It’s not. Context provides you all the needed info in 99.9% of cases.
“Alex is coming over after school, I haven’t seen them in forever.” Obviously means a single person.
“There’s construction going on? When will they be done?” Honestly doesn’t matter but obviously means a group of people.
Sure, you need to provide context, but you’d need to with a pronoun anyway.
“Where is she?” Who the heck is “she”?
“What time is he finished with work?” Who are we talking about?…
You’re essentially looking at the words singular and plural definitions and coming up with a reason they don’t work. (Hey, another “they” and I’m sure you picked up on the fact that I’m not talking about a singular human.)
Can you even think of a situation that has ambiguity, which would actually come up in natural language?
“Get who wrote this rubbish in here.”
“I’ve message them. They are coming to the meeting now.”
“You mean a team or an individual did this?”
It does depend how pedantic you want to be. I’ll dyslexic and I don’t process language like others and so I don’t like ambiguous. My default interpretation is frequently different. Human language has enough ambiguousness as it is. I’d like it reduced ideally.
“Who wrote this rubbish” is already ambiguous from the start, since it can be a singular author, or multiple. I admit they/them didn’t help resolve that ambiguity, but it isn’t the cause.
I agree ‘who’ is ambiguous and ‘they/them’ tells you nothing further. If we had a ‘xhe’ or whatever, you could narrow it down to a single person, without having to get into gender needlessly. I don’t need to know/care about gender.
It’s not clear when you say they if you mean a person or a group. The term is for both. It’s ambiguous.
It’s not. Context provides you all the needed info in 99.9% of cases.
Sure, you need to provide context, but you’d need to with a pronoun anyway.
You’re essentially looking at the words singular and plural definitions and coming up with a reason they don’t work. (Hey, another “they” and I’m sure you picked up on the fact that I’m not talking about a singular human.)
Can you even think of a situation that has ambiguity, which would actually come up in natural language?
Really easy and you know it. Of top of my head:
“Get who wrote this rubbish in here.” “I’ve message them. They are coming to the meeting now.” “You mean a team or an individual did this?”
It does depend how pedantic you want to be. I’ll dyslexic and I don’t process language like others and so I don’t like ambiguous. My default interpretation is frequently different. Human language has enough ambiguousness as it is. I’d like it reduced ideally.
“Who wrote this rubbish” is already ambiguous from the start, since it can be a singular author, or multiple. I admit they/them didn’t help resolve that ambiguity, but it isn’t the cause.
I agree ‘who’ is ambiguous and ‘they/them’ tells you nothing further. If we had a ‘xhe’ or whatever, you could narrow it down to a single person, without having to get into gender needlessly. I don’t need to know/care about gender.