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Swedish hens and singular "they"

Started by Shana A, April 17, 2012, 08:53:34 AM

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Shana A

April 17, 2012, 08:53:34 AM
Swedish hens and singular "they"

Apr 16th 2012, 16:25 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2012/04/gender

SLATE's Nathalie Rothschild wrote last week about gender in Sweden. Among Swedish efforts to minimise gender stereotyping is a small movement to replace the pronouns han and hon, "he" and "she", with a single pronoun, hen.

This is not unique to Sweden. Such pronouns have been proposed for English, too. And last year my colleague wrote about v as a pronoun for transgender people.

[...]

Mr Pullum notes an irony:

    our pronoun they was originally borrowed into English from the Scandinavian language family (the Danish spoken by the invaders of northern England about a thousand years ago) and since then has been doing useful service in English as the morphosyntactically plural but singular-antecedent-permitting gender-neutral pronoun known to linguists as singular they.

Yes, singular they has been used for quite a long time in impeccable English sources. It has three gender-neutral uses,when the gender of an antecedent is
"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken." Oscar Wilde
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