I agree with Adam : English badly needs a gender-marked 3rd-person possessive pronoun.
Gender-marked need not meaning sex-marked only.
Fr <sentinelle> = En <sentry> usually refers to men although the word is grammatically feminine.
Fr <laideron> = En <ugly woman> is used for women only but the word is grammarically masculine.
Ge <Weib> = En <woman> (pejorative) or Ge <Mädchen> = En <young girl> are realted to women while their grammatical gender is neutral, neither feminine nor masculine.
The problem with English is that noun-gender, too, is virtually lacking (except in some words like 'feminine' <ship> where gender is anyway not made grammatically visible).
The main thing is that you're basically trying to paste the concept of grammatical gender onto a language that has no concept of it in the first place (and only has natural gender, and even then only has such for only third person singular pronouns besides "they"). Trying to add anything that's gender-marked whatsoever in such a fashion is totally out of place in the context of English as a whole.
I agree Travis. My statement is completely subjective : it's an opinion formulated by someone who's utilising a language where tangible gender marks are available. My statement is irrelevant too : there's no palpable reason why English should reinstore gender marks already disposed of.
Still, I stick to it because I'm self-interested for that matter. Also, I bet gender marks would be phased in, should English turn out to be a real lingua franca in the future - that is with increasingly distant connexions to its native-speaking base as we can see it today (7 % of world population).
Yes, we have one. it is "he".
According to some prescriptivist sorts who want to deny current linguistic reality with respect to English, that is. Even if "he" once did have such a role, it does not have such a role today, and it is "they" which has taken that role today.
I've already explained that you can't use "he" and "they".
"He" is masculine and "they" is plural.
English needs a thied person SINGULAR pronoun. It has a thied person PLURAL pronoun, "they", which is masculine, feminine AND neuter.
However, there is no third person singular pronoun, so if you don't know the sex of a person you will have to say "he", but the person could be a female, or you could say "she" but the person could be a male.
What English needs is "he", "she", "it" and ANOTHER world that is neither masculine, feminine nor neuter.
Why is "they"'s also being plural a problem? It certainly isn't a problem with "you", with is most definitely singular and plural, and this hasn't been a problem overall.
English has a problem, because we have to say -
1) "A person has left HIS hat behind."
But do you know that the person is a man? It could be a woman
2) "A person has left HER behind."
But the person could be a man.
3) "A person has left THEIR hat behind."
But that is not grammatically correct, because there is only one person to have left the hat behind.
So English needs another. For example, it could be the world "thon" then we could say -
"A person has left THON hat behind."
Thon would be neither masculine, feminine nor neuter.
You is singular and plural. There is a singular and plural form of YOU in most European languages.
But most linguists will tell you that you should NOT use "they" as a singular pronoun. Most people don't know that, and use the world "they" when they shouldn't really do.
Grammar is a very leaky vessel in a fast moving stream. Nothing can contain or keep out the beautiful, messy reality of language. If someone wants to use "they", then let them!
German's don't complain that "sie" can be both plural and singular. Nor the Dutch with "zij", nor do the italians break their brains over the fact that "Lei" is a second and third person form. In any case, it will happen whether we like it or not.
I love They. Love it! Viva They.
To paraphrase Cosimo di Medici,
"...Whoever wants to be happy, let them!
For tomorrow brings no certainty..."
Those linguist who insist that you can't use "they" have only got one alternative to offer us: "he". This alternative of theirs is fine: "he" is both masculine and neutral.
However, these linguists are the prescriptivist and their insistance is rather pedantic. They're not concerned with how the language is actually used but with how they believe it should be used.
In informal situations most people would use "they". What's wrong with this? If you insist that "they" is plural, then you'd better first resurrect "thy", "thyself", "thee", "thou" and "thine" because "you" is plural too.
You'll have a far better chance of resurrecting these all but obsolete words than you'll ever have of introducing something like "thon" or "hizzer".
Jim, you had a point. Who cares about prescriptivism or descriptivism ? The only thing valid - if English is to be more widespread - is to make it evolve in the direction which may suit its future locutors (ie : those needing a proper 3rd person singular), not the current ones (natives).
The main question is this, how the heck is one going to stop people from using "they" for third person singular indefinite, and somehow make them to use something else, either because 1) you think that "they" is somehow "incorrect" or 2) you think that people "should" use some separate pronoun of some sort for third person singular indefinite (and then, get them to actually agree on a single particular pronoun (and set of associated inflected versions))?
Hell, in informal American English, we've got effectively got a number of different competitors for the place of the new second person plural pronoun, the principal ones being "you guys" and "y'all" (I at least use both, the latter, mind you, just being because I have a tendency to reduce "you all" to such by turning "you" into a proclitic before a word starting with a vowel (or a consonant which has been subsequently elided)), and mind you these are not things that are just being artificially created out of whole cloth, but rather are things from actual everday usage. Even if creating a new third person singular indefinite separate from "they" does catch on on any significant scale, which I somewhat doubt, we're still going to have this problem instead.