As a non-native speaker, referring to a single teacher as “they” is not very intuitive (although correct)…
I very much agree. Learning English as a foreign language, it feels very wrong to use plural for a single person. I’m still not quite used to it! Although, had I been taught that early on, I doubt it would feel any weirder than using “you are” for a single person.
Funny, English is also my second language but in my first language ‘she’ and plural ‘they’ are the same word, only distinguished by the verb, so it never seemed that weird to me.
I find it most inconvenient when “they” is used to refer to one person and a group in the same paragraph.
Is that any different than when you have two people of the same gender and suddenly can’t use plain old gendered pronouns to unambiguously refer to the two people?
Eg, if Susan took Anna’s apple, it’d be confusing to say “she took her apple”.
It’s not plural though. It’s just the third person neuter pronoun. Singular “they” has been a thing in English for centuries, and has only been controversial among a small segment of the population for a very short time.
Think of it a bit like French “vous”. That’s a “plural” (second person) pronoun, but is also used in the singular. In the French case, it’s used as a singular formal second person pronoun in addition to a plural second person pronoun. Nobody in France is getting up in arms about how you shouldn’t use “vous” when talking to one person.
I’m aware it’s a thing and not really a plural. What I was trying to say is that it looks plural and since I didn’t learn about this part of English until several years into my studies as a kid, it isn’t as well established in my mind as “you are” is (that also looks like a plural, but I’m used to it).
“They are” for a single person catches my mental error filter the same way as “I are” or “you is” would, which is highly annoying.
And that’s actually a pretty recent development. Less than a decade ago, I remember getting marked down in English class for using “they” as a genderless singular pronoun, as my elderly teacher grew up only ever using “they” to refer to a group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
This use of singular they had emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they.[4][5][2] It has been commonly employed in everyday English ever since and has gained currency in official contexts. Singular they has been criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who consider it an error.[6] Its continued use in modern standard English has become more common and formally accepted with the move toward gender-neutral language.[7][8] Though some early-21st-century style guides described it as colloquial and less appropriate in formal writing,[9][10] by 2020, most style guides accepted the singular they as a personal pronoun.[11][12][13][14]
Your teacher was just one of those purists and it was never something with strong consensus for being wrong.
is not very intuitive though
Yes it is. It’s completely intuitive. Native English speakers do it all the time every day. The singular “they” is used literally without conscious thought. The only time it becomes controversial is with transphobes talking about specific people who do not identify with their gender assigned at birth. Even transphobes use singular “they” without thinking in contexts like this OP where the gender is unknown. (Which is why their “but it’s bad grammar!” arguments fall flat.)
I’d say what’s intuitive is very subjective. Most of a language tends to be intuitive to its native speakers, no matter how unintuitive it seems to someone else.
To me the intuitive genderless option for “he/she” would be “it”. Coming from Finnish, it seems much more natural to have “it” include people instead of using “they” for both singular and plural. Or if using “they”, it would feel intuitive to say “they is” instead of “they are”.
Just because people with years of experience with something don’t have to think about it, doesn’t mean it’s intuitive.
As a non-native speaker, I don’t find it intuitive at all, even though I don’t have to think about it anymore. And as you can see by their post, OP didn’t find it intuitive either.
