Re: Comment on introduction pages
On 06/04/2010 10:00 AM, Ralf Wildenhues wrote: Hello, * Eric Blake wrote on Fri, Jun 04, 2010 at 04:26:49AM CEST: I'm not the automake maintainer. But I am. And I will rewrite its manual to just use the simplest gender-neutral alternative, namely, speaking to and about you, the user, or you, the developer. Ralf, kudos on coming up with a workable alternative that skirts the issue of 3rd person gender altogether! I agree that GNU manuals are a perfect place to direct conversation to the reader, but I've grown too accustomed to avoiding 2nd person due to my background in other technical writing venues where 2nd person is frowned upon. Overall, I think that this email thread is another great example of why open source works - with enough readers, there's someone that can come up with an alternative solution. -- Eric Blake ebl...@redhat.com+1-801-349-2682 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Comment on introduction pages
Hi, But I am. And I will rewrite its manual to just use the simplest gender-neutral alternative, namely, speaking to and about you, the user, or you, the developer. Lovely! I know plenty of people who will be very happy for that and I really do believe it makes a difference for reaching a more gender equal participation in open source. Great! Have a nice weekend, Chris
Re: Comment on introduction pages
Hi again Thanks for answers. We could have an elaborate discussion about linguistics, or we could change the text on the site so anyone feels at home. For the comfort of hermaphrodites I think the developer's is a good suggestion. Redundancy is not as bad as people feeling sad for not belonging, right? Gary, you seem to be a girl of great humor and mathematical asberger's and since about 1,7 of the world's population are hermaphrodites you with your amazing skills can easily calculate that 98,3 % is better than 90%. And then maybe we should ponder the fact that so few women are participating to open source. I think because of Garys. Russ, you made my day! I will redirect my question, thanks Eric for directions. Best regards, Chris 2010/6/4 Mike Frysinger vap...@gentoo.org On Thursday, June 03, 2010 22:26:49 Eric Blake wrote: On 06/03/2010 06:28 PM, Russ Allbery wrote: Eric Blake ebl...@redhat.com writes: Thanks for the report. However, English is one of those silly languages where the pronoun his can have a neuter sense rather than masculine, and this is one of those cases. Politically correct pundits are trying to eradicate that usage, but personally, I'm still of the opinion that his looks better than his/hers, as long as you understand that the usage is not locking down the gender of the antecedent. The long-standing gender-neutral pronoun in English is singular their, as used by such people as Jane Austen. I would rewrite the sentence as: The developer expresses the recipe to build their package in a Makefile A pedant would claim that it mixes singular and plural, but you are correct that it is in common enough usage that their package doesn't grate as badly on my nerves as his/her package. his/her is indeed garbage -mike
Re: Comment on introduction pages
At Friday 04 June 2010, Russ Allbery r...@stanford.edu wrote: Eric Blake ebl...@redhat.com writes: Thanks for the report. However, English is one of those silly languages where the pronoun his can have a neuter sense rather than masculine, and this is one of those cases. Politically correct pundits are trying to eradicate that usage, but personally, I'm still of the opinion that his looks better than his/hers, as long as you understand that the usage is not locking down the gender of the antecedent. The long-standing gender-neutral pronoun in English is singular their, as used by such people as Jane Austen. I would rewrite the sentence as: The developer expresses the recipe to build their package in a Makefile Such a formulation could however confuse non-native speakers, especially if their mother tongue lacks gender-neutral pronouns of this kind, and they don't read Jane Austen often ;-) In particular, that formulation would have confused *me*, and I'd have probably ended up by suggesting a patch with s/developer/developers/ or s/their/his/, to fix the perceived grammatical error. Just my 2 cents. Regards, Stefano
Re: Comment on introduction pages
If one wishes to use a gender neutral word, one could always go for person/per/pers/perself as used by Marge Piercy. That won't insult the sensibilities hermaphrodite... I've always found the claim that using his vs. hers in text influences anyone in free software projects, specially women, highly suspect; no women I know cares about the issue.
Re: Comment on introduction pages
Hello, * Eric Blake wrote on Fri, Jun 04, 2010 at 04:26:49AM CEST: I'm not the automake maintainer. But I am. And I will rewrite its manual to just use the simplest gender-neutral alternative, namely, speaking to and about you, the user, or you, the developer. By the way, if one person states that some formulation is not gender-neutral for them, that is *not* refuted by somebody else stating that the same text is gender-neutral enough for some other person. (Not trying to address anyone in particular in this thread.) Cheers, and thanks to Christina for bringing this up, Ralf
Re: Comment on introduction pages
On Friday, June 04, 2010 03:24:34 Gary V. Vaughan wrote: On 4 Jun 2010, at 13:47, Christina Gratorp wrote: For the comfort of hermaphrodites I think the developer's is a good suggestion. Redundancy is not as bad as people feeling sad for not belonging, right? Gary, you seem to be a girl of great humor and mathematical asberger's and since about 1,7 of the world's population are hermaphrodites you with your amazing skills can easily calculate that 98,3 % is better than 90%. Well, I was referring to (an assumed) approximate 90% male demographic of automake manual readers. I'll be the first to admit that I don't have the slightest clue as to the world population of hermaphrodites. And then maybe we should ponder the fact that so few women are participating to open source. I think because of Garys. It was actually my female English-Lit professor who said to the class (paraphrasing from memory): I would *far* rather be addressed as 'Dear Sir', than 'Dear Sir/Madam'... I find the assumption that I am an hermaphrodite to be far more ridiculous than the assumption that I am a man. The entire `Sir/Madam', `he/she', `him/her', `person-hole', `person-go fruit' movement is ridiculous in the extreme. If you ever submit a paper that panders to it, I will fail you. And I agree with that sentiment whole-heartedly. The reason that there are relatively few women participating in open source is because there are relatively few women active in the Science and IT fields. Absolutely not because open source manuals make the entirely realistic assumption that most of their readers are male. Furthermore, the idea that ruining the perfectly good English of those manuals with a plethora of `he/she', `him/her' sillinesses will encourage more women to participate in open source is even more hand wavy than my guess at the automake manual reader population demographic. Gary expressed it better than i would have ever spent time on, especially given the last paragraph ;) -mike signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: Comment on introduction pages
On 06/03/2010 08:01 AM, Christina Gratorp wrote: Hi! Hello, You mailed the autoconf list, but complained about the automake manual. You may want to resend this to a more appropriate list if you want anything to change, since this sentence does not appear in the autoconf manual. I found a bug in the intro pages for automake: http://sources.redhat.com/automake/automake.html#Introduction. The sentence The developer expresses the recipe to build *his* package in a Makefile must be wrong since I'm a woman and a user and have packages I want to build and those packages are mine, i.e *hers* would be correct in this case. Thanks for the report. However, English is one of those silly languages where the pronoun his can have a neuter sense rather than masculine, and this is one of those cases. Politically correct pundits are trying to eradicate that usage, but personally, I'm still of the opinion that his looks better than his/hers, as long as you understand that the usage is not locking down the gender of the antecedent. Suggestion: change the sentence to The developer expresses the recipe to build *his/hers* package in a Makefile or The developer expresses the recipe to build *the* package in a Makefile Changing to the loses the notion of ownership; and as there is more than one package with mention in the sentence (which package: the developer's, or Automake?), I feel that losing the possessive pronoun would be a step backwards. And using the developer's feels redundant. -- Eric Blake ebl...@redhat.com+1-801-349-2682 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Comment on introduction pages
Eric Blake ebl...@redhat.com writes: Thanks for the report. However, English is one of those silly languages where the pronoun his can have a neuter sense rather than masculine, and this is one of those cases. Politically correct pundits are trying to eradicate that usage, but personally, I'm still of the opinion that his looks better than his/hers, as long as you understand that the usage is not locking down the gender of the antecedent. The long-standing gender-neutral pronoun in English is singular their, as used by such people as Jane Austen. I would rewrite the sentence as: The developer expresses the recipe to build their package in a Makefile I realize that also bothers some people who are overly well-trained in the specific style of English forced by Latin prescriptivists during a short portion of the history of the language, but it's grammatically correct in English and has been for hundreds of years. In general, please reconsider your position stated above. Small things like this discourage women from participating in open source projects in little ways, and those little discouragements add up over time. It's a very minor thing to change to make someone feel more welcome by not literally writing their gender out of the manual, and the reward is far stronger than the small loss of perceived elegance of wording. -- Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/
Re: Comment on introduction pages
On 06/03/2010 06:28 PM, Russ Allbery wrote: Eric Blake ebl...@redhat.com writes: Thanks for the report. However, English is one of those silly languages where the pronoun his can have a neuter sense rather than masculine, and this is one of those cases. Politically correct pundits are trying to eradicate that usage, but personally, I'm still of the opinion that his looks better than his/hers, as long as you understand that the usage is not locking down the gender of the antecedent. The long-standing gender-neutral pronoun in English is singular their, as used by such people as Jane Austen. I would rewrite the sentence as: The developer expresses the recipe to build their package in a Makefile A pedant would claim that it mixes singular and plural, but you are correct that it is in common enough usage that their package doesn't grate as badly on my nerves as his/her package. I realize that also bothers some people who are overly well-trained in the specific style of English forced by Latin prescriptivists during a short portion of the history of the language, but it's grammatically correct in English and has been for hundreds of years. In general, please reconsider your position stated above. Small things like this discourage women from participating in open source projects in little ways, and those little discouragements add up over time. It's a very minor thing to change to make someone feel more welcome by not literally writing their gender out of the manual, and the reward is far stronger than the small loss of perceived elegance of wording. I'm not the automake maintainer. Propose a patch with the new wording to automake-patches AT gnu DOT org, and it will likely be accepted if it improves the wording. -- Eric Blake ebl...@redhat.com+1-801-349-2682 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Comment on introduction pages
Hi Chris, On 3 Jun 2010, at 21:01, Christina Gratorp wrote: I found a bug in the intro pages for automake: http://sources.redhat.com/automake/automake.html#Introduction. The sentence The developer expresses the recipe to build *his* package in a Makefile must be wrong since I'm a woman and a user and have packages I want to build and those packages are mine, i.e *hers* would be correct in this case. Suggestion: change the sentence to The developer expresses the recipe to build *his/hers* package in a Makefile or The developer expresses the recipe to build *the* package in a Makefile But then it would be wrong for an even larger percentage of automake users, almost none of which are hermaphrodites. At least with male pronouns we're exactly right 90% of the time or so. Cheers, -- Gary V. Vaughan (g...@gnu.org)
Re: Comment on introduction pages
On Thursday, June 03, 2010 22:26:49 Eric Blake wrote: On 06/03/2010 06:28 PM, Russ Allbery wrote: Eric Blake ebl...@redhat.com writes: Thanks for the report. However, English is one of those silly languages where the pronoun his can have a neuter sense rather than masculine, and this is one of those cases. Politically correct pundits are trying to eradicate that usage, but personally, I'm still of the opinion that his looks better than his/hers, as long as you understand that the usage is not locking down the gender of the antecedent. The long-standing gender-neutral pronoun in English is singular their, as used by such people as Jane Austen. I would rewrite the sentence as: The developer expresses the recipe to build their package in a Makefile A pedant would claim that it mixes singular and plural, but you are correct that it is in common enough usage that their package doesn't grate as badly on my nerves as his/her package. his/her is indeed garbage -mike signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
