I’ve been coming across many articles (especially in archaeology/anthropology) using terms for the gender of a specimen as ‘they’ in the singular. How would they be used in the singular in a conversation when referring to one skeletal fossil (singular male or female)? They is? or They are? What are these genderless pronouns for he and she in French and German?
From Mirriam-Webster
They always goes with a plural verb, even when they is referring to a single person: “They are my friend.”
In the case of fossils, can’t you say ‘it’? I don’t think the fossil will be offended, they’re notoriously thick-skinned.
Anthropologists/archaeologists don’t generally deal with fossils, the human remains they study aren’t usually old enough. That’s palaeontology.
The reason to use they not it is that we’re at least (usually) certain that they’re human remains. And we don’t refer to humans, even corpses, as it, at least non-pejoratively.
Don’t know about German, but French simply does not have them in the sense you mean. French does not have “it”, everything is either masculine or feminine, In addition, the gender of the person referred to changes other parts of the sentence, like articles and adjectives. Current attempts to change this have resulted in controversy.
Perhaps I should have written paleoanthropologist instead of Anthropologists/archaeologists. But the fact remains that articles are online using the term ‘they’ instead of he or she.
Because sexing skeletons by morphology alone isn’t as reliable as you might think (hence the recent reanalysis of warrior burials as female, like the Birka one). So better to use the indeterminate pronoun anyway.
And then there’s a case like this Finnish one, where the person is possibly some sort of nonbinary anyway.
And that’s entirely aside from issues of not imposing rigid gender dynamics on people, living or dead.
Mr.Dibble I do respect your point on the issue of using ‘they’ to refer to the remains as being human.
Thanks for that very enlightening reply.
In case you missed it, I edited it to include another example I was previously unaware of.
Yes I read it. Very interesting. Thanks again.
In German there isn‘t really an equivalent to the singular ‚they‘ (there are of course some ideas in circulation but nothing that has gained currency).
If I wanted to talk about a person the gender of whom is not determined, I‘d probably refer to die Person and use the female grammatical gender as Person is a feminine noun.
Thank you! That’s the sort of thing I’ve often wondered about. Grammatical gender giving you an out when you don’t have a gender neutral term makes a lot of sense.
I think there have been threads in the past asking how other languages deal with this sort of thing, but I don’t remember any saying something like this. They always seem more focused on trying to come up with a gender neutral term or arguing that grammatical male includes gender neutral.
Come to think of it, it seems that usage in German is often different from English where a person is introduced using a noun, later with a pronoun. The pronoun’s gender follows the noun.
A German police press release might for instance say: Zeugen beobachteten eine männliche Person am Tatort, aber sie lief davon bevor die Polizei ankam - „Witnesses observed a male person at the scene of crime, but she ran away before police arrived.“