Re: At peace with Debian (was: This is the last war...)

[Seneca <seneca-cunningham@rogers.com>]

On Sun, Jul 14, 2002 at 08:14:33PM -0500, 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.  I like Colin's idea of improving the language.
> What are some words for "gender-neutral 3rd-person" in other languages?

I'm not sure about "gender-neutral 3rd-person" in other languages, but
taking a look in my copy of _The_Random_House_Handbook_[0], on page 113:

   Remedies that have been proposed range from using he or she (or
   she or he) for the common gender, to treating singular common words
   as plural (A taxpayer must check their return), to combining
   masculine and feminine pronouns in forms like s/he, to adopting
   radically new common forms such as tey, tem, and ter.

Of course, right after that segment, the author gives his (Frederick is
more likely to be male) suggestions that writers "Avoid the singular
wherever your meaning isn't affected" and to "Omit the pronoun
altogether when it isn't essential".

As for the "new common forms", I think I'll avoid using them in my
English essays come september, I can't risk my teacher lowering my mark
in my final year of high school just because tey don't like my form.
(Although it might be fun to watch ter reaction to them, but I don't
want tem to come after me for it :-)

[0] _The_Random_House_Handbook_
    Second Edition (c 1974)
    Frederick Crews

-- 
Seneca
seneca-cunningham@rogers.com


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