On the one hand, the English language desperately needs a gender neutral singular third person pronoun. I mean, we have one, but we also insist that "it" can't be used for people without being exceptionally rude and insulting, so we need one fit for polite society.
But on the other hand, I wasn't keen on the idea of weakening the "plurality" of "they". We've already lost a distinction between singular and plural with our second person pronouns when we stopped using "thou"...
But I recently had an epiphany. You see, the plural "you" was always used to refer to single individuals.
Back in the day, English had two ways* of referring to someone in the second person. There was "you", which was plural, and "thou", which was singular. This is actually pretty bog standard in most languages I know of, so I don't rightly know why we stopped doing this.
The other thing that was "bog standard" was the fact that you would use the plural word to refer to individuals if you were being polite. You (Sie, vous, teie, etc) is used when speaking to one person, even though the word is plural, because it doubles as the polite form. You would use this when talking to someone you weren't on first-name basis with, or someone you might refer to as "sir" or "madam".**
The singular form, thou (du, tu, sina, etc) is used when talking to someone you don't have to be polite to - like someone who is of a lower social standing than you (and everyone knows it) or, more commonly these days, family and friends.
"Thou" is not just a marker of singularity, but also familiarity.
It wasn't just a matter of pronouns, either. The entire verb structure altered to say "we know each other well". Think about that the next time you hear the old hymn "Be Thou My Vision" ("nought be all else to me, save that Thou art"), and others like it. That way of speaking wasn't a marker of great respect, but of great closeness.
In many languages, it's still a gesture of friendship to be told "you can 'thou' me", and you wouldn't dream of calling someone "thou" if you weren't on close terms.
Anyway, the thing that occurred to me is that there is no reason why third person pronouns couldn't work the same way; we could use the plural version ("they") to refer to people we don't know well as a mark of politeness (or neutrality), and singular versions ("he", "she", etc), as a mark of familiarity.
So, when talking to someone about a friend, you would feel perfectly comfortable saying "he went there on his own", but if that person wasn't also friends with your friend, they would say "Oh, did they enjoy it?" and that would be perfectly normal.
When you think about it that way, using "they" as a singular word isn't really "losing" anything, but regaining something we've lost elsewhere.
Plus, it would be really handy.
*Actually, we once had three, but that's out of the purview of this post
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