I very much agree. Learning English as a foreign language, it feels very wrong to use plural for a single person. I'm still not quite used to it! Although, had I been taught that early on, I doubt it would feel any weirder than using "you are" for a single person.

[–] DevilishOxenRoll@lemmy.kyryli.uk 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

And that's actually a pretty recent development. Less than a decade ago, I remember getting marked down in English class for using "they" as a genderless singular pronoun, as my elderly teacher grew up only ever using "they" to refer to a group.

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 14 points 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

This use of singular they had emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they.[4][5][2] It has been commonly employed in everyday English ever since and has gained currency in official contexts. Singular they has been criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who consider it an error.[6] Its continued use in modern standard English has become more common and formally accepted with the move toward gender-neutral language.[7][8] Though some early-21st-century style guides described it as colloquial and less appropriate in formal writing,[9][10] by 2020, most style guides accepted the singular they as a personal pronoun.[11][12][13][14]

Your teacher was just one of those purists and it was never something with strong consensus for being wrong.

[–] TofuSauce 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Shakespear used they as a singular iirc

[–] potpie 7 points 1 year ago

And Chaucer split infinitives, but I was always told it was "wrong" in gradeschool. That's the problem with pedantry: language is a fascinatingly complex and beautiful set of patterns. Boiling it down to rules is at best a handy style guide for formal writing, but at worst it gets weaponed as a way to discriminate against people who use lower prestige dialects.

[–] DevilishOxenRoll@lemmy.kyryli.uk 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's true, and there is evidence of "they" being used as a singular as far back as over 700 years ago, but only within the last few decades has it been formally accepted by style guides, like the APA or the Chicago Manual.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 2 points 1 year ago

It's not plural though. It's just the third person neuter pronoun. Singular "they" has been a thing in English for centuries, and has only been controversial among a small segment of the population for a very short time.

Think of it a bit like French "vous". That's a "plural" (second person) pronoun, but is also used in the singular. In the French case, it's used as a singular formal second person pronoun in addition to a plural second person pronoun. Nobody in France is getting up in arms about how you shouldn't use "vous" when talking to one person.

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[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 2 points 1 year ago

is not very intuitive though

Yes it is. It's completely intuitive. Native English speakers do it all the time every day. The singular "they" is used literally without conscious thought. The only time it becomes controversial is with transphobes talking about specific people who do not identify with their gender assigned at birth. Even transphobes use singular "they" without thinking in contexts like this OP where the gender is unknown. (Which is why their "but it's bad grammar!" arguments fall flat.)