On Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 12:10:02AM +0200, Tim Düsterhus wrote: > 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): (...)
Then I learned as well :-) Maybe in the end it's only English that has no gender! English people speaking french are often having difficulties spotting the right gender, which makes their sentences sound funny but this doesn't affect comprehension at all since the genders for things do not come from anything logical. > > 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 I noticed, but it's definitely not the level of detail that we were taught in English courses at school. When you have 1-2 hours a week, there are definitely more important things to put the focus on, and most of what many of us learned was through participation on mailing lists. > 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. We don't have an equivalent either, hence the use of "he" for "it" sometimes, or "he/she" for a more polite or inclusive form, though for to designate a person. For "his/her/their" we use the same term ("leur") so that removes the need to think about it at all. But when you look at the examples in the link above, "They are my child", I'm pretty sure I would have had a zero if I gave a copy with that to any of my teachers. That's why I'm saying that using such advanced forms should definitely be frowned upon especially when the user has so little place in a project like haproxy where both sides are just HTTP agents, and that for the rare cases where this would be needed, we could easily generalize to "users" and avoid any confusion, and not require anyone who barely expresses themself with 400 words to require such difficult rules. That's only my point: being inclusive, but to the non-native speakers as well. Cheers, Willy
