I’m not a native speaker, but as far as I understood, for singular objects and animals “it” was used. Why use “they” for individual people then?
In: 1400
There’s a concept in linguistics called animacy, where nouns indicate whether the subject is animate, inanimate, or somewhere in between. Humans and things we anthropomorphize, like our gods, our pets, etc., are described with the highest degree of animacy the language has. Chairs, rocks, dishware, and other non-living objects are generally assigned the one of the lowest degrees of animacy. The absolute lowest degree usually goes to abstract nouns, like emotions or concepts. Plants, animals, microbes, dehumanized people groups machines, celestial objects, etc., all fall along a spectrum, in different places on the spectrum in different languages, and there are exceptions to all of this. For example, in the Navajo language, the highest tier of animacy is reserved for adult humans… and lightning. If you were raised speaking English or any other European language, that probably makes little or no sense. Just gotta shrug that one off as different strokes.
In English, there aren’t many words with a distinction of animacy. Mostly, it’s just he/she, it, they, who, whom, and what. It and what have a very low degree of animacy, and should rarely, if ever, be used to refer to people. If you use “what” to refer to a person, it actually changes the meaning of the sentence. “Who are you?” asks their personal identity. “What are you?” asks about their physical or immutable description. The latter is also generally seen as rude. “It,” on the other hand, is not applicable to people at all, unless that person has explicitly asked to be referred to that way. The word implies that the subject is an inanimate object.
The issue of “they” being plural is irrelevant. It’s grammatically plural, but it’s been used to refer to single people for over 500 years. And it’s not even the only pronoun to get this treatment. “You” is also grammatically plural, and referred specifically to multiple people until just a few centuries ago, when “thou,” the singular form, fell out of common use. And like the singular they, the singular you kept its plural grammar, including conjugations. If you see or hear archaic English that uses “thou,” you’ll also see that verbs with “thou” as a subject are conjugated oddly. The Bible is a great example – “thou shalt not” is used several times. Using the modern singular you, that would be “you shall not,” using the plural conjugation. It’s sort of like how the Spanish usted uses plural conjugations, even though it’s singular and the plural is ustedes.
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