Willy, Am 26.07.20 um 22:34 schrieb Willy Tarreau: > Just a small point, Jackie, as I noticed you fixed several bad constructs > of "he" instead of "it", it's worth noting that in some latin languages > (like French or Spanish), a number of common words are arbitrarily male > or female. A car is female, a truck is male, a plane is male and a space > shuttle is female. I could give plenty of examples like this, as there's > almost no equivalent for "it". [...]
Today I learned. I thought that having gendered nouns was unique to German or as Mark Twain said in "The Awful German Language" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language): "Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl." And indeed sometimes I accidentally slip in a gendered pronoun when communicating in English. > This comforts my beliefs that avoiding mentions of the user in general is > by far the best solution, and that when not possible (due to generalizing), > it's best to use a plural form (since in this case what is described doesn't > apply to a single user but to all of them). In this case instead of writing Please note that the "they" is no plural form here. It's a so-called "Singular they": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they In German we don't have an equivalent for that. I don't know about French. By now it feels pretty natural to me, though. Best regards Tim Düsterhus
