Pronouns

[stickygirl]

Just as one example, "it's" as the possessive, as in the "the dog lost it's collar" is still technically incorrect, but it's used so much that it will likely become acceptable in the near future if it isn't already.

I think that's simply based on uncertainty over the dog's gender, plus it's just a dog.
"They is" sounds distinctly UK west country colloquial along with "'em are" and others

 

[NC_Coastal]

As an English major (now a writer), I have strong feelings about pronouns - possessive, plural, indefnite, reflexive, whatever). There are specific uses for each, and they do not evolve. This new thinking of an evolving language makes my skin crawl. The whole she/her he/him identity pronouns are silly. And not knowing the difference between who and whom is just ignorant.
OK, end of rant. Carry on y'all (note the proper spelling of the gender-neutral,second-person, plural pronoun)

 

[SimonDoom]

Just as one example, "it's" as the possessive, as in the "the dog lost it's collar" is still technically incorrect, but it's used so much that it will likely become acceptable in the near future if it isn't already.

This throws a lot of people, but if you think about it, it is consistent with the way the possessive form of other pronouns is handled. We don't write "he's" or "her's or "their's." I don't believe "It's" as a possessive will become acceptable. I think people do that just because they forget or they are unaware, but my guess is "its" is here to stay. But who knows?

 

[stickygirl]

As an English major (now a writer), I have strong feelings about pronouns - possessive, plural, indefnite, reflexive, whatever). There are specific uses for each, and they do not evolve. This new thinking of an evolving language makes my skin crawl. The whole she/her he/him identity pronouns are silly. And not knowing the difference between who and whom is just ignorant.
OK, end of rant. Carry on y'all (note the proper spelling of the gender-neutral,second-person, plural pronoun)

Thank you for writing in modern English and not the Anglo-Saxon from where it evolved.
"Indefinite" btw

 

[windar]

This throws a lot of people, but if you think about it, it is consistent with the way the possessive form of other pronouns is handled. We don't write "he's" or "her's or "their's." I don't believe "It's" as a possessive will become acceptable. I think people do that just because they forget or they are unaware, but my guess is "its" is here to stay. But who knows?

English lacks an official body to rule on the language the way French, for example, has with the Academie Francaise (that second c should have a cedille under it and the first e should have an accent, but I can't figure out how to do that here), so if enough people do something it becomes accepted. That's happened countless times in the past. Also, keep in mind that the large majority of speakers of English in the world are non-native speakers, given its status as a sort of lingua franca.

I think that's simply based on uncertainty over the dog's gender, plus it's just a dog.
"They is" sounds distinctly UK west country colloquial along with "'em are" and others

"Just" a dog, "just" a dog? Excuse me!!

They's is very commonly used among African Americans as I noted above.

 

[Bramblethorn]

As an English major (now a writer), I have strong feelings about pronouns - possessive, plural, indefnite, reflexive, whatever). There are specific uses for each, and they do not evolve.

As a statement of preference, that's valid and one with which I can sympathise. As an assertion about the history and likely future of the language, it's at odds with facts in evidence.

For instance, in Shakespeare's time, it was common to use an objective pronoun in constructions such as "get thee to a nunnery", or "get you home, go". In similar constructions today, fussy grammarians would usually prescribe a reflexive: "get yourself to the theatre" not "get you to the theatre". There are dialects where you might still hear "get you to the theatre" but it's not something you'd want to write on an English exam.

Language is a human construct. There is no divine authority for how the language works; ultimately it's defined by how people use it, and human usage is constant and ever-changing.

Concepts like "reflexive", "indefinite", etc. etc. are attempts to summarise that usage in a way that's relatively terse and easy to convey to a learner. But we need to be wary of reification: such descriptive concepts don't always capture the full nuance of a language, and when the concept conflicts with usage, that just means we've hit the limits of the concept's usefulness, not that the usage is ipso facto wrong.

(A parallel: biologists found it convenient to define a class of beings called "mammals", defined by having body hair and suckling their young, and observed that mammals all had four limbs and gave birth to live young. But then they discovered the platypus and the echidna, creatures which have hair and suckle their young but lay eggs. After a period of denial, they accepted that just because monotremes didn't fit nicely into their classification didn't mean such creatures didn't exist. Instead, they needed to adjust their ideas about what a "mammal" could be.)

I've already discussed an old example of English pronoun evolution, the expansion of "you" to replace "thou" as second person singular. Another example from history is the royal "we", which is by now an archaism and will probably pass out of use altogether in the next few decades.

For more recent examples, windar reminded me that there's a significant chunk of English where "they is" does see common use. (Though I think this is a different usage to what Trionyx was suggesting, with "they is" & "you is" for both plural and singular).

I suspect we're also living through a partial breakdown of the distinction between objective and subjective first person. People struggle with "John and I" vs. "John and me", and since the confusion very rarely impairs understanding, there's not a strong pressure to maintain consistency.

(One of the reasons English so often fails to follow these neat rules is that, for most speakers, those rules aren't how they learn the language or how they think about it. The average person isn't thinking in terms of objective, subjective, reflexive; they're just remembering the kinds of situations where they're encountered this particular word before.)

This new thinking of an evolving language makes my skin crawl.

New thinking? It's been a pretty uncontroversial idea among linguists since at least the Victorian era. Indeed, Darwin himself leant heavily on the evolution of language as a close parallel to the evolution of species:

The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel. (67. See the very interesting parallelism between the development of species and languages, given by Sir C. Lyell in ‘The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man,’ 1863, chap. xxiii.)... In the spelling also of words, letters often remain as the rudiments of ancient forms of pronunciation. Languages, like organic beings, can be classed in groups under groups; and they can be classed either naturally according to descent, or artificially by other characters. Dominant languages and dialects spread widely, and lead to the gradual extinction of other tongues. A language, like a species, when once extinct, never, as Sir C. Lyell remarks, reappears. The same language never has two birth-places. Distinct languages may be crossed or blended together. (68. See remarks to this effect by the Rev. F.W. Farrar, in an interesting article, entitled ‘Philology and Darwinism,’ in ‘Nature,’ March 24th, 1870, p. 528.) We see variability in every tongue, and new words are continually cropping up; but as there is a limit to the powers of the memory, single words, like whole languages, gradually become extinct. As Max Muller (69. ‘Nature,’ January 6th, 1870, p. 257.) has well remarked:—“A struggle for life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand, and they owe their success to their own inherent virtue.” To these more important causes of the survival of certain words, mere novelty and fashion may be added; for there is in the mind of man a strong love for slight changes in all things. The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection. - Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex", 2nd edition (1874).

His next paragraph is also quite pertinent to our discussion:

...But it is assuredly an error to speak of any language as an art, in the sense of its having been elaborately and methodically formed. Philologists now admit that conjugations, declensions, etc., originally existed as distinct words, since joined together; and as such words express the most obvious relations between objects and persons, it is not surprising that they should have been used by the men of most races during the earliest ages. With respect to perfection, the following illustration will best shew how easily we may err: a Crinoid sometimes consists of no less than 150,000 pieces of shell (71. Buckland, ‘Bridgewater Treatise,’ p. 411.), all arranged with perfect symmetry in radiating lines; but a naturalist does not consider an animal of this kind as more perfect than a bilateral one with comparatively few parts, and with none of these parts alike, excepting on the opposite sides of the body. He justly considers the differentiation and specialisation of organs as the test of perfection. So with languages: the most symmetrical and complex ought not to be ranked above irregular, abbreviated, and bastardised languages, which have borrowed expressive words and useful forms of construction from various conquering, conquered, or immigrant races.

English is pretty irregular, abbreviated, and bastardised, as such things go.

The whole she/her he/him identity pronouns are silly. And not knowing the difference between who and whom is just ignorant.

No no no. "Ignorance" is when you don't know a thing that I have declared to be important. Not the other way around!

The reason the "who"/"whom" distinction is vanishing from English isn't because people are stupid or lazy. It's because most people just don't find it very important or useful (if they did, they'd observe it!) We don't need different words for the subjective and objective forms of "who" any more than we need them for "you"; context is enough to distinguish.

Meanwhile, evolution of the language introduces new, more useful distinctions. One of my favourites is African American English's use of the habitual "be":

...groups of black and white children were shown images from Sesame Street. In the crucial picture, a sick Cookie Monster languished in bed without any cookies, while Elmo stood nearby eating a cookie. “Who is eating cookies?” Jackson asked her test subjects, and all of them indicated Elmo. “Who be eating cookies?” Jackson then asked. The white kids replied that it was Elmo, while the black kids pointed to Cookie Monster. After all, it is the existential state of Cookie Monster to be eating cookies, while Elmo just happened to be eating a cookie at that moment. Cookie Monster, to those conversant in AAE, be eating cookies, whether he is eating cookies or not. The kids in Jackson’s experiment picked up on the subtle difference when they were as young as 5 or 6.

 

[SimonDoom]

Right now I'm reading Matt Ridley's book Genome, on, of course, the human genome.

One of the most interesting things about the human genome is how much of it is worthless crap that means nothing. A very big portion of the "genes" in our chromosomes don't do anything at all. Our genome evolved, and it mutated, over millions of years, and somehow the result was us. But there's no design or logic to it.

I'm by nature a somewhat fussy grammarian, but the older I get the more aware I am that language is somewhat the same way. It's an unplanned and disorderly accretion of "rules" that let us communicate with one another. But there's nothing essentially right or wrong about it.

Still, however, I'm standing my guard in defense of the serial comma (I refuse, on patriotic grounds, to call it the "Oxford comma").

 

[Auden James]

One of the most interesting things about the human genome is how much of it is worthless crap that means nothing. A very big portion of the "genes" in our chromosomes don't do anything at all.

This misguided notion has been debunked for some time now, see: Weird molecular hoops dispel 'junk DNA' myth.

Perhaps you better read a more up-to-date book on genetics?

 

[XerXesXu]

The reason the "who"/"whom" distinction is vanishing from English isn't because people are stupid or lazy. It's because most people just don't find it very important or useful (if they did, they'd observe it!) We don't need different words for the subjective and objective forms of "who" any more than we need them for "you"; context is enough to distinguish.

A very important use of grammar is to communicate status. If you speak using high-status grammar in complex sentences, policemen will call you 'Sir', in a deferential tone, shop assistants will serve you first, when a decision needs to be made faces will turn to you. Even the SAS expect their officers to speak in high-status English.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...flux-working-class-recruits-soldiers-say.html

 

[AlinaX]

The idea of there being so much junk DNA was certainly popular for a long time, but I imagine it's much like looking in someone's wardrobe and concluding that 90% of the clothes are never worn - except DNA is so huge (information-wise) that it's more like the inside of Barbie's Dreamhouse closet.

 

[AlinaX]

A very important use of grammar is to communicate status. If you speak using high-status grammar in complex sentences, policemen will call you 'Sir', in a deferential tone, shop assistants will serve you first, when a decision needs to be made faces will turn to you. Even the SAS expect their officers to speak in high-status English.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...flux-working-class-recruits-soldiers-say.html

On the subject of disproven theories... Have you noticed who our prime minister is these days?

 

[XerXesXu]

It's worked well for me.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

'Junk DNA' just means it doesn't code for a gene - it doesn't have the clusters of 3-letter sequences which encode amino acids complete with start and stop signals. Now we know a lot of it acts as promoters,enhancers, regulators of alternate splicing, and just plain structural sections to get other bits to bend as needed, but there's also lots which is simply faulty duplications of other bits, never deleted because there's no pressure to do so and they may make handy transposable elements at some point. It all still gets called 'junk' but doesn't mean it's useless (just like the junk in Scrapheap Challenge...)


Grammar and vocabulary choices can indicate status but also in-group vs out-group. Hang round any school at kicking-out time and you'll hear local dialects, some more modern Black British (aka Ja-fake-an when the the kid isn't from the Caribbean), some more classic working class London, some more influenced by Eastern European languages. Soon as their teachers appear they code-switch to dialect if not accent sounding more like middle-class London, and then may switch to a third version when they return to their parents.

Prestigious dialects change just as much. It's often noted that even the Queen doesn't speak the Queen's English any more - plenty of recordings to show how her accent has changed over the last 70 years. The words shall and shan't have mostly died out and certainly the distinctions between them vs will and won't were dying even when Fowler wrote Modern English Usage (the joke "I will drown; no one shall save me!" and the Englishmen obeying the command by not helping, was little understood even a century ago), but Enid Blyton, the hugely popular children's author from the 50s to 80s, now sounds very old-fashioned mostly thanks to the children saying 'I shall go'.

But English is a bastard mongrel language pillaging words and phrasing from every other language it meets and beating them to fit English. Like the word 'innit', spreading from South London to much of England in the last 20 years, to be used just like 'n'est-ce pas?' or 'oder?' or SAfrican 'is it?'

I've noticed many of my young colleagues (graduates aged 21-28) will talk about their partner using the pronoun they as a default - they aren't just reluctant to admit to a same-sex partner, it's just their norm. Looks like another language change. If even the Queen can happily give honours to people with the honorific Mx, (with a flunkey making a phone call to check if the recipient would do a bow, curtsey or a deep respectful nod), then everyone else should be able to cope just as well.

 

[stickygirl]

'Junk DNA' just means it doesn't code for a gene - it doesn't have the clusters of 3-letter sequences which encode amino acids complete with start and stop signals. Now we know a lot of it acts as promoters,enhancers, regulators of alternate splicing, and just plain structural sections to get other bits to bend as needed, but there's also lots which is simply faulty duplications of other bits, never deleted because there's no pressure to do so and they may make handy transposable elements at some point. It all still gets called 'junk' but doesn't mean it's useless (just like the junk in Scrapheap Challenge...)


~snip~

I've noticed many of my young colleagues (graduates aged 21-28) will talk about their partner using the pronoun they as a default - they aren't just reluctant to admit to a same-sex partner, it's just their norm. Looks like another language change. If even the Queen can happily give honours to people with the honorific Mx, (with a flunkey making a phone call to check if the recipient would do a bow, curtsey or a deep respectful nod), then everyone else should be able to cope just as well.

(Sorry I'm still getting to grips with the new quote method)
First para - *gah, love it when you talk science

Last para - woke millenials don't use using gendered pronouns to avoid outing same-sex or non-binary relationships in other people rather than their own. It does not matter what gender your SO is, but if you declare it to one person "My SO? Oh he's studying zoology, what about yours?" then the other woman can feel obligated to reply in kind "She's in the same department" thus admitting she's lesbian or bi. Even if the respondent replies "They're in the same department" then by omission they declare that either they are in a same sex relationship (I'd rather not say therefore I'm gay) or that they are correcting the questioner in their usage of pronouns (don't out me or other people with your gendered choice of pronoun).
It is a courtesy and at odds with the perception that young people attitudes are rancorous and combative "Bitch dissed me so bad"... that one's for Simon's hesitancy in using bitch as a pronoun

 

[Bramblethorn]

A very important use of grammar is to communicate status. If you speak using high-status grammar in complex sentences, policemen will call you 'Sir', in a deferential tone, shop assistants will serve you first, when a decision needs to be made faces will turn to you. Even the SAS expect their officers to speak in high-status English.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...flux-working-class-recruits-soldiers-say.html

Good point, though this is a very situational thing - there are circumstances where sounding posh can be a big liability. I suspect there's a big difference between Australia and the UK on this.

 

[stickygirl]

Good point, though this is a very situational thing - there are circumstances where sounding posh can be a big liability. I suspect there's a big difference between Australia and the UK on this.

Situational, such as a client at a tailors maybe?
suit you sir
In formal UK situations respect is often expressed with slightly forced familiarity by using first names, because Sir/Madam can sound condescending. In normal retail where discussion is required, then pronouns are seldom used and happily we don't have to tie ourselves in knots by using Vous or Tu as they do in France.... I'd guess they'd always use Vous in a French shop.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

woke millenials don't use using gendered pronouns to avoid outing same-sex or non-binary relationships in other people rather than their own... the other woman can feel obligated to reply in kind

Now this was why queers my age did it, to encourage others to feel comfortable and with luck identify those hidden other queer types (they used to call us Gen Y, but that seems to have vanished). But with the young'uns, it seems automatic now, though if they considered why they used that phrasing I'm sure they'd agree with you.

I'm sure you knew this Kumquatbish, because we've established you're smart and hot,

Have we? Oh. Right. (Is that a blushing emoji?)
[goes to look up what continent the lovely stickygirl is on. Betting on Australia. Almost all my followers are in Australia...]

 

[ElectricBlue]

Have we? Oh. Right. (Is that a blushing emoji?)
[goes to look up what continent the lovely stickygirl is on. Betting on Australia. Almost all my followers are in Australia...]

The reason stickygirl knows so much about accents is, she's a posh tart from Essex.

That's disinformation, but she is actually a fair dinkum Brit .

 

[XerXesXu]

she's a posh tart from Essex.

That doesn't make sense in British English.

 

[SimonDoom]

Good point, though this is a very situational thing - there are circumstances where sounding posh can be a big liability. I suspect there's a big difference between Australia and the UK on this.

My impression, based upon admittedly limited evidence, is that those of you from Oz are all calling each other the C word all the time. Has that become a pronoun, too? I have a high tolerance for dirty words, but it's jarring for this American. Talking that way would be received very differently here.

 

[stickygirl]

My impression, based upon admittedly limited evidence, is that those of you from Oz are all calling each other the C word all the time. Has that become a pronoun, too? I have a high tolerance for dirty words, but it's jarring for this American. Talking that way would be received very differently here.

Cobber isn't such an awful word
You're American?! How come you do English so good then?

 

[SimonDoom]

Cobber isn't such an awful word
You're American?! How come you do English so good then?

Ha.

I'm working my way through your reply as either an insult or a compliment, and I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. As EB would say, carry on.

 

[stickygirl]

Ha.

I'm working my way through your reply as either an insult or a compliment, and I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. As EB would say, carry on.

My bad, no insult intended! It's my Essex humour

 

[Zionisacat]

The other reason people use the generic and bland 'partner' is that more people are living in sin. If you've got a child together, are living together and/or own a house together, most people assume that you're husband and wife. Correcting them with 'boyfriend/girlfriend' sounds like we're back in high school and 'significant other' is two words were 'partner' is only one.
It also works in group chats e.g. "We're off to the pub to celebrate Karens retirement. Feel free to bring your partners along." is easier to send off than "We're off to the pub to celebrate Karens retirement. Feel free to bring your husbands or wives or significant others along".

 

[ElectricBlue]

My impression, based upon admittedly limited evidence, is that those of you from Oz are all calling each other the C word all the time. Has that become a pronoun, too? I have a high tolerance for dirty words, but it's jarring for this American. Talking that way would be received very differently here.

Ya silly cunt, worrying the fuck about a few words. If the drop bears don't get you, the other cunts will!

Like most things strine, it's all in the intonation. Don't ever try it with an American accent, you'll immediate be labelled as the worst sort there is .