Re: New Front Desk members
On Mon, 31 Jan 2005, Nick Phillips wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 12:11:36AM +0000, MJR wrote:
> > By the way, can you substantiate that Shakespeare claim? To
> > forestall the one in the Comedy of Errors, "not a man" =
> > "no men", which is a plural, so "their" can be accurate. Many
> > alleged examples of the "singular their" are zero rather than
> > singular and yet more are indefinite numbers.
>
> Bollocks [1]. Randomly switching genders all the time is *way* more
> confusing than using "they", "their" etc.
Actually, for a non-native speaker it might not be. I certainly would get
more confused by singular "they". I'd not get the idea that it means there
is only one being involved, instead I would get the idea that there is an
*unknown* number of *unknown* beings involved.
On the other hand, when facing a "he is this, she is also that" type of
sentence, I'd just think "yuck, what an ugly way to write that!".
I wonder how many native speakers would assume "they" to refer to an unknown
number of unknown elements when used as an indefinite pronoum? That seems
to be the real question here.
BTW, using "someone" will NOT convey the certain idea of a single being to
me either. It also refers to an unknown number of beings to me, as all
other indefinite pronoums do. Maybe that's because I am no native speaker.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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