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(Impulsivelad - I hope this post serves to clear up some at least of your confusion - forgive me for not addressing your question directly, but it's taken a while to type...)
Yes - "it" has the potential to create the slasher's curse of having far too many identical pronouns referring to different people or things in the same sentence, which is made worse, I suppose, by the fact that it doesn't decline - the accusative (direct object) of "it" is "it".
On antique gender in English - Old English is strictly gendered in much the same way that German still is, but without adhering to sense very much. So, wif (woman) was neuter, waerscipe (circumspection) masculine and...oh arse. Well, there were feminine nouns as well. Honest. I've only just got out of bed.
Middle English started out with the same system, but it's much harder to draw hard and fast rules because the West Saxons no longer produced all the extant writing, so you have lots of different dialects. But grammatical gender is gone by about the 14th century (anyone? This is so far outside my period, it's not even funny...) and people are using the pronoun that they feel fits - sunne, f'r example, gets "she" and "her", IIRC. The nominative and accusative have pretty much elided at this point also, which makes it easier to do. Default pronoun usage was, IIRC again, masculine.
Now, there was also a dialectical epicene pronoun "a", apparently (Baron, Grammar and Gender, if anyone can find a copy, and good luck), which can do duty for men, women, things and so on, which apparently mutated into "ou", observed still to be extant in the late 18th century. And at about the same time in the 18th century, poeple started to cavil against the absence of a gender-neutral pronoun in common English. New-fangled politically correct notions, indeed.
As to "their" - might I suggest that people consider the difference between the use of "their" with what Webster identifies as "notional plurals" (everyone wants to keep what is theirs) and what is clearly singular (if a college professor finds their tenure under threat, the only option available to them is to go to the mattresses), for either or both of which you may decide "they" is the best possible fit.
On uses for a gender-neutral pronoun...when the situation arises only infrequently, or can be circumvented by rewriting, the issue is (comparatively) minor. However, I do find the epicene pronoun to be a very useful thing on, say, Barbelith, when frequently I wish to interact with or describe people in very specific ways, without knowing their gender or gender-identity. Which makes me suspect that the epicene may not only be a new and exciting way to insult Jay Prosser, but a potentially useful development to streamline language in situations where gender is identifiable neither by sight, name or any other feature. |
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