... just to not use plain and common English,
The words you're trying to drag kicking and screaming out of my mouth ... are not "plain and common English". They're Newspeak. English doesn't have words for the meaning I meant to convey so I pulled in a language that does. ...
... linguistics is what I have a degree in.
Cool! Let's talk linguistics.
And from a linguistic perspective, it's clear that singular "they" is at least as old as Modern English.
Not so clear...
Here's an example from Shakespeare: "
There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend."
And another from the King James Bible: "Let nothing bee done through strife, or vaine glory, but in lowlinesse of minde let each esteeme other better then themselues."
(Examples via
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24504, there's more there)
Thanks for injecting some hard data. Let's see what it tells us...
It appears English does have a word for "a person who's sex not known or irrelevant, in the singular", and it's "they" (which just so happens to also be a word for "persons, plural" and for "inanimate objects, plural"),
That's not hard data; that's a theory. I.e., it's a testable hypothesis that's been proposed as an explanation for hard data. Testing it means answering three questions. How well does it predict actual in-the-wild examples of the usage in question? How badly does it falsely predict examples of the usage in question? And how does it compare with competing theories?
For the first question, Shakespeare? Check. Bible? Check.
For the second question, all your examples are usage, so I went browsing for examples of non-usage in the wild. From the Columbia thread:
<expletive deleted> Bibi. He will kill as many people as he can get away with.
"... the guy running Israel is a moron clinging to the office to keep himself out of jail" FIFY.
And from the Robert Sapolsky thread:
This was an interesting read, but I disagree completely with his reasoning. ...
There are statements of his views in one paragraph that I absolutely reject:
There are major implications, he notes: Absent free will, no one should be held responsible for their behavior, good or bad. ...
I suspect that when it comes to his personal life, he would expect anyone who harmed him to be punished for that behavior.
So Elixir passed up opportunities to write "They will kill as many people as they can get away with." and "clinging to the office to keep themselves out of jail.". The New York Times author passed up an opportunity to write "There are major implications, they note". And Ruth passed up opportunities to write " I disagree completely with their reasoning", "There are statements of their views", and "I suspect that when it comes to their personal life, they would expect anyone who harmed them to be punished". So either Netanyahu's sex and Sapolsky's sex are
relevant to Israeli war practices and the free-will debate, respectively, or else your theoretical explanation for the use of the grammatical construction under discussion has a serious over-prediction problem. I submit that Bibi's and Robert's maleness is irrelevant to what was being said about them. If the theory were correct then English-speakers would use "they/them/their" for singular antecedents a lot more than we do.
For the third question, I don't know what competing theories linguists have considered, but the one that occurs to me is that "they" isn't being treated as an honorary singular pronoun after all; rather, the grammatically singular antecedents in these cases are treated as honorary groups. Let's look at some examples from your link;
Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded:
I beg you will look over my poor matters, and let every one have what belongs to them; for, said I, you know I am resolved to take with me only what I can properly call my own.
Jonathan Edwards, Heaven:
... everyone will have their distinguishing gift, one after this manner, and another after that,, the perfection of the saints in glory, nothing hindering.
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography:
But my giving this account of it here is to show something of the interest I had, everyone of these exerting themselves in recommending business to us.
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe:
Hence it is, that a miser, though he pays every body their own, cannot be an honest man, when he does not discharge the good offices that are incumbent on a friendly, kind, and generous person.
Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation:
Every fool can do as they're bid.
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility:
Each of them was busy in arranging their particular concerns, and endeavouring, by placing around them books and other possessions, to form themselves a home.
Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe:
I return in my grave-clothes, a pledge restored from the very sepulchre, and every one I speak to vanishes as soon as they hear my voice!
Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby:
Let us give everybody their due.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights:
I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me.
Charlotte Brontë, Henry Hastings:
I think I should have spoken to her, but something suggested to me, 'Every body has their own burden to bear. Let her drink the chalice fate commends to her lips.'
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women:
Everybody sniffed when they came to that part.
Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now:
Everybody doesn't make themselves a part of the family. I have heard of nobody doing it except you.
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native:
It is the instinct of everyone to look after their own.
Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad:
I always ask everybody what ship they came over in.
Robert Lewis Stevenson, Treasure Island:
The admirable fellow literally slaved in my interest, and so, I may say, did everyone in Bristol, as soon as they got wind of the port we sailed for.
Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force:
Every one realised afterwards how obvious this was and wondered they had not thought of it before.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland:
'If everybody minded their own business,' the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, 'the world would go round a deal faster than it does.'
Henry James, An International Episode:
He thinks everyone clever, and sometimes they are.
I don't think I'm really going out on a limb here when I point out that "everybody"
is a group. 19th-century prescriptivists' insistence that "everybody" is grammatically singular notwithstanding, it appears English-speakers have for centuries been taking into account that the constructions "everybody" and "every body" and "everyone" and "every one" and "every fool" and "each of them" in fact refer to more than one person.
Shakespeare:
There's not a man I meet but doth salute me As if I were their well-acquainted friend.
King James Bible
Let nothing bee done through strife, or vaine glory, but in lowlinesse of minde let each esteeme other better then themselues.
George Eliot, Middlemarch:
The fact is, I never loved any one well enough to put myself into a noose for them.
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone:
It's the ebb now, sir, as anybody may see for themselves.
William Butler Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil:
Since I was a boy I have always longed to hear poems spoken to a harp […] Whenever I spoke of my desire to anybody they said I should write for music,
The same goes for these examples. "Not ... but" is a double negative. (Not one doesn't salute me) is equivalent to (every one does salute me).
In "let each esteeme", each
what? Well, each of
ye, the old plural second-person pronoun -- the preceding verse is "Fulfil ye my joy, that ye be likeminded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind.
(Never loved any one well enough) is equivalent to (always loved every one not well enough).
If there's a semantic difference between (anybody may see for themselves) and (everybody may see for themselves), I'm not seeing it for myself.
And "Whenever I spoke of my desire to anybody" is making it pretty clear he did it more than once.
That addresses the bulk of your examples; let's look at the residue.
Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles:
If anyone has seen either of them touching the medicine, they will have forgotten it by that time.
That's a pretty thin reed to hang the theory of "singular they" on. Since the normal use of the construction is on actual groups that are merely grammatically singular, it looks to me like in this case Christie is promoting her hypothetical witness to the status of an honorary group because she's talking about an unknown member of the available pool of people who might have seen who touched the medicine.
So the theory of honorary plurality predicts all the same positive examples that the theory that "they" is a singular pronoun predicts; but it doesn't suffer from the false positives of the latter. People don't call Netanyahu or Sapolsky "they" because Netanyahu and Sapolsky are known individuals, not because their maleness is relevant to what's being said. So it looks to me like your theory doesn't match the hard data of usage as well as mine does.
Finally, consider the competing theories' performance on this data:
Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe:
I return in my grave-clothes, a pledge restored from the very sepulchre, and every one I speak to vanishes as soon as they hear my voice!
My theory passes the test on that observation with flying colors. But it seems to me that if "they" were actually a singular pronoun, then Sir Walter would have written:
* I return in my grave-clothes, a pledge restored from the very sepulchre, and every one I speak to vanishes as soon as they hears my voice!
That said, even as the excuse that English doesn't have a word to express the meaning you intended doesn't really stand, I would have preferred your choice of Estonian pronouns to stay unchallenged. I also would have preferred you to add a footnote explaining what you did and why
Yes, in retrospect it looks like I should have done that; but no, English doesn't have a word to express the meaning I intended. I did not intend to convey that the person I was talking about was a group or an unknown generic person drawn from an available pool.
If you have a corpus of examples of the construction being used on specific known individuals dating back to the beginnings of Modern English, I'm all ears.
