Re: Indo-European Languages and Gramatical Gender Loss

On Mon, 18 Jun 2007 09:02:08 -0700, "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:1182182528.623254.262810@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
in sci.lang:

[...]

There are some examples in the Wikipedia
article:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they The
first is from Shakespeare and another is from The
American Heritage Dictionary 2000.

Once again, wiki lets us down.

Actually, the article has lots of examples, including one
from William Caxton, and further mentions that singular
'they' can be found in the Canterbury Tales. It also
discusses the various types of singular 'they'.
Unfortunately, it's rather badly written. Fortunately, it's
flagged both for possible violation of neutrality and for
possible factual inaccuracy, so the reader is directed to
the talk page, where the discussion (a) clarifies some of
what the article itself doesn't explain very well and (b)
indirectly explains why the article isn't very well written.

Brian
.

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