Who do they think they are?

They？谁？

The fight over the singular use of “they” has been going on for centuries

几个世纪以来，关于“they”的单数用法一直争议不断

Grammar has rarely produced as much public acrimony as in the battle over pronouns being waged around the world. In one skirmish in 2015, the University of Tennessee offered guidance on referring to non-binary students on its website, only for political blowback to lead to a legislative ban on spending public money to support non-traditional pronouns. Jordan Peterson, a controversial Canadian academic, has refused to use invented pronouns or “they” in relation to people who identify as neither male nor female. Many fulminating commentators spy political correctness running amok yet again.

英语语法中，很少有问题像代词运用这样会引起公众这么激烈的争执。2015年，美国田纳西大学在官网发布了如何称呼“非二元性别者”的指南，结果却招致政府立法禁止将公共资金用于非传统代词的研究。但是，一位颇具争议的加拿大学者乔丹•彼得森却拒绝使用新发明的代词或者“they”来指代非二元性别者。另外，很多专家学者也对语法领域的政治正确再次盛行感到非常不满。

注：

1.non-binary: 非二元性别者，为“性别认同/性别表达不符合性别二元论定义”的一类人的统称，主要包括无性别（没有特定性别认同）、性别两性体（性别认同介于男性和女性之间，即时而认为自己是男，时而认为自己是女，或者认为自己既是男也是女）、流性人（性别认同随时间流动而改变）等。参见以下网址：

https://site.douban.com/283412/widget/notes/192710953/note/609059498/ 22.

2. 韦氏词典2019年度词汇：They

12月10日，韦氏词典宣布，人称代词“They”为年度词汇，这标志着越来越多人使用这个古老的复数人称代词，来指代性别认同非二元的个人。而韦氏出版公司是美国一家已有180多年历史的权威辞书出版机构，所出版词典中文通称为韦氏词典。

《纽约时报》11日报道，韦氏词典总编辑彼得·索科洛夫斯基（Peter Sokolowski）表示，公众对词汇的兴趣通常是由重大新闻事件驱动的。今年其他一些获得了较高搜索量的词语包括“quid pro quo”（交换条件）和“impeachment”（弹劾），这些都与政治头条新闻相关。但像“They”这样的实用性词语创造搜索热潮的现象并不常见。它可能反映出人们对越来越多使用非二元人群的代词产生的好奇和困惑。

非二元性别，即非男性也非女性，代表一种性别中立。也有人将这一性别认同称之为，“性别酷儿”或“X性别”。

Into the breach comes a useful corrective in the form of Dennis Baron’s well-timed new book, “What’s Your Pronoun?” Mr Baron is a linguist at the University of Illinois, and a longtime scholar of a curious gap in the English language. For centuries, people have wrestled with the fact that there is no uncontroversial pronoun to refer to a subject of unknown, indeterminate or mixed gender.

针对学者们的分歧，丹尼斯•巴伦的新书《用什么来指代你》（What’s Your Pronoun）及时地给出了一项有用的解决方案。巴伦先生是伊利诺伊大学的语言学家，并且是英语死角问题的资深学者。几世纪以来，对于如何指代性别未知、不明确或者比较模糊的群体，英语当中一直缺少一个能被所有人接受的代词，人们也一直在努力想要解决这个问题。

Singular they, in sentences such as “Everyone loves their mother”, has been derided as incorrect for a long time. Mr Baron tracks the first such ruling to a 16th-century Latin grammar, which declared the masculine the more honourable gender that, where necessary, encompasses the feminine. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this view made its way into English grammars: when referring to a generic person, you should say “Everyone loves his mother.”

在一些句子中，比如“Everyone loves their mother”（每个人都爱他们的母亲），“他们（they）”的单数用法一直被嘲笑是错的。巴伦先生在16世纪的拉丁文语法中查到了最早的一条类似的规定，其中认为男性比女性更优越，因此必要时（使用男性代词）可以涵盖女性。18、19世纪，这种语法现象开始出现在英语中：如果是泛指，我们应该说“Everyone loves his mother”（每个人都爱他的母亲）。

But there were wide holes in this argument. Proponents of the rule treated it as a simple matter of grammatical agreement: everyone is grammatically singular, so requires a singular pronoun. They is plural and won’t do. To real sticklers for agreement, however, pronouns must tally in both number and gender. Generic they is wrong by number, but generic he is wrong by gender.

但是，上面的观点漏洞百出。对于它的支持者来说，这就是一个简单的语法一致的问题：语法上“每个人”（everyone）是单数，所以它的代词也就应该是单数；“他们”（they）是复数，所以不能用来指代everyone。但对于特别较真的人来说，代词必须能同时指代数量和性别。复数代词“他们”在数量上是错误的，但是单数代词“他”在性别上是错误的。

Nonetheless, “he includes she” was in textbooks, and so, for a time, proto-feminists tried to take advantage where they could. Laws saying that each person should pay “his” taxes required women to pay, too. So, 19th-century suffragists reasoned, the statute books referring to a generic voter as “he” gave women the right to vote. Seemingly hoist on the chauvinist petard, defenders of male-only suffrage tactically retreated: he included she unless it would produce an “absurd” reading—such as offering women the vote. (Since it was often held that husbands voted in their wives’ interests, Susan B. Anthony, a 19th-century American suffragist, suggested that if a woman commits murder her husband should be hanged in her stead.)

此外，“<他>包括<她>”这一论断曾经出现在课本中，因此有一段时间，最早的女权主义者们充分利用了这一点。法律规定每个人都应该上交“<他的>”赋税，而这里“<他>”涵盖女性，因此女性也要上交赋税。所以，19世纪的妇女参政论者推断，法律中泛指普通的投票者为“<他>”，这就赋予了女性投票权。这就像在沙文主义者的头上悬挂了炸药包，只有男人才能投票论的支持者战略性地退却了：除非读起来的意思荒唐可笑——比如赋予了女士投票权，否则<他>包括<她>。（据析，19世纪的妇女政权论者苏珊•安东尼认为既然人们普遍觉得男性投票能代表妻子的利益，那么如果女人犯了谋杀罪，她的丈夫应该以代替妻子被执行绞刑）。

注：

1. proto-feminist :The term proto-feminist is sometimes applied to a person in a philosophical tradition anticipating modern feminist concepts, who lived in an era when the term "feminist" was unknown that is, prior to the 20th century. The precise use of the term is disputed, as 18th-century feminism and 19th-century feminism are subsumed under "feminism."

（可以理解为“女权先行者”）
2.suffragist : An advocate of the extension of political voting rights, especially to women.

3. Susan B. Anthony：苏珊•安东尼（1820-1906），美国著名民权运动领袖，是女权杂志《革命》的创立者之一，被称为“美国女权运动第一人”。

Given the problems with he, lots of people have invented new, gender-free pronouns. The first one Mr Baron could find (of more than 250 in total) dates to 1841: E. Other suggestions continue in a steady stream until today. Every once in a while, one found a tiny purchase. In 1884 three dictionaries included thon, shortened from that one, but it failed to catch on. The Sacramento Bee, a newspaper, said in 1920 that it would use hir in place of “he or she”, and did so sporadically until the 1940s, but it too faded away.

鉴于<他>带来了诸多的问题，许多人创造出了无性别含义的新代词。拜伦先生发现的第一个代词E可追溯到1841年。直到今天，仍然有许多建议陆续出现。每隔一段时间，一个小代词就会冒出来。1884年有三部词典收录了thon, 这个词是that >的缩写词，但是最终未能流行起来。1920年，《萨克拉门托蜜蜂报》报导，该报将会用hir代替“he or she”。断断续续的使用了一段时间后，到了40年代，hir还是消失了。

The “missing word”, Mr Baron says, is “they”. People have been using it as a generic singular in writing since at least 1375, and have doubtless been saying it even longer. It has appeared as such in the King James Bible, the works of Shakespeare and the novels of Jane Austen. Recently, growing numbers of style guides, including those of The Economist and the Associated Press as well as the Chicago Manual of Style, have concluded that it is often the most pragmatic of a set of imperfect solutions.

拜伦先生指出“我们所缺的是<他们>的合适替代词”。自1375年起，人们便在写作中将<他们>作为泛指的单数使用，而在对话中如此使用无疑更久。这一用法在詹姆斯王钦定版《圣经》、莎士比亚作品及简•奥斯丁的小说中均出现过。最近，越来越多的格式指南，包括经济学人格式指南、联合通讯社格式指南、芝加哥格式手册等都认为在一系列不完美的解决方案中，这才是最务实的做法。

But all that comes as a different singular they has come to the fore: to refer to a known individual who identifies as non-binary, as growing numbers do, in sentences such as “Alex forgot their keys.” This is the increasingly widespread singular they that was recently recognised by the American Dialect Society as its Word of the Decade.

在众多不同的单数代词中，“<他们>（they）”逐渐崭露头角。因为越来越多的人并不能认定自己的性别，因此使用“<他们>（they）”来代指这一类人，比如“艾利克斯落下了<他们的>的钥匙”。“<他们>”作为单数代词使用正变得愈加广泛，这种用法的they最近被美国方言协会选为“十年词”。

The two usages are quite different. The one in “Everyone has their own opinion” is actually quite conservative, given its age, its literary pedigree and the fact that most people already say it in casual speech. They in “Alex forgot their keys” is, by contrast, innovative and jarring to many; for the uninitiated, it takes practice to use it consistently. And though both feminists and transgender activists have embraced the singular they, they have done so for different reasons, and other issues still divide them. A rare moment of liberation through grammar risks being caught up in wider, rancorous culture wars .

They的这两种用法十分不同。在例句“每个人都有<他们>自己的意见”中，考虑到“他们”这一代词的使用历史、文学系谱及在人们日常交谈中的普及程度，它的用法其实非常保守。而在“艾利克斯落下了<他们的>钥匙”中，它的用法是许多人前所未见的，也会使很多人感到有些突兀。对于还不习惯这种用法的人，需要一定的练习才能运用自如。尽管女权主义团体和变性者团体都接受了they作为单数代词的用法，他们的理由却各不相同，在其他问题上也依然存在分歧。这是通过语法来争取自由的罕见时刻，却有可能被卷入更为广泛、更激烈的文化战争中。

翻译组：   

Frank，男，小硕，经济学人的死侍

无忌，梦想成为自由口译员但是不会九阳神功的张无忌

Piggy，爱吃鱼，爱跳舞，爱睡回笼觉的小能猫，NUS食品系

校核组：

Chao，爱读书思考的DPhil candidate，TE爱好者

Nikolai，爱想象的小双鱼，蒙特雷候补生，AKB49

Rachel，学理工科，爱跳芭蕾，热爱文艺的非典型翻译

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