English really needs a third person singular pronoun

Adam, We're wasting time and energy being sexist - if you're reading some text and you're male and the text says 'her' instead of 'him', just transcribe it in your mind and read on. there's so much more to bother about in this world!!!

Adam said:

>>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.<< (end of quote)

I don't think this is really a problem, and it is not specific to English either. It is only that "her" is marked (it makes you think of a female person in each case), while "his" is rather unmarked and neutral. I consider "he" as a good alternative to the singular "their" used for an unknown person, because "their" oftren sounds awkward (at least to me), like in "Somebody has left their hat behind", and even more if used with "a person".

When I think of German, it is much the same:

"Jemand hat seinen Hut hintergelassen." (we don't know if it is a man or a woman, yet we use "sein", while "ihr" would be suitable only if there were only women at the given place before, who happened to be wearing hats).

oftren --> often
there were --> there had been

... or if it looked like a woman's hat (unless there were drag-queens at the given place before, who happened to be wearing hats ... but even still you might use "her" for a drag-queen).

Language forums always seem to attract a certain percentage of people who want to "fix" what they perceive as shortcomings in the language or its orthography; that time would be better spent learning the language just as it is. Although language does change by evolution over time, it is the great body of its speakers that collectively and unconsciously drive that change.

Every language has its peculiarities. Russian has neither a definite nor indefinite article, for example, yet it doesn't seem to suffer for it nor do students of Russian clamor that articles be added.

Well, the real beauty of any language divulges itself slowly, and often it's to be found in the irregularities, or even in its limitations.

Easy tarts with a tidy pedigree, like Italian which everybody loves at first sight, sometimes seem a bit predictable and one dimensional once you start speaking them fluently.

Learning English is like an archeological adventure!

Todd : "Learning English is like an archeological adventure!"

That is so true. The same would apply to any European language : mutual influences, enormous written stock, ongoing evolutions.

"Well, the real beauty of any language divulges itself slowly, and often it's to be found in the irregularities, or even in its limitations."

I had this experience with Latin, which, unlike its offspring Italian, is rather rich in irregularities, indeed, it is perhaps one of the least predictable languages. I recommend that to any "connoisseur", or if you want a living language, try French, German or any Slavic one, or Lithuanian, for that matter.

By the way, it seems the time is past when learning a language used to be a lifetime's business. Many of today's languages seem much less complicated than even their ancestors. Is this because life has become more predictable in general? Or does language complexity also follow the laws of thermodynamics? :)

Everything in the Universe follows the laws of thermodynamics. Beware of the pop-culture notions of entropy.

When refering to a non-specific or unknown-gendered person, I always say and write 'they' and 'their'. I say it all the time, and write it (even in essays) and no one questions it. I understand that it may not be historically correct but it works.

It would be nice if English had a gender-neutral pronoun, but it doesn't. I can never make myself write, for example, "Someone has left THEIR hat", because that's just ungrammatical.

I love languages with all their quirks, and I strongly oppose changing them just to be gender-neutral. "Grammatical sexism" is totally non-important and says NOTHING about the reality of a given culture. For example, Spain is a highly "sexist" language, whereas Farsi is completely gender-neutral. Which country is more sexist, Spain or Iran?

I have never understood how the use of a given grammatical structure can be labelled as "sexist". Grammatical gender (especially the use of general pronouns) may have something to do with the sexist attitude of speakers in the distant past, but in my opinion this is still not sufficient reason to say that the use of "he" as a general (neutral?) pronoun is sexist, and even much less that languages with a gender structure are "sexist languages". How come no one bothered about this before the advent of feminism? (I don't have anything against feminists, just dislike if proponents of a particular ideology try to influence language to make people say things their way.) The pronoun "somebody" seems to be pretty much gender-neutral, so what pronoun we use with it is simply a matter of general agreement.