Can they mean it?

Dennis Baron (@DrGrammar on twitter) linked to a text from 1789 in which William Marshall writes about a gender-neutral pronoun in Gloucestershire, ou, meaning either he, she or it. It describes the word as being analogous with plural they. So ou will means he will, she will, or it will. In the same way, they will can refer to men, women, mixed groups, unknown genders, or inanimate objects (‘how are the trains? Oh, they will all be delayed’). This made me wonder about singular they, which can refer to a male or female referent (which would also be grammatical with he or she respectively), or someone of neither/another gender, or unknown gender, etc. But I’m pretty sure it can’t refer to something that would normally require it. I don’t know if I can think of a context where it’s not clear whether the referent is animate/human or not, therefore making a word that covers all possibilities a useful addition. Perhaps ‘Someone or something has knocked over the garden fence’, where it could be vandals or the wind? 

Incidentally, I’d saved the link to this with the note to myself ‘Can they mean it?’, as per the title of this post. I was so confused about who might mean what, until I realised that I was asking whether the word they can mean the same thing as the word it. 

Congratulations on being an alumni?

My final-year students are graduating today. They'll be graduands for the duration of the morning and afternoon, and by around 3.30pm they'll be graduates. I enjoy this use of Latin morphology: the -and ending comes from the Latin gerund and gerundives, which end in -andum or -andus/-anda/-andum respectively.

The gerund is a noun derived from a verb, so in English it would be something like Graduating is a reason to celebrate. The gerundive is an adjective, and it's translated as something like 'to be graduated' (or 'fit to be graduated' or 'ought to be graduated'). It's this gerundive sense that we use in English: they are the students who are (fit) to be graduated. (Notice that we're using an adjective to refer to a thing, as in 'the French'.)

It appears that we've knocked off the gender agreement ending (-us, -a, or -um) and this helps us out in English so that we don't have to worry about whether it's a male or female graduand. Incidentally, when we borrowed this word into English I'm pretty sure they'd have all been chaps so I don't think this was gender equality at work.

When the graduands morph into graduates, they also become alumni, another Latin word. It's plural, in that form, and pedants will have know that the singular is alumnus or alumna, depending on whether you're male or female. Again, this is a bit annoying for English speakers who don't really bother that much with gender other than pronouns, and even there we're not fully signed up to a gendered system (we make no distinction other than for singular humans that aren't me or you (he and she, in other words), and singular they is also available if we can't be bothered even with that).

Normal procedure when removing gender distinction is to go with the male for everyone: actors and actresses become actors, lady doctors become doctors, and so on. With alumni, we're taking to using the plural form for everyone. You're an alumni once you graduate. This ever so slightly grates on me but I am a good linguist and a descriptivist and do not go around correcting people. I don't know why we use the plural. We're familiar with this in words like cactus/cacti so we might have used alumnus as the singular; we just didn't. Perhaps it's because we use alumni in the plural way more often than the singular and, as it's not that common a word, that's the one that stuck.

Specification of pronouns

Sigh. Another silly article. It discusses the perfectly valid point that it would be good to have a gender-neutral pronoun so that people who identify as neither male nor female do not feel excluded, but then it says:

"For those now considering commenting to suggest that there’s a perfectly fine existing neutral pronoun – “they” – remember that pronouns must match both gender and number. So in the case of single individuals, it’s grammatically inaccurate." 

WRONG. As we know, what's grammatical is what speakers find to be grammatical, including singular 'they' for most people. (Let's also overlook the fact that in saying that 'pronouns must match... gender' it precisely contradicts the point of the article, which is that we want a pronoun that isn't specified for gender.) Fortunately, someone in the comments section was there to help them out:

"If pronouns have to agree on number and gender why aren't you campaigning for new words to separate you (singular) from you (plural)?" 

The technical term for this is 'underspecification': forms might be specified for number, gender, and person (first/second/third), and if any of these is not present, it's underspecified for that feature and it can 'match' with anything. So, for instance, we might say that you is not specified for number. In fact, it probably is, as it has to occur with the plural form of the verb (were rather than was, for instance), just like they does. And then of course in French the pronoun used to refer to 'you (singular)' is either singular or plural, depending on whether one is being polite (tu/vous) with appropriate singular/plural verb agreement. 

This is a much more sensible article on the matter.