su, 2005-01-30 kello 14:43 -0500, Glenn Maynard kirjoitti: > Ugh. English has no gender-neutral third person singular pronoun, which > means that the use of "he" and "his" for an unspecific third party assumes > nothing about his gender. Your objections to [1] and [2] are patently > false. (Your rewritings, arbitrarily switching between plural and singular > forms, are clumsy.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they is informative. Singular they isn't uncontroversial, but it is not unheard of, and works pretty well. In fact, though I can't find a reference to it now, I remember Ian Jackson himself being the first person for me to explain this with references. My English teacher at school would have scorned it, but I've now become accustomed to it and like it. I see it used in many places. In fact, most Debian development documentation, for example, is already gender neutral, even if not always using singular they. If I were radical, I'd propose English import the Finnish "hän" (possibly transliterated as "han") as a gender neutral third person singular pronoun. At least it would be an easier sell than the occasionally proposed "sheit", I wager. > There are useful things for Debian to spend time on. This is not one of > them. Indeed. There is no point in being gender-specific when one can easily and without cost or harm be gender-neutral and having a long discussion about it is mostly a waste of time. We are naturally neutral about religion, nationality, and ethnicity. If someone were to write Debian documents and insert incantations from a particular religion, there would be a fuss. Gender is a similar issue; there is no benefit to us from not being gender-neutral. In the interest of not wasting unnecessary effort on this, I won't be continuing the thread, should further discussion happen.
