[signalsmith]

It's kind of odd, because people seem to accept singular "they" for strangers, but not once there's a name.

If I say: "I bumped into a stranger on the street and trod on their toes, apologised to them, and they apologised to me" - generally (in normal spoken conversation, not here when we're paying attention) people don't care. Using singular "they" for strangers is pretty common, and hundreds and hundreds of years old.

The problem comes when we give someone a name. If I say: "I bumped into Julie on the street and trod on their toes, apologised to them, and they apologised to me", people might think it sounds odd (if they're not used to it).

It's as if we have an order/hierarchy in which we expect to learn information about people. Like, by the time we know someone's name, we assume we should already have been told their gender, and we confused if hasn't happened yet.

[weberc2]

This shouldn’t surprise you. Most people can infer gender from visual appearance alone with well over 99.99% accuracy without being explicitly told. If you know their name and other gendered indicators, it would be a marked anomaly NOT to know their gender.

[signalsmith]

I can also guess people's height to within an inch or two, but I can still have an abstract conversation about a friend-of-a-friend I've never met, without expecting to be (constantly!) told how tall they are unless it's relevant to the story.

So in terms of the order we learn things about people we've never met (when it's not directly relevant), we expect gender much earlier than many other attributes. It mostly reflects our values as a society, as language often does, but that's kind of my point.

[weberc2]

I misunderstood your point. I thought you found it remarkable that we expected to be able to discern gender quite quickly. In any case, I don’t know how much our gendered language indicates our values as a society, probably that gender is just information-dense (lots of behavior correlates strongly with gender) such that many languages evolved gender as a utility (and indeed English actually lost much of its grammatical gender though probably not because the density of information was lower in English-speaking societies, but rather due to massive influxes of non-native speakers which had a broader simplifying effect on the language).

[GhostVII]

But gender has a much more significant affect on how someone acts than their height, and significantly affects what kind of relationship you could have with that person.

[geofft]

That makes it relevant for stories like "I met him at a bar and we shared a few drinks," but not "I sold her a cup of coffee this morning" or "She's interviewing for our team."

Gender is also kind of a useless differentiator in many contexts because of the way that gender correlates with behavior: if there's a group of mothers or Catholic priests or even schoolteachers or venture capitalists, I'm much more likely to find pronouns for short/tall useful than for male/female in communicating about specific members of that group.

[geofft]

I can also infer race from visual appearance with similar accuracy, but if I say "Can you hand this to that black person" would be super weird and quite likely objectionable, even if I was correct that the person was black. And nobody would want abbreviated pronouns on race - "I talked to whim and whe said to talk to blim" just seems sort of ... overly concerned with people's races.

It's a linguistic quirk of English that "Can you hand this to [that female person]" is accepted and natural. On first principles it shouldn't be.

(It is interesting IMO that Japanese has a pronoun for "she," and it's a compound word that literally translates as "that woman." It only developed as a pronoun in the last century or so, from the influence of Weatern works which had he/she or equivalent pronouns.)

[iguy]

Here's the first-principles argument: Most people grow up and learn the language in a family group, which has a mix of ages and of sexes. Saying "he" vs "she" here usually cuts the number of people you could be talking about in half, it's very informative, one bit! It will often let you omit the name, or shorten the sentence elsewhere.

Whereas always marking what continent you're all living on, or what race you all are, usually doesn't convey any information. So it seems entirely unsurprising that languages tend not to build this in. Many do build in markers for what species, because again this was useful information, since most of our ancestors spent a long time farming.

[UncleMeat]

This sounds like working backwards. Up this thread, people have suggested that the reason is that gender matters more to society than height (this is why we don't announce people's height). When this argument is defeated by race, it switches again to what "seems reasonable".

What evidence, beyond "this seems reasonable" is there for this argument?

[iguy]

Sometimes multiple things are true, and none are "defeated". It seems beyond obvious that our ancestors 1000 years ago did a lot more gossiping about who was going to marry who, than about anything we'd today describe as racial distinctions.

[geofft]

I'm not debating whether it was true 1000 years ago. I'm saying that today, it is a linguistic quirk of English. Of course English is a language that was in use in some form 1000 years ago - and we don't use all the same words we did then, because some of them don't have value to us today. (Singular you, for instance, was much rarer back then!)

[MaxBarraclough]

> When this argument is defeated by race

What do you mean? You mean that racist societies might be expected to distinguish between races with noun classes? Seems to me this might well have happened in some language at some time, or at least a variation on it: distinguishing between those inside the clan, and those outside.

It looks like the sex distinction is the one most commonly reflected in language, which strikes me as empirical evidence that it's generally the most valuable one.

> Common gender divisions include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine and neuter; or animate and inanimate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Gender_of_p...

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_g...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class#Languages_with_noun...

[weberc2]

Gender matters more than race or height (I.e., race doesn’t make one markedly stronger or un/able to birth children or any of the social roles that emerge out of those properties), and as I mentioned elsewhere, multiracial societies weren’t a universal reality (and aren’t today) such that it would leave a mark on grammar.

[UncleMeat]

Wealth, education, and any number of other categories also matter a ton. We exclusively use gender and perhaps age to label people. Why?

[weberc2]

Race is fundamentally different than gender in many ways. Contrary to your claim, you can’t discern race as easily as gender—there are far more racially ambiguous people than there are gender ambiguous people. Unlike how gender proxies for biological sex, race doesn’t proxy for any interesting biological phenomena around which we might organize our culture—thus race is much less information-dense than gender. The likely reason you find racial qualifies objectionable is that your culture experienced racism in its history (e.g., the US’s historical oppression of African Americans), not because it is a completely useless disambiguator (although it can be if the circumstances are right—such as a group where all members share the same race). We don’t have specific pronouns for specific races because (in addition to the previously cited reasons) interactions with specific groups were rarely universal experiences. That said, we do have pronouns that can indicate membership to our people or the people across the river (originally “race” referred to a people or ethnic group—e.g., “the Celtic race”): “us” and “them”.

[ZeroGravitas]

You reminded me of Douglas Hofstadter's "A Person Paper on Purity in Language"

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...

In which he pretends to be from a parallel dimension where you don't use he and she (for male and female) but whe and ble (for white and black) to highlight the absurdity of language making gender explicit.

My daughter is very young and currently refers to everyone, including Disney princesses as he/him which sounds totally weird to me, but I guess it is one option for phasing the distinction out.

[geofft]

Thank you - I hadn't seen that before, and this is basically how I feel about having to attach a gender to anyone I refer to in the third person.

[keiferski]

I would say it’s more that “they” is used for individuals when the subject is specified previously in the sentence or conversation. In your example sentence, “the stranger” clarifies this. If the sentence were simply “They bumped into me on the street.” it is unclear if the subject is singular or plural.

[signalsmith]

In my second example, I used "Julie" instead of "a stranger". The subject is specified in exactly the same way, but people might find "they" more surprising in that case.

Some people might even take it as a potential clue that Julie could be non-binary, because of how much we expect gender-matched pronouns at that point. (Not saying they should, just that they might.)

[keiferski]

Ah yes, my bad, you are correct. I meant to say that it's not simply that the distinction is between "named individual" and "stranger" but is more complex.

It seems like "they" is used 'correctly' for a singular subject when the subject has been previously referred to, but hasn't been given a proper name. But I'm sure a linguist has studied this in further detail.