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I have been reading a manga called A Bride's Story translated by Yen Press, and on page 47, volume 13, there is this speech bubble by a woman addressed to an audience of grown-ups including the newlyweds:

Hey! Everyone, come quick! They doctor says he's going to take a photograph!!

which appeared to me at first to be a typo of The doctor says, and I had actually sent them an email pointing it out, but was ignored.

After reading a bit more of the manga from the beginning, I have come to appreciate the grasp of the English language by the translator, so I started to question myself if I may have wronged the editors. A quick google search of the term "they doctor says" yielded some results, but they mostly pertain to nursery rhymes and children's books, maybe as a cutesy way to imitate childspeak. Here are two examples:

Five Little Bears - Nursery Rhymes Video for Kids

Five Little Bears Jumping On The Bed music song video for toddlers and kids. As soon as these cute five little bears go to bed they start to jump but oh dear trouble is on its way one by one they fall off the bed and hurt themselves. Mama and Papa call the doctor and they doctor says No more bears jumping on the bed. Great original version for the favorite Five Little Monkeys Song.

The Birds, the Bees, and the Berenstain Bears

[...] The basics of life have been freely covered in this house. All that stuff has been gone over. So when they doctor says the word birth canal, both kids stop the story and say, “the baby comes out of the mother’s vagina.” [...]

My questions are as follows: is "they doctor says" grammatical? And is this phrase as used in the manga's context simply a typo or meant to convey something I have not grasped?

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    All those examples just look like typos to me.
    – user888379
    Commented Jan 11 at 13:38
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    A spelling checker isn't going to spot this because "they" is a valid English word. A grammar checker might, but grammar checkers are so imperfect you'd be foolish to rely on one, and they may create more work than they solve.
    – Stuart F
    Commented Jan 11 at 15:47
  • @StuartF I'd say it'd be foolish to not have a spelling and grammar checker for publications, as this typo could have been spotted and thus prevented if only they made use of even a mediocre checker like the one in LibreOffice (well, it didn't catch the error if the text are in all caps as appear in the manga, but that is another topic). If you're instead against autocorrect, I'd agree with you (maybe the examples I've found are autocorrected?).
    – Gao
    Commented Jan 13 at 14:06

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I think the examples you found are just Standard English with typos. However, "they + noun" is grammatical in some dialects where "they" is used instead of "their":

U.S. regional (chiefly southern and south Midland), Caribbean, and in African American use. As possessive pronoun: = their adj.

They all brought they rocks and Christ turned 'em into bread. (Mules and men, 1935)

OED

As "em" in this quote shows, possessive "they" is almost always found alongside other dialect indicators in writing. In other quotes in the OED, "dey" is used to represent th-stopping.

The reasons the examples you found look like typos are that they don't have any other dialect indicators like that, and "the" is more fitting than "their" in context.

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  • Wow, OED is free again? This dialect is mind-blowing and makes sentences hard to read, very much like some Shakespearean English I've read. But "they" and "their" do sound similar enough that when spoken, I could imagine them being used interchangeably. Is it as easy to make this slip of the tongue for "they doctor says" as it is to do it in writing?
    – Gao
    Commented Jan 11 at 14:15
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    This is just one free OED page; the entire thing is not free. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "Is it as easy"—this is just how some people talk, similar to how some people pronounce "caramel" with two syllables, without the middle A. (Often people who use poss. they, especially AAVE, are also exposed to standard English, so they may sometimes choose to use a standard pronunciation, like when code switching.)
    – Laurel ♦
    Commented Jan 11 at 14:26
  • Note that 'Their doctor says...', while grammatical, doesn't make sense at all in context. So 'they doctor says...' may be OK in some context in Caribbean English, it wouldn't work here. Just more evidence that it is a typo or error by non-native translator.
    – Mitch
    Commented Jan 11 at 15:58
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    @Mitch Perhaps it was too understated, but that's what I meant by "the" is more fitting than "their" in context. I would even say it's not really grammatical in the first one, since they already said "the doctor"—either way, we know how the rhyme goes and it's not "they doctor".
    – Laurel ♦
    Commented Jan 11 at 16:25

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