Pronouns

[jack]

"When John was a woman, [he/she/they] said '...' " Which pronoun do you prefer? (That is, "he" is appropriate for John now, "she" would be appropriate for what John was then, and "they" would specify the ambiguity.)

"The things God or Jesus [was/were] recorded as saying are ..." Which pronoun do you prefer? (That is, do you treat them as two separate people (were)? Or one person (was)? :))

Obviously both are arbitrary, and I think both sufficiently specialised that most people wouldn't mind which you used, I just wondered if anyone had a strong opinion :)

Comments

[simont]

"God or Jesus": the special case of them allegedly being the same entity would not deter me from treating them grammatically as separate people. However, even so it's not clear to me that I would use "were". Consider "Either Fred or Jim says such-and-such, though I can't remember which": you may be uncertain of the identity of the speaker but you know there's only one of him, so the verb is singular.

Perhaps "God and Jesus" would be a better example for offering the option of treating the noun phrase as singular. Though now that's making me think of Samneric from Lord of the Flies.

Gender transitions: I'd generally use whichever pronoun went with the name it was substituting for. If I'm talking about John, I'll substitute his name with "he"; if I'm talking about some past event during which John was going by (as it might be) "Jane", I'll substitute "Jane" with "she". This is primarily because my grammar cortex would otherwise have to remain in first gear the whole time in order to be able to reliably suppress its normal unconscious pronoun selection, which would be irritating for me and probably not too good for anyone listening to me either.

eta: though, after another thought experiment, it's entirely possible that under some circumstances I might tell a story about John-before-he-was-John and not bother shifting (name,pronoun) pair at all. It would probably depend on the nature of the story and whether the change was relevant in some way, and/or on context and whether other people had already started talking about the episode in question and what name and pronoun they were using if so.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

the special case of them allegedly being the same entity would not deter me from treating them grammatically as separate people.

That's no doubt actually the correct solution. Imagine if I referred to "Sensible-Jack and impulsive-Jack both want to..." even those actually are the same person, the different presentations thereof are grammatically separate. I don't know what the nearest example that does take a singular verb would be, if any.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Perhaps "God and Jesus" would be a better example

Yes, I think that works at least as well.

But I'm not sure "or" doesn't work. The things that were said, were said some by Jesus and some by God (and potentially some by both, but I don't think I asserted that). So "and" probably works, but maybe gives the impression they both said the same things?