• KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    9 months ago

    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?

    • jabjoe@feddit.uk
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      9 months ago

      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.

      • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 months ago

        “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.

        • jabjoe@feddit.uk
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          9 months ago

          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.