Hir is a gender-neutral pronoun used as substitute for “him/her” or “his/her”. It is common practice for orgtology students to use “hir” in their research write-ups, since it is more efficient than writing “him/her” or “his/her”.
A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. The English pronouns he and she are third-person personal pronouns specific to the gender of the person (not to be confused with grammatical gender). The English pronoun they is an epicene (gender-neutral) third-person pronoun that can refer to plural antecedents of any gender and, informally, to a singular antecedent that refers to a person, the "singular they".Many of the world's languages do not have gender-specific pronouns. A number of the ones with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a traditional grammatical gender system, where all or the vast majority of nouns are assigned to gender classes and adjectives and other modifiers must agree with them in that; but a few languages with gender-specific pronouns, such as English, Afrikaans, Defaka, Khmu, Malayalam, Tamil, and Yazgulyam, lack traditional grammatical gender and in such languages gender usually adheres to "natural gender". Problems of usage may arise in languages like English which have pronominal gender systems, in contexts where a person of unspecified or unknown gender is being referred to but commonly available pronouns (he or she) are gender-specific. In such cases a gender-specific, usually masculine, pronoun is sometimes used with a purported gender-neutral meaning; such use of he was common in formal English between the 1700s and the latter half of the 20th century (though some regard it as outmoded or sexist). Use of singular they is another common alternative dating from the 1300s, but proscribed by some. Pronouns such as who and which are not discussed here, though similar but different consideration may apply to them.
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