Re: GR Proposal: replace "Chairman" with "Chair" throughout the Debian Constitution
On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 11:15:57AM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 03:27:56PM +0200, Margarita Manterola wrote:
>> - <li>The Technical Committee and/or its Chairman;</li>
>> + <li>The Technical Committee and/or its Chair;</li>
> A "Chairman" is a person. A "Chair" may be an object.
> I don't think anyone will misinterpret your proposed new wording into
> thinking the TC has a physical chair that someone sits on, but the
> s/Chairmain/Chair/ you apply does to me seem to introduce some
> grammatical ambiguity that could make the text of the constitution less
> clear than it might be.
> Since I'm not a native English speaker,
Since Debian is an international project, with many (I expect a
majority but am too lazy to check) of non-native English speakers,
maybe taking a more unwieldy, but more clear route, would be better:
Chairperson?
Or we could show we are a *deeply* geeky project, that knows that in
Old English, "mann" or "monn" meant had a gender-neutral meaning of
"human", corresponding to Modern English "person" or "someone", and
that this has been corrupted after the Norman conquest. So we could
decide to go back to the "roots" and recognise that "Chairman" is
etymologically not gendered. To make it more clear, we could replace
it by "Chairmann" or "Chairmonn". IMHO the latter would be far too
not-understandable to modern ears, so the former is better; at worse
it will be seen as a spelling mistake.
If one wants to have a language reform, I rather like this "back to
the roots" approach to the reform; obviously we cherry-pick what we
want/like from the roots and don't go completely back :) You know, the
same way that the discerning Frenchmann does not scoff at "je vais
faire mon shopping" because e (or ey or ee or sie or (s)he or they or
...) recognises that this is just a return of Old French "eschoppe"
(now spelled échoppe and somewhat antiquated, but still understandable
by most Frenchspeakers) via a detour in English, instead of a vile
"anglicisme".
This article contains a clause shamelessly copy/pasted from Wikipedia;
it may make it entirely covered by the Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike License. Or not, because it is such a short
quote. You figure it out, since you want to do something with it.
I'd rather you asked me for a signed agreement in triplicate before
taking it out of the debian-private debian-developer-only archives to
quote/post somewhere else.
--
Lionel
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