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By John McWhorter

Opinion Writer

The rapid growth (and partial retreat) of “they” and “them” has gotten a lot of attention in recent years, but English is hardly the only language that has been experimenting with a gender-neutral singular pronoun. The French have tried fusing “il” (he) and “elle” (she) into “iel,” while the prettiest example to me is Portuguese’s “elu,” where “ele” is “he” and “ela” is “she.”

It’s happening in Mandarin Chinese as well, with the new character X也, which combines the Roman letter X with an element that’s present in the word for both “he” and “she.” It emerged in 2015, but until recently there was no graceful way to type it, a fact that slowed its adoption. That changed last September........

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