I like the idea of "ze" (gender-neutral pronoun), but this is the first I've come across it. Hopefully it'll catch on as IMHO it's a big improvement over alternatives like "they".
While on the topic of "missing" words, when will our language finally get something reasonable for "you (plural)"?? Extant "y'all" (southern) and "yous" (NJ) are not cutting it!
Why is it a big improvement over 'they'? Singular they has become popular naturally, whereas 'ze' has existed for years without anyone naturally using it(except for trolls on the internet).
If it is good enough for Austin, Byron, and Chesterfield, not to mention Shakespeare, then it is good enough for me.
The catch is that it sounds best when there's no specific antecedent: "Every user of the workshop must be responsible for their own safety."
It sounds odder when it is deliberately used to avoid (mis)gendering a specific individual: "Pat does not discuss their* gender." I think this is the niche that 'ze' is supposed to fill.
I looked at some older examples of singular-they and they almost exclusively refer to an unknown or unspecified person ("Everyone loves their mother"). Using it for a specified person seems to be fairly new: Time Magazine had a piece describing how their (in this sense) was the 2015 word of the year.
I've heard of 'ze' as a gender-neutral pronoun, but I've never really seen it used. How would you substitute 'ze' in that sentence: "Pat does not discuss their gender"?
“Ze” (like “they”) is a subject pronoun, it has been suggested with various object pronouns (like “them”), possessive determiners (like “their”) and possessive pronouns (like “theirs”), including at least these patterns: ze/hir/hir/hirs, ze/mer/zer/zers, ze/zir/zir/zirs; ze/zem/zes/zes.
So, the “their” could change to any of “hir”, “mer”, “zir”, or “zes”, depending on which “ze” pattern was used.
The accord with the verb is still as if it's a plural pronoun. Just like with "you" which technically also used to be plural, doesn't take the old singular second person forms: "you have" not "you hast"
I grew up in the South, and I never encountered the use of "y'all" in a singular context (I'm 48). I'm not sure where that idea started.
Edit: I should instead say I never encountered it among actual locals using the word in normal speech. Later on, the plural was sometimes used jokingly after the idea that "y'all" was plural had taken hold in popular, non-Southern culture.
Yeah, definitely see that (mainly from a Donegal speaker), but I think it's more an indeterminate number. "How're ye getting on" is pretty common in verbal and informal written forms, directly to one person.
You'd think Scrabble would want to stay neutral with politically charged words like this so as not to offend any potential customers and instead ultimately gain more purchases and fewer boycotts. Especially a word like ze which would not exist if we parents had been doing our jobs correctly.
I’ve got to imagine that the sort of people who would be sufficiently offended by the inclusion of a novel pronoun to _refuse to play a board game_ are not common enough for, er, whoever’s in charge of scrabble to worry about.
