D users in Munich, Rome, Venice, or Frankfurt?

[Robert Fraser]

BCS wrote:
> Hello Derek,
> 
>> On Wed, 13 May 2009 01:04:19 +0000 (UTC), BCS wrote:
>>
>>> Ah! One of my favorite qwerks of the English language, how to refer
>>> to a specific single someone of unknown gender without insulting
>>> them: "it"?
>>>
>> I hate it but what can I do?
>>
>> Use "they". Sure, its wrong but everyone knows what you mean. As in
>> ... "A good coder will write useful comments because *they* care."
>>
> 
> Yeah, much as I dislike it, you end up having to. And as someone else 
> pointed out, "they" is actually correct (why, I don't know). Also, in 
> your case, it's the generic "they" and in one way of thinking, it *is* 
> plural (as in there are many people that it can refer to) so it kind of 
> sounds reasonable.

"why" in descriptive linguistics means "what most native speakers judge 
to be correct" (which is often different from "what textbooks like to 
assert is correct"). Basically, native speakers have an understanding of 
a language that may be different from any official "specification" of 
the language (just like DMD ;-P). This is why native Esperanto speakers 
tend to speak a slightly different version of Esperanto than the 
official one.

Some native speakers may judge "he" to be more correct than "they" 
(especially those in academia or snobby middle-class white socialites), 
so one or the other might be correct in different varieties of English.

I read a study (of Americans, probably college students at whatever 
university it was done at) that showed that the processing time for a 
sentence containing "they" for a singular unknown referent tended to be 
faster than the processing time for a sentence containing "he" in the 
same position for 90+% of speakers, even for speakers who believed that 
"he" was the correct choice. I'm too lazy to dredge up the study, but 
basically:

third-person "they" is easier to understand for native speakers!