But not with continuity, not popularly over that whole time span.
If it's something we're all accustomed to and comfortable with, why even mention that it was being used in the distant past? The article is trying to simultaneously argue "try this new term they, it's easy, everybody's saying it now, it's modern, you'll love it" and "this term is not at all strange and new, you're silly if you feel uncomfortable with it because it has always been used." It's trying to have it both ways in its wrangling.
Do people also casually use it to refer to humans, or is it just me?
In my experience, everyone who complains about the use of the singular "they" uses it themselves all the time when they're not thinking about it.
The reason why there's any debate at all about the singular they is not because it's new and strange. It's because beginning in the mid-18th century, influential grammar textbooks started discouraging its use and advocating "he" in its place. Many generations of kids have grown up being told in school that the singular "they" is wrong, but despite that, it has remained a very standard part of spoken English.
Really, are you sure singular they was in widespread intemperate use, like today, prior to these influential Victorian grammarians?
OK, but they were influential, so they influenced the 1850s and subsequent decades, making this usage currently new and strange, because for a century or more people used he instead. Why deny that? To persuade them with the implication "we never got accustomed to saying he, turns out you didn't ever speak this way, it was just an illusion"?
I'm not sure what matters in persuading people to speak differently, but saying that a term is being revived, rather than being a complete neologism, is ... admittedly a little bit persuasive, but it doesn't much help with the glaring issue that it's still a major change from what we're used to: and there are additional valid complaints, firstly that it removes information, and secondly that it's used less sparingly than it was in the past. It's now commonly written, in formal texts where clarity matters.
This was for clarity in the phrasing of legislation.
I've picked up a rumor that this 1652 book encouraged the use of he in gender neutral contexts: https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-170... but I can't find where. It might just be an exaggeration based on the part where it says "The Maſculine is more worthy than the Feminine, and the Feminine is more worthy than the Neuter." But there's no doubt that the 17th century, never mind the 19th, was stuffed with sexist bastards in influential positions. So what's the use in pointing at the past, or even at the present, to say that some of the time they used they? Fundamentally you still have to argue for why, or why not.
> OK, but they were influential, so they influenced the 1850s and subsequent decades, making this usage currently new and strange, because for a century or more people used he instead. Why deny that?
They only succeeded in influencing formal writing. Singular "they" continued to be a completely normal and heavily used part of spoken English.
> but saying that a term is being revived, rather than being a complete neologism
It's only being "revived" in formal writing. It is style guides that are changing, not the way that normal people speak.
> there are additional valid complaints, firstly that it removes information
It allows you to not specify that information. Sometimes you genuinely have no idea what gender the person you're talking about is. "Someone is knocking on the door. I have no idea who they are."
> Fundamentally you still have to argue for why, or why not.
The argument is that style guides and grammarians artificially banned people from using a completely regular pronoun in formal writing, and that the alternative they offered (gender-neutral "he") is extremely awkward. We already use this pronoun this way in spoken English. We should be able to write it too.
plenty of people prefer to go by "it", so i'm not sure this is the slam dunk you seem to think it is. no one is claiming chaucer as an authority; we're claiming you don't seem to know enough to be worth listening to in a debate about the usage of pronouns.
Yes contradicts the negative question. So "Is this not a mistake?" should be contradicted with "yes, it is a mistake" or affirmed with "no, it is not a mistake".
It's further confusing because we have the idiom of suggesting things politely in a tentative manner such as isn't this a mistake? which has lost its sense of negativity and has come to mean "this is a mistake, I think," as opposed to being parsed literally to mean "this is not-a-mistake, I think".
> English had a four-form system, comprising the words yea, nay, yes, and no. Yes contradicts a negatively formulated question, No affirms it; Yea affirms a positively formulated question, Nay contradicts it.
> Will they not go? — Yes, they will.
> Will they not go? — No, they will not.
> Will they go? — Yea, they will.
> Will they go? — Nay, they will not.
So, this has obviously simplified. But what I find interesting is that English speakers from the Philippines or from a Russian background chose differently (where SME is standard modern English, and PRE is Philippine/"Russian" English):
Will they not go? — SME: Yes, they will. PRE: No, they will. [Not sure about that one.]
Will they not go? — SME: No, they will not. PRE: Yes, they will not. [I hear this all the time from non-native English speakers.]
Will they go? — SME/PRE: Yes, they will.
Will they go? — SME/PRE: No, they will not.
ETA from Wikipedia :-)
> In December 1993, a witness in a court in Stirlingshire, Scotland, answered "aye" to confirm he was the person summoned, but was told by a sheriff judge that he must answer either yes or no, or else be held in contempt of court. When asked if he understood, he replied "aye" again, and was imprisoned for 90 minutes for contempt of court. On his release he said, "I genuinely thought I was answering him."
I'm trying to parse the extra "not" in archaic holdovers vs plain modern English. It seems to carry a subtext.
Modern "Are you happy now?" is said with sarcastic tone, to spoil happiness. Would be archaically "Are you not happy?" As if to dare contradiction. It's loaded, unlike when saying sympathetically "Are you unhappy?"
Others:
"Are you not entertained?"
"Are you not the very same Smith that dwelt at Haversham?"
"Prick me, do I not bleed?"
But commonly:
"Are you not a Christian?" most likely seems direct, but said in a formal sense, "rhetorically", an exhortation to act like one.
Oh that's what you're banging on about. You think AI is like a demon, or you think LLMs are people too, something like that, hence "I don't care what makes the music". That would otherwise be a spooky and implausible phrase that says something strange about what gives music quality, as if quality in music is something ethereal and mathematical and objective and detached from the human condition, and detached from artists. But if you think the AI counts as a person too then it seems less cold and abstract.
(Belatedly) yes. Kind of a big argument to grapple with, but let's start by considering everything. I mean, all the stuff, the abstract stuff, that's out there objectively in the universe and in the future, waiting to be discovered. I believe there's quite a considerable amount of it. It's all potentially of interest to us eventually, and only a teeny tiny part of it is comprehensible to us now. That part is at the leading edge, the cutting edge of our enquiries, and in order for us to see and comprehend and even care about that part, it has to relate to us. It has to be oriented to us and our thoughts and things we can use.
You see what I'm getting at? Humans don't really like abstract things. Mathematicians seem to, but I doubt that even mathematics truly has an objective abstract quality that's distant from human concerns. I reckon humans do human mathematics, and it probably has fashions, too, it's probably modern and current, that is, of its time and place.
So you could accept that, but still claim that music relates strongly to mathematics as we know it. Of course there's such a thing as the mathematics of music. I could dispute the value of that to the quality of the music, as being too abstract and niche compared to the evocative qualities of music, where it evokes things in our physical world: the sounds of hitting things with sticks, heartbeats, tones of voice, meaningful instruments such as bugles evoking battles, mazy noodling around evoking contemplative thoughts (is that abstract?) ... but either way, the point is that we live in a sort of parochial Bag End, if Middle Earth represents everything abstractly possible, and so we only understand hobbit things and only appreciate hobbit art. So to speak.
> gold has about the same vapor pressure as the much more abundant iron, nickel, cobalt and germanium, so it would be impossible to extract it from iron by vaporization
Don't Starve has a certain point-and-clickiness about it. There's one player character and a lot of noticing objects of interest and clicking to pick them up. That's probably important.
Back in the course of human evolution there must at some point have been mammals who were not yet riding on the dysfunctional cycle of violence. That means the natural rate must be non-zero, at least, or else the cycle would have no starting momentum.
Got lots of rabbits in my town, on a tiny nature reserve beside a footpath that goes from some office complexes to an industrial estate. It's ten minutes walk from the houses where people keep cats. I guess all those fluffy neutered cats have dedicated their attention to actual cat food and to the sport of infringing on the territories of other cats, and just aren't very rabbit-centric. If the cats were feral and breeding the rabbits might be in trouble.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_(pronoun)
So maybe we should bring back it, or ignore Chaucer as an authority.