Re: At peace with Debian (was: This is the last war...)
On Sun, 2002-07-14 at 19:43, Derek Gladding wrote:
> On Sunday 14 July 2002 05:36 pm, Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Sun, Jul 14, 2002 at 05:24:39PM -0700, David Wright wrote:
> > > Guess what: no matter how much you agonized over it when you were
> > > young first discovered feminism, you can't eliminate the "generic
> > > masculine" construction in English without distracting your reader
> > > or being wrong.
> >
> > So let's improve English so that you can (not necessarily using a
> > plural form; other ways have been suggested). It's not like it's a
> > dead language, after all.
> >
>
> Well, "their" has been acceptable for both neuter and plural usage (||
> not &&) for most of the history of the language, so it's more a case of
> "rolling back a buggy patch" than improvement. I personally find it no
> more distracting than seeing "colour" spelt wrongly ;-)
Hmmm. My (female) grammar teachers would have deducted major points
for mixing pluralities. I like Colin's idea of improving the language.
What are some words for "gender-neutral 3rd-person" in other languages?
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