Pronoun questions

[megwrites]

I've been researching gender-neutral pronouns in the English language this weekend.

I'm wondering what pronouns are most commonly used and in what contexts. I've come into contact with a/ou, though I'm still not sure if I'm using them correctly in a grammatical sense. I did not know that a/ou originated in Old and Middle English.

I'm more familiar with zie/zir and sie/hir, but I'm wondering if they have different connotations or can indicate different things? I haven't found a lot of links about that yet. Most of what I found just seems to explain that they exist and where they fit grammatically.

So if anyone has links, info, opinions, I'd love it if you shared.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

English has an excellent gender neutral pronoun with a long heritage, from Shakespeare to Austen: they. The "number error" of They walked their dog home last night is simply not as important as the gender error of the "generic" masculine.

ETA: the original sample sentence had an unintentional tense error, now corrected.

There's an outstanding dead-tree book on this topic:

The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing
It was a very well reviewed book in 1980, and the link is to the 1988 version. There's a 2001 reprint (iUniverse, which means the authors had to self-publish, which just makes me want to cry). Here's a nice interview with the authors, Casey Miller and Kate Swift

as well as useful bibliography from Marquette University in Milwaukee

A crucial text in the 2nd wave women's movement was The Cook and the Carpenter by June Arnold. FIrst published in 1975, the gender reveal at the end forced many readers to re-examine the meaning of gender in their lives.

[dsgood]

As has already been said, "They" has a long history in English as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. And I don't hear the people who object using "thee" and "thou" rather than "you."

There's also "that person," which I've heard mostly from 12-step people. But I've also heard it from a cop in London, Ontario (I'd called the police there because someone I knew on the Net had been sounding suicidal.)

[owlectomy]

My preferred pronouns in the case of uncertain gender are
1) singular 'they'
2) no pronoun, but using a mix of the person's name with indefinite and definite articles, e.g., "I found that post problematic because username fails to engage with X and Y," rather than, "I found his post problematic because he fails to engage with X and Y." I learned this from a theology student who had a theologian professor who didn't refer to God as He or She, but just God all the time.

Both are relatively graceful, transparent, and unlikely to offend. I don't mind the various neologisms but I'm not likely to use them myself unless referring to a specific person who's indicated that that's their preference.