this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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My main problem with it is the namespace ambiguity, especially with respect to plurality. For simple statements it's fine, if you're saying something about one person it's going to be clear they are the one you refer to. If you're talking about their relationship to a group though, unlike a singular pronoun it is no longer explicit that you refer to them but not them, for instance. You compensate for this by making sure your meaning is clear in other ways and it can be made to work, but the fact you have to put in extra effort to make up for "they"'s relative lack of structural utility is a serious problem with the word.
I still use it for lack of a better way to avoid implying knowledge/relevance of gender, but it would be nice if some overtly singular gender neutral pronoun like xe would catch on.
Yeah as an example a simple sentence like "My daughter and her boyfriend went to a concert but she got ill so they had to come home"
Can't change to "My daughter and her boyfriend went to a concert but they got ill so they had to come home"
It loses its meaning.
My daughter and her boyfriend went to a concert but my daughter got ill so they had to come home" is extra "work"
It's not perfect
But you literally just demonstrated how dealing with ambiguous pronouns is a non-issue? You'd get the exact same ambiguity with "a mother and daughter went to a concert but [she] got ill".
But you would never say that, unless you actually wanted to confuse people!
In your example, you'd have to say the mother or the daughter, but not in my example
How does your example read if you change 'she' for 'they'?
I think you've missed the point. You don't say it that way because it's ambiguous and it's natural to avoid the ambiguity. The same applies to your example; you're speaking in an intentionally awkward way and you already know how you'd say it normally.