Singular they - Comparison With Other Languages

Comparison With Other Languages

If, following Pinker's proposal, they is considered as a pair of homonyms, this would be analogous to a language like Basque, which uses the word nork both as an indeterminate pronoun meaning "who" and also as a marker in distributive constructions.

Basque has two ways of expressing universal distributive quantifications: (i) lexically, through the quantifier bakoitz 'each'; (ii) configurationally, through the construction exemplified in (1).

In (1), an indeterminate pronoun takes on a universal distributive value. Such a value is not a lexical property of the relevant indeterminate pronouns.

Basque is far from the only example of this. S.-Y. Kuroda considers it typical of East Asian languages, Japanese and Korean in particular. Yet other languages have even more particular ways of expressing distribution and quantification. Sumerian, structurally similar to Basque, uses a nominal suffix, dedli, to indicate "each individual". Some suggest that such a linguistic dispute is typical of Indo-European languages, especially Slavic languages such as Russian, Belarusian or Bulgarian where the system of singular and plural nouns is quite complex.