I totally understand wanting to be respectful, but respect goes both ways. She needs to respect the fact that her odd pronouns are literally breaking the English language for people who want to use them.

I personally think that the ultimate end game for pronouns in English will be creations of new ones with no connotations (so easy to apply like names) that get incorporated into the language or more likely an eventual move to a single pronoun that applies to everyone. Chinese, for example, only differentiates in written form so would be an easy adjustment. They is every high schoolers preferred choice in essays before English teachers complain.

I'm not sure how the under 20 is adjusting but in my groups of mid 20 to late 30 nobody is trying to disrespect anyone by not using preferred pronouns, but it just slips out from decades of usage, and people just end up replacing pronouns with the person's actual name after multiple times apologizing. The having to remember multiple names when meeting someone just doesn't seem tenable long term.

> more likely an eventual move to a single pronoun that applies to everyone

Oh god i hope. As a german, we have pronouns for all nouns. So far no societal backlash against those, but they just seem totally useless to me (beside maybe a teeny tiny bit of "forward error correction"). You just have to learn them. Surest way to spot an immigrant. Then there is job titles. In the US, "nurse" seems to be used for both genders, but the words origin is female. Yeah, we have that as well for many jobs. Others usually have suffixes. Ofc we want to be welcoming to all. You can imagine the job listings...

That's more or less what singular they is, surely?

zhe

is a great non-gender pro-noun

That's a problem with the English language though. There's not a singular only version of "they" and there probably should be.

The singular only version of "they" is "they", just like the singular only version of "you" is "you". "You" was formerly plural, with "thou" as singular, but "thou" has since fallen into disuse.

You was always both singular and plural, but in the singular form it was the formal second person pronoun, whereas thou was the second person singular informal pronoun; it's the same as the difference between du/Sie in German, tu/vous in French, or je/u in Dutch. This is why the King James bible uses thou: it's intended to feel more accessible to its readers with a friendly tone.

> You was always both singular and plural

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You says the singular "you" didn't occur until Modern English, and the singular form 'ye' died out in the 1600s with early Modern English.

The King James Bible, published 1611, uses "ye" as the singular form of the formal "you", as in "Ye shall know them by their fruits."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version further notes:

] In a period of rapid linguistic change the translators avoided contemporary idioms, tending instead towards forms that were already slightly archaic, like verily and it came to pass.[87] The pronouns thou/thee and ye/you are consistently used as singular and plural respectively, even though by this time you was often found as the singular in general English usage, especially when addressing a social superior (as is evidenced, for example, in Shakespeare). ...

] Another sign of linguistic conservatism is the invariable use of -eth for the third person singular present form of the verb, as at Matthew 2:13: "the Angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dreame".

Come all ye faithful is singular?

I've been trying to figure this out and just end up being more confused.

One issue is that song's use of "ye" seems to be from the 1750s, so about 150 years after the KJV usage, which in turn was somewhat archaic. English changes.

Another is how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_(pronoun) says:

> In Early Modern English, ye functioned as both an informal plural and formal singular second-person nominative pronoun. "Ye" is still commonly used as an informal plural in Hiberno‐English and Newfoundland English

So it's possible that the KJV uses "ye" only for formal singular second-person, even if was also used more widely used for informal plural, and as that informal plural became more widely used, it became the go-to way to translate the Latin, which is in plural.

And then I read https://www.etymonline.com/word/you?ref=etymonline_crossrefe... and my eyes roll up in confusion.

Most likely I misunderstood the text I copied from the KJV entry, and "ye" and "you" are both plural forms?

I give up.

> "You" was formerly plural, with "thou" as singular, but "thou" has since fallen into disuse.

Sadly. Overloading "you" and "they" feels rather clunky. I wish it got rid of "he" and "she" instead - gendering pronouns is completely useless, and that's coming from someone whose native tongue genders much more than just pronouns.

After Miner49er went to the store, they went the bank.

After Foo and Bar went to the store, they went to the bank.

If we don’t need a singular-only you, why would we need a singular-only they?

Have you considered that someone who chooses "it/its" as its pronouns is intentionally trying to break the English language with said choice? In this case, it is Swiss, and therefore it is likely not a native English speaker which could be a factor as well.

German has similar singular pronouns to English, with "he", "she" and it corresponding directly to "er", "sie" und "es".

(Not trying to make any point here, just thought it might be useful for context.)

Swiss though, so the evil twin of German :P

Possibly, but that just makes me more interested in simply ignoring her wishes.

Really not. Most sentences can be easily rewritten without pronouns. I know a bunch of trans people and have trouble remembering who likes to be called what, so I just reduced the number of direct references. It's not that hard to do, because most conversations don't involve so many subjects that it becomes complex.

I'm sorry to hear about that. Sounds difficult.

That's the reply I should have given to your complaint about 'breaking the English language'.

You can't 'break' a language. You either just follow its rules or flaunt them. If your output is still comprehensible - which 'it' as a pronoun is - it's still language. Back in the day English used to have two pronouns for 'you'. Was merging them both into one pronoun also literally breaking the language?

She's actively making the language less comprehensible by breaking the rules. Multiple times in this thread, people have said "it" and I've been confused as to what - or who - they're referring to.

I'm not a language historian, so I don't have an opinion on your last question.

People seem to be assuming that this request for certain pronoun usage is made in good faith. Asking to be called "it" is probably just trolling on "its" part. "It" would probably laugh at the people bending over backwards to accommodate.

it uses both pronouns: she/her and it/its, as written on her website[1].

[1]: https://maia.crimew.gay/

Sure, but that’s not what the page says. The Wikipedia article says that. The page says “it/she”. From what I’m familiar with, the order is usually “singular/plural” and when multiple are preferred I’m used to seeing it written as you notated it here as pairs in a list e.g. she/her, his/him, they/them, it/its, xe/xim, etc, in a list. I guess I can infer that’s the intention, however, which is fair enough.

But that really didn’t have much to do with what I was discussing. That was a separate argument about how we use “it” to refer to objects as a rule. Humans are objects, but we also generally prefer to think of them as objects of a higher order variety. In conversation, we take advantage of this to parse and interpret context more quickly. Choosing to do otherwise makes it more difficult to know if the “it” I just used in this sentence is Maia, some other object, or an abstract point I’m making in this discussion. Anyway, that’s why I prefer she/her.