#Pronoun matching. I was looking at an instance, and its list of suspended servers. The reason for one of the suspensions was given as "the admin literally calls themselves a Nazi". Fine reason. But the pronoun?
#Epicene they/them/their/theirs, no problem. But that reflexive pronoun? Number concord says that the singular "admin" should get "themself" and not "themselves" as the reflexive. Am I off in this? Do most people use the whole set in plural, without making the partial adjustment?
@bok Thanks. I was having a good day. Now Im sitting here trying to figure out which it should be.
"the admin calls themself a Nazi."
vs
"the admin calls themselves a Nazi."
Quick! AI to the rescue (one of the few, legitimate uses of MLMs: proofreading)! <click> Grammarly does not care. Ergo, either themself or themselves are OK? But it did object to the `literally` .
Though as an engineer, I will always defer to a human English expert to stand correct.
Every time I hear or use "they/them/their" in the singular I have a moment of mental anguish, with every one of my former English teachers from decades ago loudly tsk-tsking in my mind.
So I welcome the unambiguously singular form in "themself", giving those English teachers (and my mind) a moment of peace.
@bobjonkman
We actually have full set of pronouns that aren't being used. Sometimes I wonder how things would be if, instead of copying the third-person plural form across, we'd copied the unused second-person familiar down. Thou, thee, thy, thine, thyself. (Or perhaps the older "thu" instead of "thou".)
I say Robin today; thu looked better.
I should remember to give thee back thy book.
That reading of thine is set for tonight, no?
Probably too confusing....
Nah, second-person pronouns don't work as third-person gender-neutral pronouns. At least, not in my head.
But I'm all in favour of bringing back the archaic forms of second-person pronouns, as long as we use the letter Thorn again: Þou, Þee, Þy, Þine, Þyself.
And while I have a linguist's attention, what's the difference between Þou and Þee? I'm not sure when to use which form...
@bobjonkman
Melissa Scott, "Shadow Man": a drug used to make hyperspace travel tolerable had a delayed effect, and now human colonies settled that way have five sexes: hyperfem, female, neuter, male, ultramasc.
Each gender gets its own pronoun set, and she uses pronouns that start with þorn and eð and ȝogh for the new ones. And naturally there are new orientations, say for a male who’s open to sex with just females, or just hyperfems, or both: three different orientations.
I = nominative = thou
me = objective/accusative = thee
my = possessive adjective = thy
mine = possessive pronoun = thine
myself = reflexive = thyself
With complications. A stove, an oven. Thy nose, thine eyes. You insert the N before a vowel. And Quakers use "thee" as a subject.
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