On Sun, 12 Oct 2003, Orna Agmon wrote: > Recently, someone noted that a part of haifux site was gender specific, > and a discussion followed that comment. Following that (private) > discussion: > > In addition to the "Encourage Women in Linux HowTo" [1] > http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/ > > which was thoroughly discussed in Linux-il, I wanted to draw your > attention to the following essay, written by Douglas R. Hofstadter[2]
> http://www.angelfire.com/rebellion/personpaper/ > > I was enlightened. I have read most of the article, and I do not agree with the manipulation done in the article. Simply replacing "man" with "white" everywhere doesn't mean anything as "white" clearly represents a color, while "man" is no less sex neutral than "person". What next? Use "huperson" and "personkind"? Luckily, this problem does not arise in Hebrew (at least with the word "man"), the Hebrew word "ADAM" means both man and woman. However, this problem does arise when a distinct gender selection must be performed, such as in verbs. Sometimes, it is simple to use plural, but in other times one must make an arbitrary descision (and add a comment about it). In the case of Haifux, where the overwhelming majority of the populace are, maybe regretably, male, the logical decision is to use the masculine form. In neutral circumstances, or with a female majority, there is room to use the feminine form instead. > [1] Did you know that women respond a lot better when invited personally? > Meaning, if you want to change the rate of men to women [3]in Haifux, > using female gender is a good start. The W2L series is not abotu changing the gender composition of Haifux. Maybe women will respond better, but also the other way around, and as the vast majority of the target populace is (regretably) male, this will have a negative impact on the total number of participants. > [3] Almost FPE. FPE? -- This message was sent by Alon Altman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ICQ:1366540 GPG public key at http://alon.wox.org/pubkey.txt Key fingerprint = A670 6C81 19D3 3773 3627 DE14 B44A 50A3 FE06 7F24 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -=[ Random Fortune ]=- Max told his friend that he'd just as soon not go hiking in the hills. Said he, "I'm an anti-climb Max." [So is that punchline.] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://www.haifux.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
