Re: At peace with Debian (was: This is the last war...)
On Sunday 14 July 2002 06:14 pm, Ron Johnson wrote:
> 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.
Bah. Threaten to club 'em to death with all 14 lbs of the Shorter OED :)
"But, Professor Pedanta, this says that you can ..." *thwack*
> I like Colin's idea of improving the
> language. What are some words for "gender-neutral 3rd-person" in
> other languages?
Hmm, French has gendered plurals. My German is too rusty, though iirc
the gender comes from the name for the role directly rather than the
sex[1] of the person performing the role, and I've only just got
started on Russian, so can't answer that one.
- Derek
[1] "Gender is a word to be applied to grammar, not people. If someone
is female, that is her sex, not her gender. (The gender of Mädchen, the
German word for girl, is neuter.)"
http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/index.cfm?page=673903
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