Swedish hens and singular "they"
Apr 16th 2012, 16:25 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2012/04/genderSLATE'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
