢𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑤𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔; 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 ℎ𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑑.”
This is an example of clarity and lack of confusion.
That is not an opinion.
Of course it is, but it is a common weakness to confuse one’s own opinions with revealed truth. You simply don’t grasp how much confusion there is in the human world, and how much work is needed to stave it off on the part of authors and editors regardless of what pronouns are used. But by all means continue in your simple certainties.
Oh, and if you’re going to ignore M[asha] Gessen’s preferred pronoun use, “she” is the word you’re looking for. Being Russian in origin, M[asha] doesn’t get huffy about it, but they do prefer “they.”
“Good dictionaries do exactly that: that’s what distinguishes them from mere glossaries or vocabularies.”
As a speaker of a language where “dictionary”, “vocabulary” and “glossary” are translated as словарь (“worder”) I am eager to know: are “lexica” comparable to glossaries and vocabularies (or are even worse) or to dictionaries (or are even better)?
(Russian does have лексикон leksikon)
“…lots of examples of words used in different contexts rather than falling into the trap…”
I don’t know about traps… lots of examples are found in a thick dictionary.
When it is a paper dictionary, that means it costs more. When it is a paper dictionary for a few specialists this cost is not as important, same for dictionaries in the Internet. But I wonder how much more effort a dictionary with lots of examples takes.
Technically, a lexicographer first collects examples, then extracts “meanings” from them.
Of course, I do want “lots of examples” to be the ideal.
The reader is forced to guess based on context, which is exactly what good grammar is supposed to avoid.
This is a confusion between grammar and style, a confusion deeply embedded in the prescriptivist works by linguistically untrained amateurs. Such authors love to declare, mistakenly, that constructions they disfavour in writing on stylistic grounds (sometimes quite reasonably) are “ungrammatical.”
In order to reduce ambiguity, written English actually does need to use stylistic tricks which are not needed in speech. This is partly because writing is divorced from its disambiguating context, and also because the English focus system is based on stress, which is unmarked in the orthography. (The effect is like writing Classical Greek leaving out most of the particles: the unnaturalness of this is often lost on people whose ideas of English grammar are based on what they learnt at school.)
But this is by no means a good argument against singular “they.” If an author can’t cope with that in writing without producing significant ambiguity, they’re either not much cop as a writer, or (most likely) ideologically hostile to the usage, and thus simply not willing to make the effort.
are “lexica” comparable to glossaries and vocabularies
Liddell and Scott’s “Greek-English Lexicon” is a fine example of what I was dissing as a mere glossary, as, indeed are many works with “dictionary” on the title page. The names that authors decide to give their works in English often do not align with the quality distinctions I ascribed to the labels above (particularly in the case of dictionaries of foreign languages, all too many of which are really just glossaries.)
“it’s deeply misguided to consult a dictionary for a word like “of” or “if” or “the” or “they” or “be” or “have”, even though the big dictionaries feel obliged”
Why? Of course I did so when I was a student… and still do it sometimes.
Even the descriptions in “serious” grammars (if you are comfortable with those), I think, can be accompanied by descriptions in dictionaries. But many people are not really comfortable, while “unserious” grammars are useful for people who practice a very specific way of learning languages.(with textbooks and teachers and what not).
Any halfway decent teaching grammar will be much more helpful on English “the”, “of”, “they” etc than any dictionary can be (though a good dictionary will give you a lot of nicely grouped examples, which may indeed help the learner.) There’s no need to remove your copy of CGEL from its useful position as a support for the stereo speaker, bookend or whatever.
The equivalent of English “of” in Kusaal is zero. You will seek it in vain in the dictionaries. The Kusaal usage of this non-word is actually strikingly parallel to the English, though. (The relationship in Kusaal is expressed by word order and tone neutralisations, rather than by an empty word like “of”; but once you’ve decided that the Kusaal and English constructions are semantically analogous despite the great formal mismatch, there are any number of close semantic parallels. But a dictionary won’t help you here at all.)
@J.W.B.: As a result of those other uses of “they”, more kinds of ambiguity are possible. Here’s an attempt at a triple threat, supposing that Cypress is non-binary: “Someone in the administration told the FBI that Cypress had information they wanted to keep secret.”
(That’s based on a sentence from The Hobbit: “To the Elven-king he [Bard] sent the emeralds of Girion, such gems as he most loved…”The second “he” should refer to the Elven-king, except that we’d been told earlier that he had a weakness for white gems.)
So yes, there are more than two senses of “they” and one is quite recent (he said without checking), but why is that the thing?
By the way, an objection to “he or she” is that it leaves out non-binary people.
@WIMC: I agree with Jean-Antoine that it’s an objective fact that using “they” for lots of different things creates ambiguity, and I’ll add, as I said, that invented words could avoid the ambiguity. I agree with Hat that disliking that or saying it’s not what grammar should do is a matter of opinion. (I share Jean-Antoine’s opinion but am not going to go on a
crusadecampaign about it.). I agree with David E. that a lot of prescriptive grammar is style advice but I don’t agree that this topic is one such.Маша Гессен has preferred “them” for at least two years now, and I think probably a lot longer? I think I remember them insisting on it in the fist Trump presidency.
Their name now is M. Gessen.
Historically, the case of you and the case of singular they are very much parallel – ambiguity was increased out of politeness, i.e., calling people in a manner that takes account of their perceived preferences and feelings. There was a period before where addressing anyone by thou was fine (as addressing anyone by a non-formal pronoun is in contemporary Arabic or Scandinavian languages), now it’s quaint, and there must have been a transitional period where people struggled with and some objected to it. But politeness won over disambiguation, because anyone not joining the transition would have seemed boorish (those who didn’t join didn’t care, like Quakers or dialect speakers).
“halfway decent teaching grammar ”
@DE, or a teacher. Note that I picked English from books and games, I didn’t “study” it.
It is not a bad idea to study it, but it is not necessary: sometimes you don’t actually plan learning a language, but still want to understand a text or a speaker. Also there are language learners who either imitate this “picking” experience or practice something else which does not require a grammar book.
Yet people who do it (“want to understand a text”) still find dictionaries very useful.
As for teaching grammars, they’re written with a particular learner’s trajectory in mind, which isn’t mine.
If used them, I would have to use the index (if the book has index!) to find… what? The several places where something is said about what I’m looking up there? But then I’ll want another book where same things are gathered in one place. Isn’t “dictionary” such a book?
– languages tend to distinguish numbers.
– for personal pronouns they’re suppletive in European langauges. For demonstrative pronouns they are not.
In the third person they are new (demonstratives bacame personal) and are not necessarily suppletive.
“You” is the result of external pressure on language (or if not external, then that of an “odd” communicative need, created by the etiquette) and the above makes me think that otherwise (for “normal” commucative needs) distinct thou and you are somehow convenient.
“not bad enough to require a solution in practice.”
Bad enough to make the langauge naturally develop a solution.
I knew someone who claimed to have learned several languages by memorizing words from dictionaries, and let the grammar happen by itself (or not, he didn’t care.) I heard his his Spanish (which presumably he had learned that way,) and it was not super grammatically correct but acceptable, and he spoke it and understood it very easily and comfortably.
I don’t think anyone is disagreeing with the claim that the newer uses of “they” adds ambiguity to some set of possible communications, without reducing it elsewhere.
It just seems very strange to make a point of that without noting that it’s generally the same sort of ambiguity that we have been used to dealing with when employing more established pronoun use. There are many more ways to combat ambiguity than relying on convenient pronoun categories. As I said earlier, it’s apparently very easy to overstate the importance of this introduced ambiguity.
The objection is:
People get used to being illiterate farmers in poor countries. Or hunters and gatherers. Or to being oppressed women in places and times when or where women are seriously oppressed (or say, can’t study in university). And while I’m not going to tell every hunter and gatherer “become a programmer in Moscow*”, being a programmer in Moscow is more convenient in many ways (bot not others). However not all such people want to change anything.
For this reason the argument “we are accustomed to it” is purely emotional, it has nothing to do with “objective” convenience of what you’re accustomed to.
“You” for both numbers can be “cheap” for the language or it can be very “expensive”, and I personally have no idea how to tell which one (a good question, however, it can be interesting to think about it seriously), but maybe, as with those hunters and women, once you’re accustomed to it, you’re accustomed to it…
* I wrote “become a programmer” (without “Moscow”) and then realised that I DO find the idea of bedouin and hunters and gatherers studying programming very attractive. Because this profession does not require you to move to the city from your herding or hunting or gathering in the desert:) So I AM going to tell it to them, and so I changed it to what I’m not going to tell them.
drasvi: how do you get used to living your life in a language which doesn’t distinguish definite and indefinite nouns? Impossible!
@y, drasvi,de
Applying David’s observation that nonexistent “of” in Kusaal is used entirely analogously to “of” in English, we see that nonexistent “a/an” and “the” are used entirely analogously to the referents in English.
Here is an example.
Chelovek sidel u stola. Ya skazal cheloveku uxodit’.
Lit. Man IMPF sat at table. I PERF told man IMPF leave FOOT.
A man was sitting at the table. I told the man to leave.
languagehat said:
Yes, but you have to admit they’ve been doing it probably your whole life, you’ve linked to articles before where they do it, and you haven’t noticed or at least haven’t complained until now, so how bad can it really be?
Personally I found the reference to “the Times best-seller list” a little jarring, since publishers don’t splash “Times bestseller” on book covers, they splash “New York Times bestseller”. But it’s not unusual for New Yorker articles to say simply “the Times” on first reference. I’m told this is a New York subculture thing. Fair enough, the magazine is not named The Generic American.
or at least haven’t complained until now
I can’t complain about everything at once! I’m working my way down the list.
“New York Times” is just stupid.
…a New York subculture thing
hmm. i do think that my tendency to think of the first two words as separable in this way is connected to being a new yorker who just calls it The Times (and knowing that the london paper of the same name exists).
York, Nebraska, has a paper called the York News-Times. Or rather, the York News-Times. Or rather not.
Good people of York (either of Nebraska or of the second in primacy Archbishoprics of England or elsewhere) may want to have a paper named New Times, which we can then call the name of New (York) Times.
The Archbishopric one has had since 1882 under various names The York(shire) (Evening) Press. That naming should provide plenty of grist to Hat’s mill. (Although I suspect it’ll appear rather low down the list of things to complain about.)
There was also The York Free Press full of left-wing scuttlebutt.
Next time it happens, I’ll try to remember to post it here.
Didn’t have to wait long. At a big on-line meeting today, there were problems with the audio. The host said, referring to a non-binary participant a couple hundred miles away, said, “[Name] says they can hear us in Las Cruces.” At first I thought [Name] was there with a group, and I still don’t know whether that was the situation or not. Not that it matters.
@Y, intuitively, topic and comment as expressed by word order play a similar (competing, overlapping) role. It is difficult to turn this intuition into “science”, though.
But if we accept it, the compensation (for either “the” or information structure expressed by word order) is systemic, the whole system is structured differently. It would be (again) difficult to tell which system is “cheaper”, what can be said is that both are “stable”.
(Think of a ball in a little pit either in the Netherlands or on a mountain. Potential energy here is “cost”, and the little pit means it’s “stable” irrespectively of energy. These notions do have to do with each other: any path down such that the potential energy of the ball decreases monotonously as the ball moves along it immediately means the ball can’t be “stable”, so whether it is stable or not depends on values of energy in our space, that is across the surface)
A different example would be something very particular, say, one word for carrots and parsley. We know what the compensation for this will look like. First, it won’t (as we will think) be “systemic”. Second, it likely will be a phrase like “red carrots” or “saracen parsley” (or farangi, rumi, nasrani…). It is (again) difficult to say if such phrases are “costier” then long words, but, “red carrots” will be “stable”, while “saracen parsley” will be replaced with simple “saracen”.
Now if we introduce prescriptive pressure which does not allow such phrases in the educated register, we, I think, understand what the compensation will be (pointing at carrots, or saying something like “carrots, I mean those which are red” – or whatever prescriptive pressure does allow in this register) and how “expensive” it will be.
Logically, for “you” for both numbers 1. the compensation must not be systemic 2. with prescriptive pressure which doesn’t allow everything the langauge comes up with as the compensation – and it DOES comes up with compensations, and they are not allowed in the educated register – it be much more expensive than one word for carrots and parsley.
But that’s my logic. I can’t say using this you is “difficult”, I don’t feel so.
@PP, if neither the speaker nor listener were expecting or thinking about this “man” (it is a simple description of what the speaker sees in a room), likely the “table” will be fronted and thus topicalised. Like “somewhere” in где-то залаяла собака “somewhere barked dog”. Or like “the” in “the table” in English. “Man” in turn will go to where he belongs: “new information”.
How do you call it, when something like “The rabbit was looking at me [thusly]” is used as the first line in a novel?
It is a rabbit readers don’t know, the speaker too could have met this rabbit exacly when this rabbit was giving this [say, tired] look (described in the first line) to the speaker.
And the role of”the” here – if English is anyhow similar to Russian (I can’t be sure, but I think so) – is NOT to mark the rabbit as known. Rather it is used “as if” the rabbit were known.
What the name of such “as if” use of “the”? Or where I can read about it (some linguistic analysis of such uses of “the”)?
Not sure you (the readers) understand me: I have Russian as-if topics in mind. But I think “the” too can be used this way.
Topics or “the”, I don’t understand how to call them and where to read more about them:(
“…by memorizing words from dictionaries, and let the grammar happen by itself (or not, he didn’t care.) ”
@Y, there are many people who “let the grammar happen by itself”: children and everyone who learns langauges like children do. And those who’re literate adults do use dictionaries.
However they do not “memorise” anything. I think one can say that a dictionary is mostly a tool for passive contact with a language (those who try to understand a text without trying to “study” the language).
The person you’re speaking about, accordingly, is using it for active learning.
@drasvi: Novels and other literary texts create worlds, either openly or by implication. So if a novel starts with “the rabbit stared at me”, it creates a world with the implication that the rabbit is known at least to the author, and usually an expectation that the following text will explain somewhere how the author came into contact with the rabbit and why it stared at them. That expectation may well be disappointed, and that implication may well be wrong. These are things that were discussed in the semantics classes I took back at university, but I don’t remember the names of the textbooks we used and they are back in Germany. Maybe others have better recommendations, but I guess it would be a good start to look at semantics textbooks and search for “implication”.
@drasvi
You are right, the sentences I wrote are minimal and tried to avoid focus on anything but the man (with secondary focus on the table, or it was the only one in the room–anyway, he has to sit somewhere). So something like a police report. Your questions about the are probably covered in CGEL, I can only say what sounds right and wrong in English, and what certain usages imply for me beyond the words used. In some edge cases, it might depend on the speaker, like the use or non-use of diminutives in Russian (or the word “wee” in Scots or Ulster English).
search for “implication”
The technical term is implicature — “something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed.”
Less formally, ‘presupposition’ [see also wikip]. The classical example (apologies for the sexism) “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”
In English/European languages, a definite article used at the start of a story (“the rabbit …”) carries a presupposition the speaker is already in the middle of a situation. Another example from a recent thread on Agatha Christie’s ‘Five Little Pigs’, the story first sentence
_the_ young woman … _the_ room. As a literary device in media res [wikip]. Also personal names function as-if introduced by a definite article. So if this is the first Christie story you’re reading/you don’t already know this name, it carries a presupposition this is an important dramatis persona.
Short story.
@PP, you wrote “a man” in English, with an “a”. If what is meant is: you enter a [known] room and see an unknown man [without expecting to see him], then the man is “new information” (the comment) and the specified part of the room (the table) is the topic (and likely will be fronted).
However:
лингвист на это сказал бы:… linguist on this said would:… a linguist would say to that:…
@Hans, I think it is possible that the author (as the character) only knows this rabbit for a fraction of second. But of course if she is writting the novel years after rabbit gave her that look, as the author she knows this rabbit for years.
I was thinking about Russian topics (кролик смотрел на меня усталыми глазами) but I think it will be “The rabbit was looking…” in English. What bothers me: this tactics is often used in normal communication as well. A simple example would be: a team is working on a problem, you join the team without knowing details about the problem. I’m telling you what’s the problem, and I’m speaking to you as if you have been working with us and thinking about it with us. I mean, I use a word order which I would use if it were so. But I can do same when telling you about my problem (when I don’t have a team).
When a certain gesture or word is allowed with lovers or friends, I can use it with someone else when flirting or as a sign of friendly attitude or trust. If a man kneels before kings, he can kneel before his girlfriend (as a part of courtship). People play with conventions. People play with linguistic conventions too.
Descriptions of the function of both “the” and Russian topics instead refer to the reality, they describe the convention. But that’s a reality of speakers’ minds, and speakers can and do modify it.
That makes those descriptions rather imprecise. Accordingly, I tell: “if [this and that: a reference to the reality] then likely the word order will be [this and that]”. This “likely” is here because of the above.
This can be annoying for learners (they are told that “X is used IFF Y” and then they see that X is sometimes used when Y is not true) but imprecision is also bad in sceintific descriptions. I want to be able to describe such things more precisely instead of saying “usually”, “likely” etc. each time.
new information” (the comment) and the specified part of the room (the table) is the topic (and likely will be fronted).
English doesn’t really work like that. New information is typically focused, and it can appear anywhere in the clause. There’s no rule that old information has to be fronted; often, it’s already at the front, because subjects and topics usually coincide in English, but actual fronting of topics otherwise involves clefting or dislocation and is quite a marked construction. “The table, a man was sitting at it …”; “It was at the table that a man was sitting …”
As often, problems arise because English focus is marked by clause-level stress, and this is not marked in the orthography. PP’s example actually goes
“A mán was sitting at the table.”
Contrast
“A man was sitting at the táble.”
which has the default clause stress pattern, with focus on the last full word of the predicate. (It’s the default because predicates are usually new information.) Probably this dull table-sitting man is just part of the background to the story (for now, anyhow), and the interest is about to shift to the real protagonist. “A man was sitting at the táble, when a manic pixie dréamgirl leapt up onto it and began dáncing.”
@DE, I know, I meant Russian. I meant, likely, in Russian the table will be fronted and this will hint at the fact that this man is “a” man rather than “the man”
@Hans, “semantics textbooks” – thank you! Somehow it didn’t occur to me to think about those. (I was thinking about grammars…)
About what I called the reality of speakers’ minds and its modification:
It is normal to start novels with, say, “he”. But that’s novels. You won’t perhaps be too much surprised if your daughter (4 y.o.) rushes into the room yelling “he called me a fool!” without telling who’s “he”, but it is not very normal for adult communication.
But what’s normal is to use Russian topics in either of these ways:
1. We’ve been talking about X for some 15 minutes. In the middle I say something where X is the topic.
This reflects the fact (of the reality) that X is within the field of our attention.
2. We often talk about X. Say, it is me and my ex-wife and X is her daughter or husband. She didn’t talk about them today, but if she topicalises X when he mentions eihter for the first time today, it is not surprising.
Basically, that’s her “context” which I always remember (load into my primary memory in computer terms) when I talk to her.
3. Once (half a year ago) we talked about X.
I say something about X (for the first time since then) and X is the topic. That will sound as continuation of that conversation.
It is like “I have loaded that conversation into my primary memory again!” and you of course understand that you must do same.
Of course, you can say that that conversation was in your memory (hard drive) and thus a part of your reality, but I think I subtly manipulate your reality here.
The difference with (2) is only quantitative
4. We never talked about X.
And yet I do same thing, “as if” we talked about it.
So while 1 is the basic function of topics and in descriptions of Russian topic I expect to see the description of this function, 3 and 4 are… function of that function.
However 3 and 4 happen often in communication and a description that does not tell about them is going to be imprecise.
@DE, for many years my hobby was reading essays and questions of Russian learners. Reading and answering them, of course but often I didn’t post what I wrote, because they were way too long and detailed.
And one of the several things that made me do this was the very first such question I read, which made me think of how intonation and word order interact in Russian. I enjoyed thinking about such things.
For a couple of years I didn’t read grammars and works by linguists: I was inventing my own grammar so I wanted to compare my invention to what lingnguists say, which can only be done when you first invent it and then read and not vice versa:) So back to that question about intonation, it seems very few researchers have anything to say about this. Strange.
This can be annoying for learners (they are told that “X is used IFF Y”
That’s the beginner’s version. There is a trade-off between keeping rules simple (and leaving many cases where they are wrong or don’t cover the situation a speaker finds themself in) and overloading a beginner with complexity.
to my ear, the temporal finessing AntC pointed out is the main difference between “The rabbit was looking at me…” and “A rabbit was looking at me…” as the opening of a narrative.
but part of that is the position having neutralized another usual implication of the difference, which would be for “The…” to indicate or acknowledge that the existence of other rabbits is meaningful (possibly because this is a familiar one, but not necessarily, depending on what we’ve heard earlier in the narrative), and for “A…” to indicate that if other rabbits exist, they aren’t significant (or haven’t been up to now). i’m not sure what to call that – is it somehow to do with topicalization? or evidentiality?
So back to that question about intonation, it seems very few researchers have anything to say about this.
I think that it has tended to be neglected in the past precisely because it is not regularly represented in English orthography; and focus is also a difficult area to study in general, both for practical reasons and because of problems on the theoretical side (there are even naysayers who deny that you can define “focus” cross-linguistically at all.)
Both CGEL and the other CGEL have a lot about the English focus system and its manifestation via stress and intonation, though. And modern grammars of “exotic” languages generally have meaty chapters on “Information packaging” nowadays. Philip Jaggar’s excellent Hausa grammar is particularly good on focus, and Melanie Green wrote a whole book about it:
https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/Focus+in+Hausa-p-9781405156264
@drasvi
You are right: “u stola sidel chelovek. Ya skazal cheloveku ukhodit’.” is more precise re a/the. But the first sentence in this version corresponds to “A man was sitting at the táble”, which leads the reader to think the table might be significant. An average militsioner might prefer my first version, whereas his more exact colleague would insist on the second one. If the man were to levitate and fly away from the scene, one could perhaps write “sidel u stola chelovek”.
@PP, wait.
WP:subject (or “Subject (linguistics)” or what it is) says subject is what one’s speaking about. But it also says it is a combination of three things: topic, pivot and [a reference to the semantical] agent.
I think “about” has nothing to do with agency. While I’m not sure what’s “pivot”, I think the about is not about it.
So “about” must refer to topics (and is misleading in an article about subjects, especially given that English subjects don’t necessarily refer to agents and very often are not topics).
When I want to tell a simple geographical fact about Africa, I say
В Африке холодно.
in Africa it-is-cold
It is cold in Africa.
The (grammatical) topic here is “in Africa” and logically what I’m talking “about” is either “Africa” or “how things are in Africa”
This does not mean Africa is “significant” or “insignificant”.
And as I understand in English you will say “It is cold there” rather than “there it is cold”
Actually topicalisation (by fronting) of the table makes it uninteresting. Again, it is not unlike English “the” in “the table” or fronting of “somewhere” in
где-то залаяла собака
somewhere barked dog
You enter a room, so “a room” is expected. In the room you see a man, and this is not what you expected to see, even something sufficiently interesting to share.
“The table” is simply a[n expected] part of the [expected] room.
@DE, again, I was speaking about Russian, but that changes nothing:)
Actually, even Russian intonation contours were only listed in 1978, I learned about them from a question of an Iranian student who asked us native speakers “is this said with ИК2 or ИК3?” (IC2 or IC3?)
As you can guess instead of answering natives pondered over their ignorance,
The way that focus interacts with definiteness in Kusaal is that the given-information sense of the definite article pretty much rules out the usual new-information reading of focus, and constrains the focus construction to be contrastive instead:
M da’ bʋŋ.
I buy donkey
“I’ve bought a donkey.” (No explicit focus; I’m just telling you about my day, maybe.)
M da’ nɛ bʋŋ.
I buy FOCUS donkey
“I’ve bought a donkey.” (e.g. in reply to Fʋ da’ bɔ? “What have you bought?” English does not distinguish these two cases formally.)
M da’ nɛ bʋŋ la.
I buy FOCUS donkey the
“I’ve bought the donkey.” (Not the goat, as I was told to.)
I think this pretty much works the same way in English, where focus likewise can signal either new information or contrast.
@DE, do you mean that in English,
(a) if I tell you to buy a goat and you buy a donkey instead, you inform me about that by saying “I bought the donkey”, not “a donkey”?
(b) you tell me you are not sure whether you should buy a goat or donkey. Then you tell me “I bought the donkey”, not “a donkeÿ”.
If so, i didn’t know:(
Why? Do you use you is for a singular second-person referent?
Belatedly: No, but if we were to adopt “they is,” we should of course revive “you is.”
@drasvi:
(a) No, the donkey would have to have been mentioned already for you to say “the donkey.”
(b) Yes, that’s correct.
It’s not that indefinite NPs can’t be contrastively focused, just that, if a definite NP is focused, the sense is going to be contrastive (naturally: because it’s not likely to be new information.)
Quite a lot of English clauses in isolation are ambiguous between new-information focus and contrastive focus. I imagine that there are languages which distinguish these possibilities more consistently, but Kusaal, at any rate, is much like English in this respect.
Preposing in English may or may not involve focus on the preposed element, and whether the preposed element has to be “given” depends on things like whether it’s a complement or adverbial; complements usually need to be “given”, though the givenness may arise just from the whole setup rather than because the preposed element has been previously mentioned or is definite.
“I’ve got no green ones in stock, but a red one I can find for you.”
Kusaal is much like English here too, though it needs more syntactic paraphernalia to prepose clause elements: you can’t simply alter the word order, the way you can in English. As in English, preposing usually implies topicalisation (though not always), and a clause with a preposed element may also have a separate focused constituent. But Kusaal has no way of focusing the preposed element itself, or any part of it: unlike English. (And, also unlike English, Kusaal can’t have more than one focused element in a clause.)
Subjects are topics by default in English, and part of the reason why passives are common (and very useful) in English is that they provide a handy way of turning an object into a topic by making it a passive subject.
Getting a bit back to the general interest discussion about singular “they” (as opposed to the obviously doomed attempts to explain to a native Russian speaker the meaning of the), this is what Viktor Mair posted on LL about a new proposed Chinese character. A random fragment to whet your appetite
@DE, thanks!
(a) would have seriously surprised me. But even (b) surprises me. If you told me “we need a donkey”, I would then say (without confidence) “I bought the donkey [we need]”. But I didn’t know that it also works with my example (b). Must be more difficult to pick when you only communicate to native speakers on forums.
So as I understand your “not the goat” example is similar to my (b)…
@D.O. interpretation of a Kusaasi example hinges on this “the”.
So as I understand your “not the goat” example is similar to my (b)…
Yes. The mere fact that we talked about a choice between a goat and a donkey would be enough to justify saying “the donkey”, even though we hadn’t been talking about that particular one. Our preceding theoretical discussion is enough to turn this newly-introduced actual donkey into something given in the context.
(I actually had a mental image when I composed the example of a specific donkey we’d previously been discussing as one of several potential purchases, but it works for your Scenario B too.)
You can, to introduce a gratuitous complication just for the LULZ, also say in Kusaal
M da’aya bʋŋ.
I buy.INDEPENDENT donkey
“I’ve bought a donkey.” (Of all the things I might have bought!)
The trick here is that da’aya is a specifically phrase-final form, so the object bʋŋ “donkey” here has actually been right-dislocated out of the verb phrase, producing a cor-fancy-that you’ll-never-guess sense.
FWIW, articles in German and French work as in English for the situations described here; the numerous differences lie elsewhere.
The two main differences between Kusaal la and English “the” are that la is more strictly confined to “previously mentioned”, and is not usual with “shared background information”, so you say winnig for “the sun” rather than winnig la; and that personal pronoun possessors don’t induce definiteness, so it’s o biig “her child” at first mention, and o biig la subsequently.
You can even say
O biig kae.
her child not.exist
“She has no children.”
cf.
Her hair is long. She has long hair.
Possession expressed by either a verb or possessive form of the [pro]noun.
@DE, about passives as means of topicalisation: it occured to me (a speaker who thinks in topics) early that English passives can be used for that. But in Russian passives are very bookish, and in English they are used excessively in certain very bookish registers. I don’t know how and how often they are used at the bottom of the English diglossic continuum (using “diglossia” not as a name of “exotic” systems like “Arabic” but as a property of all languages in varying degrees).
Telling they are normal in English without analysing registers is uninteresting when some of those on the top are full of passives and (perhaps even international) conventions specific to those registers and passives leak from there.
Have they arisen in those registers (in or even outside of English) and then leaked into spoken English?
Or maybe some of them are so and others come “from the bottom”?
Or maybe they are characteristic to English grammar and arose there and leak from there to other languages?
Or somethign else?
@drasvi
I was told (by the militsioner) to leave.
I am easily hurt.
This use of the passive is common in speech. In the second sentence it is unavoidable without vagueness and padding (people can easily hurt me); in the first sentence there is a concrete agent (the militsioner) .
@drasvi: The first OED citations for “be” in passive constructions are from early Old English. For anyone who’s interested:
The forms of “be” are “biom” and “earan”.
As you can see, those are bookish, but I think all or almost all known Old English is bookish or poetic, for the obvious reason, so your question is hard to answer. However, English has had passive constructions for a long time.
Yeah, the English passive is not a specifically high-register thing at all, nor is it particularly “marked”; this a relatively unusual thing cross-linguistically.
The old Welsh synthetic impersonal/passive (as in Siaredir Cymraeg “Welsh is spoken”) is extremely literary (like the subjunctive), though it turns up quite a bit in written officialese. In Welsh as She is Actually Spoke it’s been replaced by a periphrasis with cael “get”
Sancteiddier dy enw
“May your name be sanctified” (1588 Bible)
Dŷn ni eisiau i dy enw di gael ei anrhydeddu
“We want your name to get its honouring” (Rocky Horror Beibl.net, 2024)
Kusaal doesn’t do passives, but it has a kind of middle use of transitive verbs:
Ti nu daam.
we drink beer
“We’ve drunk beer.”
Daam nuya.
“Beer has got drunk.” (The -ya is not a passive flexion, but a phrase-final perfective marker: it’s absent in the previous example because the verb is not phrase-final.)
The usual way to convey what English does with passives is to use an empty ba “they” as subject:
Ba yɔɔdif sʋ’ʋŋaa?
they pay.IMPERFECTIVE.you well.POLAR-QUESTION
“Are you well paid?”
Interestingly, the object of such constructions behaves as the syntactic “pivot” rather than the subject: the construction has been grammaticalised, rather than just having a vague unspecified subject, like the English “Do they pay you well?”
I confess to knowing very little about the enforcement priorities of militsioners in formerly Soviet lands, but are they known for being sticklers about prescriptivist grammar, or elegant style?
@Jerry, you can here an article in Russian with a cute example of morpheme-by morpheme (not even word-by word) translation of a Latin text, pp 112-120.
So English-calquing-Latin-calquing-[Greek-calquing-]Hebrew is not same as English of Beowulf even if Beowulf is “bookish” (poetic) too.
@DE, it is not difficult to find examples of high-register English passives – I mean, texts such that (a) you can’t imagine so many passives in normal speech and (b) in function uncommon for normal speech.
Synchronously some passives are marked and the distribution is interesting. As an L2-speaker I don’t understand it, but I am able to discern some interesting distribution: some examples are rather striking.
Same in Hungarian: Nincs gyereke not.exist child.hers/his.
Also same in Hungarian: put the verb in the “they” form with no subject expressed.
szenteltessék meg a te neved
may they make your name hallowed
@drasvi
I think you might be referring to
(a) overuse of passive in scientific articles to avoid giving the impression of bias;
(b) use of passive in legal declarations or regulations where the writer wishes to avoid identifying a name or restricting the scope unnecessarily
(c) use of passive by people who have screwed up (or by their defenders) to avoid assigning blame (this starts very early: “My shoelaces/glasses/watch/pen got broken)
Maybe you could provide more context.
@ktschwartz:
The interesting thing about this Kusaal ba construction is that the object becomes the syntactic pivot.
For example, Kusaal clause catenation with the particle n links clauses with the same subject, which is then not repeated in the second clause. If the subject changes, the n has to be replaced by ka (“and”, kinda, but subordinating in such cases, not coordinating.)
Neverthess, you get e.g. (Romans 14:20):
Diib wʋsa nari ba di.
food all be.proper.LINKER they eat
“All foods may be eaten.” (nari being the regular sandi outcome of nar n)
If you say instead
Diib wʋsa nar ka ba di.
ba “they” has to be taken as refering to an actual previously mentioned group of people: “All foods are suitable for them to eat.”
[Incidentally, this is one of the many pieces of evidence showing that the analysis of catenation with n as a serial verb construction (as in nearly all other grammatical accounts of Western Oti-Volta languages), is mistaken.]
Hungarian subjects generally don’t need to be expressed anyway, so I don’t know if there’s any way to distinguish “they eat it” from “it is eaten” outside of context.
German uses passives about as often as English of the same register, unless it can get away with using the impersonal pronoun instead. (That one is archaic in English: One does not simply walk into Mordor.) Using the reflexive pronoun to replace a passive, as in Romance or Slavic languages, very rarely works in German, I’d say.
@David Marjanović: Use of the impersonal pronoun one is elevated register, but not archaic in any English variety I know. Moreover, it is much more common in British English than North American. In Britain, it is commonly used as a polite, distancing way to refer to oneself in the third person.
FWIW, Danish (and Swedish) has verb forms with fossilized reflexive pronouns (now all levelled into -s from -sik) that are generally used as passives with some lexically determined mediopassive uses. Han sås i byen = ‘He was seen in town’ corresponds to Jeg så ham i byen but De sås = ‘They met.’ Archaic Glasset sloges itu= ‘The glass was smashed’ corresponds to Jeg slog glasset itu but De sloges = ‘They fought.’ Finder = ‘finds,’ but Findes = ‘exists.’
(Edda age Old Norse had -mk for 1sg forms, but I don’t remember what it was for the other non-3p forms. Possibly leveled to -sk already).
Explicitly non-specific subject pronoun: Man så ham i byen. The oblique case is en, but rarely used in these end times. (one used as an object is not common in English either, I {don’t} think. It pleases one to hear that seems archaic).
Moreover, it is much more common in British English than North American.
Really? I’d put it exactly the other way round. I’d say in BrE even the “distancing way to refer to oneself” is now archaic, whereas it still seems to be used unaffectedly in AmE (Edit: I think this is in academic/formal contexts). This is the sense 3. wiktionary calls‘generic you’.
In BrE, if not ‘you’, you’d use someone/anyone/everyone to avoid sounding pompous. Or first pers plural.
Hmm. I can’t think of a way to test my impression via ngrams. Plotting ‘You never know’ vs ‘One never knows’ seems to bear it out: the ‘One’ version is flatlining, marginally higher for AmE vs BrE, but too small an incidence to mean much. Curiously wikti’s “one/you shouldn’t be too quick to judge” doesn’t appear at all. [Or of course I don’t know how to drive ngrams.]
AI Overview disagrees with me about BrE cp AmE, but when I try some of its example sentences in ngrams, the ‘one’ version doesn’t appear at all.
it still seems to be used unaffectedly in AmE.
Definitely not.
to me, that impersonal “one” isn’t unusual or exotic, but is always marked (though not always to the same effect). i do think of “one” where i’d expect “i” as more of a british (do i mean English? probably) or Commonwealth thing, but “one” where i’d expect impersonal “you” doesn’t have that regional association.
am i right to think impersonal “you” is the residue of the exclusively-formal singular “you”?
(also: obligatory ron perlman recognition nod for his role in City of Lost Children)
—
(because i cannot resist)
“Hungarian subjects generally don’t need to be expressed”
– Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar, Prince of Metternich-Winneburg zu Beilstein
“Well, the moral of the story
The moral of this song
Is simply that one should never be
Where one does not belong”
Words written by an American in 1967, arguably marked for register although whether that register is “archaic” or something else is debatable. Looking at the google books ngram viewer to compare “one should never” with “you should never” is interesting, because in the largest “main” corpus they are more or less even with each other in frequency from around 1905ish until 1970ish, but not only does the “you” form become substantially the more common one after 1970, it was also the more common one before 1905, with the divergence in its favor getting larger the farther back toward 1800 you go. This suggests to me that “archaism” is the wrong way of thinking about the “one” form, and that whatever happened to make the previous minority variant a stronger competitor for much of the 20th century needs some other explanation.
am i right to think impersonal “you” is the residue of the exclusively-formal singular “you”?
Kusaal (which never uses plural pronouns for politeness, unlike Mooré) sometimes uses the second person singular fʋ for a vague “you” in proverbs, e.g.
Fʋ ya’a bɔɔd tampiing siind, fʋ pʋ lɛm zɔt lieŋ daug nyɔɔgɔ.
“If you want to get honey out of a stone, you won’t spare the axe shaft.”
i.e. “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”, but (as the objective is ludicrous) with the suggestion that someone is rather too focused on a problem for their own good.
I use impersonal “one” on occasion, though admittedly it might be maintained that I am archaic myself.
I agree with rozele that it’s not archaic, but it is marked; in conversation I would really only use it jocularly, for example if I was affecting a donnish manner to annoy my children. I use it in writing without much in the way of qualms, though; in preference to impersonal “you”, in fact, in more formal contexts.
Definitely not.
(Thought it wouldn’t take me long to find counter-examples.) Sally Thomason’s papers mentioned here four days ago (I did add a comment ” in academic/formal contexts”); from her biog seems not to be tainted by any Brit disease. 2001 Can rules be borrowed? I count (in 20 pages)
In context, none of those would I call pompous or affected. OTOH I wouldn’t myself use that phraseology.
I also see a couple of examples in 2005 Pronoun Borrowing (!), but that was joint with Dan Everett so maybe Brit-contaminated.
“archaism” is the wrong way of thinking about the “one” form, and that whatever happened to make the previous minority variant a stronger competitor for much of the 20th century needs some other explanation
that makes a lot of gut-level sense to me (as unreliable as that can be), and makes me wonder what else shares that pattern of change. the timeline seems to point to the specificity of (in the u.s., at least) the period between the rise of modern multi-mass-media (radio, paperback publishing, recorded music, film, television, etc) and the breakdown of what i’m tempted to call (in a gramscian mode) the hegemony of system-supportive traditional intellectuals* over those media. i think their hegemony was marked by certain kinds of formality in language, with room for certain kinds of informality: a high- to upper-middlebrow range of registers, we could maybe say, with (towards the end of the period) the line of propriety falling between tom lehrer and lenny bruce, or between patrick dennis and jack kerouac.
and thanks, JWB, for pointing to dylan – i think his work is interesting on this, in exactly the period of transition to less “one”!
even in Frankie Lee and Judas Priest, the “one” lines JWB quoted, which are framed as the song’s moral (i’d say marking formality rather than archaism), are immedately followed by a particular kind of “you”, as a bridge to get that moral from the abstract to the practical-but-metaphorical (“so when you see your neighbor carryin somethin / help him with his load”) on its way to the concrete (“don’t go mistaking paradise / for that home across the road”). that kind of “you”, which i think is very deliberately ambiguous between personal “you the listener”, poetic-individual “you the song’s implicit individual addressee/target”, and impersonal “you-meaning-everyone” is common to quite a few of dylan’s songs. i think, in particular, it’s part of the formal repertoire he used while he was still writing overtly political songs but had basically stopped writing topically: songs like It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue; It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding); Forever Young; Like a Rolling Stone; even Ballad of a Thin Man. that slippiness let him do things he couldn’t have otherwise, whether the addressee within the song was cast as friend or foe, and whether the balance of the other “you”s leaned towards personal or impersonal.
.
* in the 20thC u.s. context, primarily publishers and high-profile journalists, members of “the professions” (lawyers, doctors, clergy, academics), and politicians from the duopoly parties.
@PP, I mentioned scientific articles above. It is internatinal: you see same in some articles in Russian and in English many authors are L2-speakers. Often the only motivation is that they think it’s scientific style, like “we” in articles by one author.
But this overuse of passives is striking.
“easily Xed” is a peculiar construction of its own, I think (also “can be easily Xed”, “easy to X”) where “easily” is an important word. To illistrate my point that style, distribution and historical trajectory must depends on specific construction and function.
Even
“When I saw it, it was Xed” (state)
is not same as
“the value was obtained by…” (event of change of state) “important results have been obtained” (English perfect and how do you call what it expresses instead of events and states) etc.
Are two very different things united by one form of the participle. Or by the fact that “stative” one recruits participial forms for description of states (but is full of complications not found in the second construction).
It is not I think what people mean when they criticise “passives”.
“full of complications” – e.g. the function of “easily” which I mentioned. With easily it means “Xable” or “can be Xed”, not “Xed in its peculiar easy fashion” (as “smartly” in “smartly dressed”)
Or that “?when I saw it, it was obtained” won’t really work.
am i right to think impersonal “you” is the residue of the exclusively-formal singular “you”?
Adding German to DE’s evidence – German has that impersonal 2nd person, too, although it’s used less frequently than in English because man is very much alive in all registers. And German also uses the informal du here, not formal Sie. Was du auch machst, ist verkehrt “Whatever you do is wrong” can be both a general rule in life addressed at no-one in particular and an observation on someone’s haplessness (although the latter is the less likely interpretation out of context), while Was Sie auch machen, ist verkehrt will most likely be taken as a comment on the addressee’s haplessness. So there seems to be no link between generality and formality of the pronoun, but rather the relationship seems to be with the informal pronoun. The same seems to be true for Russian, as far as I can see.
@Lars: man also uses <ein- for the oblique forms, but in German, that doesn’t seem on its way out.
@Hans: that’s interesting! and (though i only trust myself so far on finer points of usage) yiddish works similarly, with separate impersonal pronouns (מען/מע/מ | men/me/m; עס/סע | es/se), but informal singular דו | du is also used for general/abstract purposes.
I take it The New Yorker counts as exemplifying AmE, and that an article June 2025 is not archaic. (Admittedly the author is of Turkish birth.) Via the Hattery
Random samplings uncovered other instances in comparable US publications (like LARB). But this is hardly scientific.
I’d like to sample (say) The Economist to probe this alleged BrE proclivity, but paywalled. The Guardian‘s longer-form social commentary pieces I can’t find any examples.
@drasvi
I was giving examples for common spoken usage of passive; I agree that there is no one advocating avoidance of passive in examples like these.
@hans
I also learned “unserein-” in the meaning “one, people like us”, but I suppose this is obsolete.
In Britain, it is commonly used as a polite, distancing way to refer to oneself in the third person.
This is not common. It is stereotypically a faux humility of the upper classes, in particular Prince Charles as was, a 1988 comical biography of whom was titled “One’s Life”.
This is the sense 3. wiktionary calls ‘generic you’.
Not really; it’s a development of that where “generic you” is an indirect way of saying “me”: what Merriam-Webster calls sense 2b rather than 2a. Of sense 2 it goes on to say:
Regarding “people who start sentences with one often shift to another pronoun more natural to casual discourse”—per MWDEU, by the 20th century BrE has a stronger prescription against it, mandating “one should serve one’s guests before oneself” where AmE might allow “one should serve his guests before himself”. Gender-neutrality concerns have prompted varying changes to the latter; besides switching to “one’s–oneself” or “their–themselves”, I would guess another response has been to avoid using “one” altogether.
I remembered a use of the impersonal pronoun as the setup for a punchline:
— Through the Looking-Glass
As I recall, the Annotated Alice explained this as a murder joke.
I am now by free association recalling Fats Waller’s catchphrase/tagline “One never knows, do one?” Where the unexpected shift of number-agreement is presumably part of what makes it memorable or personalizable.
On further reflection, perhaps the better parse of the Fats Waller aphorism is that the first verb is indicative but the second subjunctive, thus avoiding any number-agreement mismatch. Not entirely clear at a quick glance what semantic nuance that would be communicating, but perhaps it’s a bit of poetic-license and adds to the overall gnomic quality.
Jim Broadbent’s aristocratic character in A Sense of History uses first person one.
Thought it wouldn’t take me long to find counter-examples.
Depends what you’re countering. You seemed to be saying Americans use “one” freely, and that is simply not true.
I did add a comment “in academic/formal contexts”
In an edit after I responded.
In context, none of those would I call pompous or affected.
Well, “pompous” and “affected” are perhaps not the right words. That impersonal “one” is definitely formal (hence the restriction in use you mention); no one uses it in ordinary conversation unless they’re deliberately being formal (or putting on formality). I strongly suspect you’re wrong about its being more common in US than UK formal use, but I’m not going to take the time to dig for examples.
Huh? Everett is American.
I also learned “unserein-” in the meaning “one, people like us”, but I suppose this is obsolete.
It’s not obsolete. But I associate that with people assuming the pose of “simple citizen” and complaining about “those up there”. It’s a pose I never liked and which nowadays is coming so frequently from AfD sympathizers (the German equivalent to the MAGA crowd) complaining about “the elites” that it’s totally borked for me.
@Hans: Interesting: so it “means” (or at least feels in the usage you’re currently noticing) something like “one of us” as rather pointedly contrasted to others who are not-like-us? Most typically “us” means some assortment of people less than the entire population of the planet, but one can in many contexts focus on the group being referenced without necessarily specifically focusing on the not-group (or the outgroup to the ingroup) and the contrast between them. But I suppose it could be in some contexts useful to have a way of talking about “us” that does bring that additional focus/contrast with it.
Interesting: so it “means” (or at least feels in the usage you’re currently noticing) something like “one of us” as rather pointedly contrasted to others who are not-like-us?
Basically, yes.
Or rather, while it’s literally “our-one”, it means “people like us”. “One of us” is eine(r) von uns.
Impersonal du and impersonal ich are strikingly common in Vienna; I blame Czech.
If this is true in writing, it could be an effect of Britons being much less comfortable to write as they speak. In my experience they say gonna as often as Americans, but they’re much more reluctant to write it.
Then it must be regional, because I know it only from fairly old writings. 🙂
Yes. Historically the others most often seem to be upper classes or overeducated eggheads from what I remember.
Or in Russian свой брат (lit. one’s own brother).
On further reflection, perhaps the better parse of the Fats Waller aphorism is that the first verb is indicative but the second subjunctive, thus avoiding any number-agreement mismatch. Not entirely clear at a quick glance what semantic nuance that would be communicating, but perhaps it’s a bit of poetic-license and adds to the overall gnomic quality.
Were the subjunctive used in the main clauses or questions?
I feel that we are, or audiences were, supposed to imagine a comical black character who was pretentious enough to use “one” but was in over his head and made a grammatical mistake in the main sentence. Or one can hope it was a parody of that sort of character.
I think you’re on the right track, but it’s not so much a comical black character as a comical American character of the half-educated and rumbustious sort who populated so much 19th- and early-20th-century humor, raised on half-understood scraps of the Bible and Shakespeare and accustomed to hearing the orotundities of orators.
I think Waller, as a specific individual rather than generic type, came off a bit more sophisticated than that, but YMMV. The “do one” could be a comical hypercorrection, but then you would ideally have an account of how that sort of character who was not quite as educated as they put on might have blundered into that specific hypercorrection.
It’s also tricky to categorize FW because he was a very well–known songwriter but he typically did the music and had a collaborator do the lyrics, so it’s a bit misleading to infer his own “voice” from those lyrics. One of his lyricists was the fascinating Andy Razaf (1895-1973), who was rather atypical of the creative strata of black American society at the time on account of being the child of exiled Malagasy royalty who had fled French imperialism (full unclipped surname Razafinkarefo).
Good lord, I hope I didn’t come off as calling Fats Waller a “comical American character of the half-educated and rumbustious sort”! I meant that he was parodying such a character, or assuming the voice of such a character for comedic purposes. Waller was a sophisticate hiding behind a comic mask (as sophisticated blacks have so often had to do).
Thank you @mollymolly for bringing up the Royals. They do indeed use ‘one’ in the generic you sense of: anybody who lives in palaces and rides in gilded coaches — so it is in effect 1PS, per your quote from M-W. My hypothesis is that Americans think they’re in some way representative of BrE. (Or perhaps they don’t get it that when Brits use ‘one’ in that way, they’re taking the piss. “One’s Life” indeed.)
Despite the repeated claims here of ‘one’ being more common in BrE, I simply can’t find any contemporary BrE examples whatsoever — “in writing” is where I’m looking, @DM. (I’m not claiming ‘one’ is used “freely” by anyone, @Hat.)
Certainly ‘one’ was more prevalent in BrE a century or more ago (don’t know how it compared with AmE at the same vintage). Lewis Carroll, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers plenty of examples. Impressionistically, talking heads weren’t embarrassed to use it on the BBC — but I might be confusing that memory with ‘That Was The Week That Was’/Alan Bennett/Peter Cook/Monty Python/the John Bird, John Fortune piss-takes — all last century, so don’t count.
My impression it’s nowadays more AmE is largely formed from formal/academic writing appearing at/linked from the Hattery, and I’ve fairly quickly found examples — which have all been US-based. (@kts I mentioned Dan Everett as possibly BrE-tainted, because he was based at Manchester U at the time. Happy to be told his ‘one’s were all American.)
I’d go so far as to say that in BrE ‘one’ has become so skunked by the piss-takes, nobody uses it (unaffectedly) any more.
Further to the upthread peeving about the name of _The [London] Times_, I just learned that the stylebook of that august publication has now evolved to the extent that the noun phrase “big boobs” may licitly appear in a headline, at least if it’s in quotation marks signaling that the phrase was uttered by someone quoted in the body of the story. I imagine it was not thus in the days when the Rt Hon the Lord Rees-Mogg was editor.
I will admit that I don’t know if the online piece I was perusing (an interesting explanation of shifts in the practical implementation of US immigration policy) was duplicated with the exact same hed in the hard copy edition you could (still? I assume?) buy on the street in London.
@Hat: I agree entirely about parodying (as I mentioned) and wearing the mask. As for my phrase “a comical black character”, let me put it this way: The mere fact that he was black fit a stereotype at the time and increased the humor for audiences of the time.
Quite so.
Then it must be regional, because I know it only from fairly old writings.
Just google it. I found it in online texts from the 2020s in what seemed to be unironic use. I didn’t check for region. I would assume that a reason that you and me both don’t encounter it in everyday speech is not that it’s regional, but that we have limited contact with the sort of people who use that word in earnest.
“half-understood scraps of the Bible” – it is not that I understand fully the scraps of the Bible I read:)
@PP, it was not an objection to anything you said. I wanted to emphasise that passives vary (formally, functionally, stylistically), which has to do with DE’s and mine argument which in turn has to do with an artcile by Pullum which LH and DE like and which I find very unprofessional.
However, the construction “X is fucked up” is not unlike “X is big”. I’d say, states and qualities expressed by participles are semantically in the nominal “orbit” and events are in the verbal orbit. When I say “passive” (rather than “participles”) I usually think about the second (events). But they do have to do with each other and a good analysis of “passives” must of course have somethign to say about both.
By the way, “easily”.
Compare grammaticalisation of “hardly”. Has not this “easily” devoured modality of “can be easily”?
That’s a viable interpretation of me in Berlin, no question, but not so much of me back home. The FPÖ doesn’t seem to ever use the word either, and they didn’t shy away from using der kleine Mann auf der Straße (30 years ago).
Given that there’s a genitive in it (*unser einer must once have meant einer von uns), I’d expect it to have a geographically patchy distribution on first principles. It’s definitely absent in my dialect.
@drasvi
Your questions are hard for me…
English overuses participles in place of adjectives:
I am done = ich bin fertig = ya zakonchil
This is not a passive, like “I am hurt”, because the thing that is done is not me, but something I have completed or given up on.
Re easily v. hardly, easily has a habitual sense, where hardly is a “one-off” qualifier.
@PP, what do you mean by one-off?
I though “hardly easily” is more or less acceptable in English….
Hardly rarely if ever means “with difficulty” or “with hardship”. It nearly always means something like “almost didn’t” or “almost not”.
I hardly had time means I almost didn’t have time.
Hardly ever means almost never.
Easily almost always means “with ease”, “without difficulty”
And I’m hard put to come up with a sentence where “hardly easily” would make sense. It does not cromule for me.
@drasvi, ryan
Ryan, I agree that “*hardly easily” does not work, but “hardly easy” meaning “rather difficult” works as ironic understatement Maybe *easily-ish?
Drasvi, you are right that “easily” does not necessarily imply repeated action like, say, “frequently”. It depends on the rest of the sentence. “Hardly” is less adaptable, e.g.,
[FOOTBALL TEAM] barely avoided relegation on more than one occasion.
but not
*[FOOTBALL TEAM] hardly avoided relegation on more than one occasion.
20 years ago I heard a then-new song by Robert Plant on radio, The Enchanter, and one of the few chunks I was able to discern (because being fluent reader I couldn’t understand spoken English at all) was “it’s so easily done, easily done”.
Weirdly, hearing it once on radio was enough, now I’m hearing Plant’s voice in my head:)
@Ryan, that’s what I mean by “grammaticalisation” of hardly (I think it also can mean “not” without “almost”).
But I think in easily too underwent some degree of grammaticalisation. Namely, apart of the meaning “with ease” it can convey the modal meaning of “can be [easily] done wiktionary”.
I see that Wiktionary doesn’t even recognise this as a distinct “meaning”, glossing it in “…are easily controlled” as “without difficulty”. However what is said is not that someone is controlled. It means “can be controlled”.
(also I think – without confidence – that the word order is easily controlled but controlled without difficulty, and if so, I’m not sure if it is because of the brevity of easily or some other reason).
>hardly (I think it also can mean “not” without “almost”).
If I respond “I should hardly think so”, the meaning is that I don’t think so. And yet, I believe most English speakers would recognize it as understatement rather than the word hardly having a fully negative meaning.
And I did recognize what you meant by the grammaticalization of hardly. My point is that that hasn’t happened with easily. If you look at the uses in wiktionary, the only one that could plausibly be considered grammaticalized is #3. But note that easily can only be used in that way with comparatives and superlatives. They give “this is easily the best meal I have eaten”, but you can’t say, “this is easily a good meal I have eaten”. Easily here is basically characterizing the superlative suffix, defining the difference as an easily distinguishable one. It is still rooted transparently in the meaning of easy.
Ryan, “is easily” in the sense “can easily be” is quite a different story from grammaticalisation of hardly.
But I think the fact that “easily” can convey the modal meaning of “can” too makes it grammatically interesting. In Russian (replacing the passive participle with a reflexive verb: those are used in the same function) it would sound understandable but unidiomatic, the preferred construction is “is easy to [verb]”, also found in English. Perhaps this makes me inclined to read “is easily …” as omission of “can be” and then treat this omission as “easily ate can” and compare it to grammaticalisation.
@Ryan: Thinking about your examples, I noted that, “I could easily think so,” does not mean quite the same thing as “I could think so without difficulty.” The former means that the speaker has no prejudice or other reason to disbelieve if presented with evidence in support of a proposition—which (perhaps ironically) means much the same as either, “I could easily be convinced,” or, “I could be convinced with difficulty.”
Brett, sure, but that is still transparently using the meaning of easy. You say that “I could think so without difficulty” equates to the first meaning you offer but not the second. Consider that “I could think so without much difficulty” does equate to the second.
I think what you’re recognizing is again just very minor irony in the usage (as you hint), rather than a different or grammaticalized meaning.
Drasvi, I think you’re complaining about how adverbs work rather than making a case that the meaning has changed. Adverbs are often used in hypotheticals:
Easily, used your way — A teacher:
Today’s homework is easily completed = Today’s homework “can be” easily completed.
Another adverb used that way — A cooking instructor:
An egg is quickly cooked in a frying pan = An egg “can be” quickly cooked in a frying pan.
(Brett) I can easily imagine the world where I think (with or without difficulty) so? “Easily could” rather than “easily think”?
@Ryan, when I call something “(grammatically) interesting”, it is not a complaint!:)
@Ryan,
1. thanks! Grammaticalisation does mean change. And I’m not ready to speak of any historical change.
2. if so, then all adverbs are interesting:)
Your two examples, “today’s homework is [ ]completed and “an egg is [ ] cooked in a frying pan” are different in two important ways.
3.
(A) Today’s homework is easily completed > Today’s homework is completed
(B) An egg is quickly cooked in a frying pan > An egg is cooked in a frying pan
I think in (A) the meaning changes beyond recognition. In (B) the change is not as serious.
4. “Today’s homework” only compatible with the reading that it possibly can be easily completed. It is NOT “usually easily completed” or “sometimes completed” (what if the teacher came up with the idea for today’s homework today?).
“An egg”, in turn (I think so but as an L2 English reader – rather than speaker – I’m not entirely sure) is compatible with habitual readings (“usually quickly cooked”, “sometimes cooked in a frying pan”). Of course, the habitual reading entails possibility (you can insert “can” and if it was true, it still will be true), but it is not same as possibility.
____
Can “quickly” be used in contexts similar to that of “today’s homework”? Is it idiomatic there?
I mean, where it changes the meaning beyond recognition and which are only compatible with possibility, not with habitual meaning.
And I’m hard put to come up with a sentence where “hardly easily” would make sense. It does not cromule for me.
“Don’t complain. You can do it easily.”
“I can, but hardly easily”
maybe?
@DE, I feel jealous when you promote it. It is TOO similar to the way of thinking about language I came up with when reading essays by Russian learners, answering their questions etc. and when thinking what I want to have as a learner. But the idea is simple, one rather wonders why everyone else doesn’t speak about langauge this way.
The idea is simple conceptually, but its application is not.
Personally, I think this is a feature rather than a bug. Language is not simple: even if your overall theoretical orientation to the analysis of human language is valid, you shouldn’t be expecting simple answers all the time.
As St Ludwig reminds us: “Die Umgangssprache ist ein Teil des menschlichen Organismus und nicht weniger kompliziert als diese.”
A big part of the the difficulty is that meaning is much harder to get to grips with than form, both theoretically and practically. In consequence, a lot of modern linguistics has concentrated on separating the formal characteristics of language from meaning as much as possible (pretty much the antithesis of Construction Grammar.) It’s an interesting and suggestive true fact about human language that this approach works a lot better than one might have expected a priori.
a lot of modern linguistics has concentrated on separating the formal characterics of language …
On a historical note, and by ‘modern’ I presume you mean from 1920’s, but especially 1950’s onwards, starting with the formal is what symbolic logic/mathematical/computer languages do.
Unlike human languages, they’re deliberately syntactically unambiguous. Then automated processing can ‘layer’ the meaning on top of an already-parsed syntactic structure. Where “meaning” includes the denotation of variables and functions.
A moment’s observation of natural languages’ persistent ambiguity — also that human utterances aren’t so much complete sentences — should have shown (I would have thought) that modelling language generatively from the speaker top-down was going to be productive of sentences (maybe) but unproductive of models for parsing.
Yes, the tendency I had in mind actually goes back to Bloomfield, though its more pathological developments appear with Chomsky, of course.
Bloomfield’s argument was pretty much that taking meaning properly into account was just too damn hard, and we should see how far we could get without doing so: perhaps surprisingly, the answer turns out to be “quite a long way, considering.”
Chomsky, now … he thought that the map was the territory.
The interesting thing is that human languages do turn out to be not utterly unlike mathematical formal languages. (Perhaps that’s really because formal mathematical languages are not in fact eternal Platonic ideas, but have been invented by, like, people – people with human language capacities.)
human languages do turn out to be not utterly unlike mathematical formal languages.
It’s surprising how much formal languages can cope with what at first sight looks like syntactic ambiguity. GPSG is a fine example. Chomsky’s 3 models of grammar (that nobody got to see until decades later) was just wrong.
formal mathematical languages … have been invented by, like, people
Some people have gone out of their way to design (computer) languages that are really quite anti-human, but still Turing Complete. OTOH, I don’t think they’d have got there without first understanding examples of what they were aiming to avoid.
Nobody’s tried AFAIK to produce a computer language with inflection or any sort of morphology. They’re all just sequences of tokens.
-r, masculine, referring to Organismus.
AFAIK, there was an attempt once to make a computer language based in some way on Sanskrit (on the grounds that Sanskrit is oh-so-logical, of course); but I can’t find that on Wikipedia. Maybe it was so embarrassing it was purged from the article on Sanskrit and its talk page…
You might be thinking of Panini (or Pāṇini, to put in the diacritics) and his Aṣṭādhyāyi. Some people who read that Sanskrit grammar found it to be so formal and recursive that it resembled a finite-state machine as used by computer scientists.
There are a bunch of papers I’ve collected on the topic but haven’t read yet. As I understand it, if everything what is claimed about the grammar is true, it could be used to parse a Sanskrit text for grammatical correctness, and/or to generate a grammatically correct Sanskrit text.
I wonder if perhaps Panini may have deliberately excluded irregularities that would have caused problems. That is, he wrote a grammar for a very formal idiolect of Sanskrit. Those irregularities that were not in his grammar were then deprecated by himself and his successors as being wrong. But who knows?
Etienne brought up Panini in this thread, as being in an SF alternate-universe story: “[A Roman Empire that colonized the New World whose] technology is basically medieval, but it has a kind of computer technology whose foundation is “Pāṇinian” formal logic.”
I’ve been wondering what he meant by that.
He did explicitly label a bunch of irregularities as occurring “in the hymns” – as a difference between Vedic and Classical Sanskrit.
…make it speaker-oriented, so that a speaker who indentified as female would refer to all singular human beings as “she”… (link)
@DE, that’s what I do. I write “she”. I write “she” because I’m a man, in expectation that all like-minded ladies write “he” because they’re ladies.
I don’t know if I met any.
Let’s think that you selflessly though about ladies and their selfish needs, and I selflessly though about myself and my selfless needs)
(But I think my solution is pretty)
(But I think my solution is pretty)
It also matches my ideology: I’m feminist because I’m sexist (I like women) and expect like-minded ladies to behave accordingly. As I told, in some ways in does work so with my Russian female friends: in our arguments regarding which gender is disadvantaged in Russia, I said* female and they say male. And I’m GLAD it isn’t vice versa)))
* I changed my mind because conscription, which is indeed a form of slavery and a shame only needed because adults don’t want to pay.
As for people who are neither I perhaps would have some solution IF I knew one.
there was an attempt once to make a computer language based in some way on Sanskrit
Could it be Vedic or Smrti? Or perhaps Om?
… any sort of morphology.
Taking a very broad interpretation of ‘morphology’, there’s ALGOL 68
(And the
FIkeyword was also adopted into BASH shell scripting.)This was adopted to avoid a syntactic ambiguity in ALGOL 60: the ELSE part is optional; if you’re parsing a nested IF … THEN … and come across ELSE, does that belong to the inner or outer IF?
The spelling backwards idea applied for all sorts of syntax that featured arbitrary-length contents: ESAC, OD.
Why are people so hostile to that idea? (I know, I know, sexism.
LH, WHAT idea?
Availability of a pronoun for people who don’t think about themselves as men or women?
Something different from ‘he’ for hypothetical ungendered referents?
Complete replacement of gendered pronouns (or even ‘getting rid’ of them and gender)?
People speak of all three things in this thread, and my opinions about these three things are VERY differeht.
I support the first, I see nothing I could like about the third and I think the second is a really minor change in language but I don’t know if it affects our thinking. If ‘all of them’ then in my language I would be hostile to ‘the idea’ (because why not have the first without the third?)
‘nothing I could like’
Because poeple, I like to be of different sex, and I like to be of different gender with my frinds! It’fun, it’s cool. I don’t like the pressure to conform to gender roles. Any pressure to be anything but that thing one wants to be.
But the thing is, girls around me like to be girls and boys like to be boys, and for us gender is mostly a means of expression. Why would I want to deprive anyone of it? Let’s do something about the pressure instead, and if that will erase gender then it will and if it won’t then it won’t, but I won’t support a fight against what we enjoy:-/
If this isn’t enough, I also HATE all ideas of achieving equality by ‘making people alike’. Gender-neutrality as an ideal of language is one such idea.
And changing the socity by changing language too is not what I would really like (if I didn’t find the goal, ‘getting rid’ of gender in the society, horrible). It annoys me.
And some of the supporters are simply aggressive. This too is hardly likeable. Yes, I understand that likely some critics are aggressive too (elsewhere). But if some folks from your group are shelling mine and some folks from mine are shelling yours you can at best expect me to be equally sceptical of both group ideologies.
___
This is about the third idea. As I said, I do support the first. And I say ‘nothing I can like’ rather than ‘I hate it fiercely’ because you aren’t talking about Russian, it’s your language. (the strong word, ‘hate’ refers specifically to ”all ideas of achieving equality by ‘making people alike”’, not to language)
Could it be Vedic
Vedic’s potential for NLP — for which it is ideal of course because Sanskrit — has yet to be realised.
or Smrti
(That re-ordering of constituents is somewhat like Functional Programming’s partial application/currying and being able to use an infix operator as a prefix function or vice-versa. POP II language uses postfix notation (aka Reverse Polish). Kinda SOV, but it’s rigidly postfix throughout.)
perhaps Om
Again seems to be a thin veneer of Devanagiri keywords over a conventional C-like syntax.
Whilst it’s true that verbose COBOL or SQL use a lot of English-like syntax, modern C-like languages use maybe a few dozen keywords in mostly mathematical/algebraic notation. The hard part of learning the language is not the keywords. (And the supposed benefit of COBOL being English-like led to all sorts of line managers interfering in code, without realising for example full stops are significant but indenting is not.)
Bemusing as Smrti’s SOV looks, I think it’ll fail on grounds of verbosity,
but the actual third-person pronoun forms go back to English “he/him”
(this and also masculine in Ghanaian Hausa)
@DE, to balance it:
1. you must remember I think 2 person verbal forms for both genders in Arabic dialects which look like feminine 2sg elsewhere.
2. (semi-)Russian pidgins systematically use Russian feminine possessive moyá and tvoyá (“my”, “your”) for “I”, “you”. Feminine here means “agreeing with feminine possessed”, my feminine something, my female someone.
The sexist idea will be that masculine forms are used because they are masculine (of course!) and feminine forms are used because of their phonetical shape (and of course not because they are feminine!) but this sounds so sexist…
-r, masculine, referring to Organismus.
Quite so. Apols to LW.
(I’ve always felt that the sentence should be embroidered in letters of gold on a sampler, to be hung in the workroom of every linguist. Along with “All grammars leak.”)
masculine forms are used because they are masculine
In the Amazonian language Jarawara, feminine is the default gender. Groups of people are feminine unless all-male, and all first and second person pronouns take feminine agreement regardless of reference. (And all inalienably possessed nouns have the gender of their possessor.)
@de
Do the jarawara know how babies are made?
Yes. Why wouldn’t they?
@de
If they thought the mother was the sole progenetrix, they might be more likely to regard men as the spare. I do not think the connection between sex and babies is so obvious.
LH, WHAT idea?
The second.
@LH, thanks!
It was not a rhetorical question and people here actually speak about all three of them. Seeing them in such messy context referred simply as “the idea” drives me crazy.
As you see I use “she” instead of “he” (and while I say I expect same from like-minded women, I don’t need anyone to do same). But I don’t feel it this convention (“he”) is really a part of the langauge, for me it is more like a convention, comparable to honorifics.
Also I would love to see serious scientific studies of whether this “he” actually affects anyone’s thinking the way we don’t want it to be affected (say makes women feel “observers” rather than actors or whatever). I have doubts.
I also support the idea of different pronouns for anyone who wants them.
If you see me objecting or angered by this pronoun thing, it is because of the confusion. Say, “get rid” (of gender) is a quote from rozele, and some do actually speak about it. And I want to get rid of oppression associated with gender, but not of expression associated with it.
Also I would love to see serious scientific studies of whether this “he” actually affects anyone’s thinking the way we don’t want it to be affected (say makes women feel “observers” rather than actors or whatever). I have doubts.
Women have said so for a long time, if you want to believe them. (And no, I do not mean “every woman on earth,” so there’s no point telling me about your female friend who isn’t bothered.)
LH, that’s silly.
If you are not interested in opinion of my female friends, why I would be interested in opinions of some unnamed woman? You’re being disrespectful here, and not to me.
If I promice not to tell anymore about opinions of people I know, will you too promice not to tell anymore about opinions of “women”?
It IS possible to talk about such things, especially with like-minded people, without turning the conversation into a conflict.
I understand that you’re thinking that when you say something about women, I will object that my freinds say different things. I don’t know why you expect that (do you think I’m an enemy or what?). But the form you choose informs me that feelings of people I love and respect are neither important nor interesting.
There was one years ago that found English native speaker’s first reaction to, e.g., The surgeon prepared herself for the operation is the same as to grammatically incorrect sentences.
Also I would love to see serious scientific studies of whether this “he” actually affects anyone’s thinking the way we don’t want
The just-late Deborah Cameron springs to mind:
https://debuk.wordpress.com/
Lots of actual papers cited if you explore the archive.
“Other feminists examined the copious terminology available for talking about female genitals, pointing out that these terms tend to fall into one of three categories: clinical/Latinate (vagina, vulva, pudenda) obscene/pornographic (cunt, pussy, snatch) or vague and euphemistic (foofoo, ladyparts, undercarriage). They are numerous yet monotonous, sending largely the same message—that women’s genitals are shameful in a way that men’s are not. ”
The “three categories” would seem to be the same for the corresponding male organs. So I think the main (non-specific to male/female) explanation is handling of a taboo topic. Is the disproportionate effect for women because (a) there are more words for c–t? (b) many words for c–t are used specifically by men (in a perceived pejorative or demeaning way)? (c) asymmetric synecdoche (c–t for woman– or man — used as an insult more than dick/bollicks for a man, and never for a woman)?(d) transfer of other grievance which woman would feel slightly ridiculous or embarrassed if she articulated it directly?
The post discusses these issues in some detail. In general, Cameron liked evidence, and was impatient with ideologues of any kind who privileged theory over data.
A post which bears more directly on what drasvi was talking about is
https://debuk.wordpress.com/2025/10/20/the-birds-and-the-bears/
If they thought the mother was the sole progenetrix, they might be more likely to regard men as the spare.
But how does their system of grammatical gender lead to the presumption that they thought the mother was the sole progenetrix? I don’t follow. Our SAE traditional default-masculine systems do not appear to have led to any widespread inability to recognise motherhood …
And the Jarawara have a perfectly good word for “father.”
But I may have inadvertently given a misleading impression of the Jarawara gender system. Perhaps I should explain that family relationship words are not treated as inalienably possessed in Jarawara, though names, dreams, shadows and pains are, along with the usual suspects, like body parts. Languages which distinguish alienable from inalienable possession formally do not necessarily agree on the semantics of which nouns go in which category.
There’s a nice grammar of Jarawara by R M W Dixon, which is where I got all this from.
(Pdf versions can be found in the usual places.)
Still more relevant to drasvi’s points:
https://debuk.wordpress.com/2018/08/05/the-illusion-of-inclusion/
(Sorry for this piecemeal retrieval: I’m having some difficulty with relocating the posts I was thinking of on that site.)
@PP:
Ah. I have achieved satori. You were thinking of the opposite causal relationship: a people unaware of fatherhood might be more likely to regard feminine as the default gender. In hindsight, it’s pretty obvious what you were driving at: apologies for being dense.
There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of that in this case. And in fact, I think that what Jarawara has is a system in which masculine is the marked gender, which, if anything, I would have interpreted as going with a heightened association of masculine grammatical gender and biological maleness. Essentially, the converse of what Deborah Cameron is claiming about English in the birds-and-bears post.
But I’m also persuaded by what she says in the illusion-of-inclusiveness post: these sorts of grammatical epiphenomena are of little importance in themselves, and the real problems are tied to deep-seated social attitudes not fixable by linguistic tweaking alone. The language changes will follow the relevant social changes, as with her example of younger women appropriating “guys” as sex-neutral, from its former marked-as-male status, because they decline to associate the positive mutually-supportive associations of the word specifically with maleness.
I’m reminded of what rozele said recently about the “Ghanaian solution” to the pronoun-gender thing (viz. using “he” and “she” in free variation): IIRC, it would only actually work if the sexist social attitudes had already been fixed, so that nobody actually had any reason to care about being “misgendered”, as no unwelcome stereotyping could be implied by it.
@de
Thanks for being patient. I was brief and sometimes where I am ignorant, and I know someone else has the answer without having to look it up, I toss off an initial question before voicing an uninformed speculation. I like the recognition that ingrained attitudes reflected in language (if actually present!) have to change as well as the language, and that one can choose to be offended or not, assuming of course that the offender is acting in good faith.
One of the things about “misgendering” is that, whether presenting as “male” or “female” is a result of biology or socialisation (or even a conscious act), some people are doomed to present largely as the “misgendered” sex they are repudiating. This is like the person who has lived in another country or even town for most of their adult life but retain their childhood accent and attitudes .
these sorts of grammatical epiphenomena are of little importance in themselves, and the real problems are tied to deep-seated social attitudes not fixable by linguistic tweaking alone.
This is my basic attitude.
I toss off an initial question before voicing an uninformed speculation.
I do that too!
“my basic attitude” – but somehow you get annoyed when I say I don’t know how important is what you say is of little importance and want to see serious scientific studies of their importance.
And tell me that “women” say they are important (“if you want to believe them”). Tell me that – while also advising me not to cite opinions of any specific women I know here.
@DE, my point:
When we call hypothetical referents (“one”, “the reader will ask: …”) “he”, a Whorfian hypothesis comes to mind that this will somehow affect our thinking. For example, it will make women see themselves as outside observers of the society.
This would be a motivation to change this he, if, of course, we want people to think differently (say, we want women to see themselves not as observers).
However I feel this change won’t require much effort from me or from the society (and is not a serious change in the langauge). I feel it is “cheap”. Can the effect also be “cheap”? Can it be so that this change will not really affect anyone’s “thinking”?
Besides, I know that usually hypotheses about people’s behaviour, thoughts and feelings based on simple symmetry contradict the reality. You think that – of course! – it will make people prefer A to B and… it makes them prefer B to A or doesn’t change their preferences.
Whorfian hypotheses must be tested, but it is very difficult to do. So I wish to see sceintific studies etc.
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One important note: I said “outside observers”. But in reality the society is split in two halves, male and female.
Many our problems arise from the fact that many parts of what we (or many of us) believe to be “the society” or “the worthy part of the society” were once parts of the male half – and from that we-or-many-of-us, men and women, think the women’s half is somehow “stupid”.
An example of that view is what Russians (and I think Europeans) think about Arab women. They think all they do is “obey men” because men “made” them so. Looks like a feminist view, even though offensive (and very much so) to Arab women.
And it is not conceivable that women will be as unaware of the “women’s half” as men are or see themselves as “outsiders” (or “observers”) in it.
@DE, I read the first of the two posts.
With hesitation (because I’m angered at LH) Maybe I’ll read more when I calm down.
I would say, scientifically it raises questions but doesn’t lead to answers. But that is what blog posts are meant to do.
It mentions a point similar to mine, but:
1. it is about how “he” is not realistic
2. the post disagree with this view (said [passive!:)] to be a view of second-wave feminists)
3. then, somewhat confusingly, it tells this “he” is a problem
4. because it reinforces… what is criticised by Wittig. But… Wittig in the quote is speaking about grammatical gender, which makes this reinforcement tautological.
This is somewhat confusing. Similarly confusing is what she says about language that doesn’t produce the “bias”. But
– what bias is meant here, perceptual, cultural, social – or grammatical? Locically, the first, second and third and not fourth, one can’t say that language does NOT reinforce language. But as I said, Wittig’s quote is about grammatical gender, and what this post is written about (calling lionesses “he”) too can be linguistics (people seeing a lioness can’t really believe she’s male).
On the other hand, the distribution of book characters is culture.
– she says “language on its own”. What does it mean, “on its own”?
Does it produce the bias in thinking (if that’s what is meant) or not? Do we agree with Whorf here or not?
We all, of course, know that speakers of a language always also have a culture and that cultural biases are mostly found in the culture.
One meaningful interpretation would be that in a culture without a bias biased language won’t change anything, while in a biased culture it will reinforce the bias. In other words, it can reinforce something but not more than that. But I don’t think this is what is meant.
It looks like an attempt to find such words that combine both linguistic [excessive?] scepticism of Whorfian ideas and feminist [excessive?] enthusiasm about them, as in the Russian joke about the “comrade colonel” and crocodiles (“Comrade colonel, do crocodiles fly?” “They do not” “But comrade general said they do!” “Well, they do, but nizén’ko-nizén’ko…” – lit. reduplicated to emphasise the diminution diminutive of the adverb nízko “lowly” with dialectal stress, instead of literary nízen’ko).
Sorry, I didn’t mean to criticise the post (and it is normal for blog post to raise questions rather than give serious answers), I really don’t know how this “on its own” should be understood. EIther it does have a bad effect on speakers or not. Or the effect is weak quantitatively (unlike crocodile flight it can be so!). Or if things are more complicated, then “on its own” does not tell how exactly.
This is not the only confusing thing. The post begins from “treating as male” when the sex is not known but then an example with a lioness whose sex IS known is said to illustrate the “strength” of this habit. But this example contradicts to what is said about “unknown gender”, moreover, it’s incompatible with the interpretation that the speaker is actually thinking about the lioness as a male.
Meanwhile, words “treating” and “male” (not “speaking”, not “masculine”) must refer to thoughts, not grammar.
And then below “not an easy question to answer” (I agree) and “choice of he might not always” reflect beliefs.
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As a Russian speaker I’m suprised that someone can call a lioness he. When I call a male dog or cat sobáka or kóshka (the first is the most common name of the species, grammatically feminine, and does not mean “bitch”, the second is both the common name of the species and the name of female cats) I can use she.
But in Russian nouns agree with verbs and adjectives.
Sobáka poshlá “dog went”, not poshël*. And then Oná poshlá, not on poshlá.
Imagine a phone call:
A: “I’m walking my dog” – the expected word is sobáka. Many prefer grammatically masculine pës for thier male dogs and object to others when those say sobáka. But I’m less sure about the idiomatic “walking a dog”. The example can be change to “I’m with Mary, she is walking her dog”, then I’m more confident about sobáka.
B: “and what SHE (your dog) is doing?”
A: “I’m walking with Rex [a dog name common in 80s]”
B: “and what HE (Rex) is doing?”
But English “she” does not agree with anything.
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*Not for humans, 1st declension nouns referring to men (like Latin nauta) usually** have masculine agreement.
With grammatically masculine words for women the usage can vary, and either way you feel either grammatical discomfort from the agreement “poet [m.] said [f.]” or social discomfort from masculine agreement when talking about a woman. Which motivates “poetess”.
** in “what заноза [splinter] in the arse he is!” , “what” is likely to be feminine.
Oh, lowly is an adjective like friendly, so the adverb of low is… low, following the model of hard instead of the model of friendly.
About gendered languages, specifically Russian:
1. the birch tree is absolutely a girl, and so is fox.
2. distinct words for genders lisá, lis “fox” volk, volchítsa “wolf” don’t seem to change much.
Either one of two (as with cats) or something entirely different is used as the name of a species.
In translated fairy tales fox can be male, and I guess in those written by people who read them too.
In Russian fairy tales foxes are girls. Because how not, if birches and foxes are always oná “she”?
Neither using “he” with lisá nor using an uncommon word seem to be a good idea.
But I’m not sure about cattle. “Bull” and “cow” seem to be entirely different – the principle about distinct name of species either doesn’t work for them, or does not work in literary Russian – and I don’t remember fairy tales about them.
And I DO think about birch trees as women and oaks as men (to an extent) and for this reason it can be annoying when people tell that those genders are hardly more than a grammatical convention:)
DM, I vaguely remembered that (without being confident that it is NOT used as an adverb in this meaning, but with a feeling that it is not normal) but decided to make it morphemically literal.
“oaks as men” – an example of this thinking is the wasp thread.
“Only a woman can have a wasp waist” says Aleksandra Jagielska. I do not feel that in Russian comparison of a man’s waist to that of an osa won’t work because of gender: we are not comparing the man to an osa, we are comparing waists. I understand the reason why “hourglass figure” which is same is usually said about women differnetly (men don’t have such hips, Ideal men don’t have such waists) and I think I could say osinaya taliya (but maybe not “hourglass figure” in English – this somehow feels more feminine to me, rather that purely geometrically descriptive – can be so because I learned the English phrase from different contexts) about a man if he looks so.
But whether it is same in Polish or not, Aleksandra thought so.
@DE, about that post again:
____
Whorfian hypotheses are hardly easy to test:( Not only so, linguists tend to stay away from them.
The author of this post (knowing the state of the art very well, I believe) seems not to be sure what’s going which may mean I’m even less likely to find a good study of the question (I mean my question)
____
Language and culture:
“He” for hypothetical referents like “someone” is a convention and not something speakers choose intuitively. Speakers of many languages do it because it is a convention, C. And it arose in an entirely different culture. I say “arose”, we must then ask from what state? It either was a shift from some other system X (which one?) or [it’s so old that] it came with grammatical gender.
We don’t know if such shift X > C could or would have happened in the 21st century. We don’t know if a shift from any other possible state or convention Y could or would have happened either in the 21st century or when X>C happened.
We also don’t know if in the 21st century language tends to maintain C or another slow shift to some other state Y is going to happen. We know it maintained it before.
But we can speculate about factors.
– literacy must make any such change (from most states) less likely
– markedness of female gender must make spread of “she” in this function less likely
– changed gender roles must make some change more like
It seems to me that we can’t meaningfully say something about whether this convention has anything to do with the culture of the 21st century (I mean here not the “whorfian hypothesis” but influence of the culture on language).
Maybe we can learn in what culture from what state and why it arose?
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It is somewhat different for “he” for lioness and mayor of Paris. People have a choice there.
Re, foxes as girls in Russian fairy tales, is this Ukrainian literary/folkloric/animated fox taken by Russians to be a girl or does the maleness of the specific character override that? https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9B%D0%B8%D1%81_%D0%9C%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B0
As I may have mentioned before, I myself am aware of this particular fox only because I sometimes patronize the drinking establishment on Second Avenue in the East Village named Лис Микита in Ukrainian but the Sly Fox in English (since Anglophone patrons without a personal connection to East-Slavicness tend to be unaware of Mykyta as a specific famous fox). The Sly Fox sounds like a perfectly cromulent name for a bar in traditional English-or-Irish pub onomastics.
JWB, лиса lisá, also лиса lisítsa are names of the species and also of female foxes.*
лис lis is a male fox.
Микита is a лис lys, so a boy) But I don’t know it the stories were influenced by Ukriainian own fairy tales or say tales about Reynard…
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*I never thought about it, but this pair is a bit strange, because lisítsa is used in encyclopedic entries about Vulpes, but it is diminutive so lisá somehow sounds serious.
Compare WP:Фенек (Fennec): diminutive лисица with large ears … from dialectal Arabic فَنَك “лиса” (not what Arabic dictionaries say, but if we interpret “fox” as “the most common local Vulpes” then of course fenek means “fox” in Sahara and the local pronunciation of ṯaʕlab will mean “what they have to the the north of the desert instead of foxes”)
@JWB, funnily, лис “he-fox” is not uncommon in (Russian) male nicknames and avatars on the Internet. Either because many he-foxes we read about we read about in translation, or because the word is so simple, shortest possible in a langauge full of long words – but lis sounds respectable, and maybe mysterious, and that he is “cunning” make you think he must be clever.
For romanticism and translations, compare your own feelings about, say, kitsune.
Compared to this, лиса (and maybe also) лисица “she-fox” as a virtual character of a woman is a bit simplistic (some women do look so that one will compare them to she-foxes – is it because we saw films where women play vixens*?) and is “cunning” less attractively.
* “women play vixens” doesn’t sound neat. Must be “women play vixen”.
Cf. Pelevin’s A Khuli.
“the most common local Vulpes” – I learn from WP that there is another Sahara fox apart of fennec, namely Rüppel’s fox with same-but-larger range. I guess ṯaʕləb etc.?