Hi!

On Sun, Dec 16, 2007 at 11:26:17AM -0700, L wrote:
>>[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>>>Oh, and by the way, I'm not a real man.

>>>Actually I'm not a man at all.

>>>Not all people who are in software are men.

>This an interesting point..

>I came up with a solution and also wrote it down here:

>http://z505.com/cgi-bin/qkcont/qkcont.cgi?p=The-He-She-Woman-Man-Problem-Solved

>Yee will find it interesting if yee is a uman.

No need to invent yet another kind of wheel, in my eyes.

See for example
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun
Seems Middle English even already had a completely neutral singular 3rd
person pronoun but that got lost again. From the neologistic
neutral/epicene singular 3rd person pronouns, the ones I see most are
singular use "they", sie/hir, zie/zir, ze/hir (somewhat close to
sie/hir), or the slashed variant (s/he, etc.). For the neutral noun,
nothing wrong with "human" (the latin origin with the male bias is remote
enough for me so it feels neutral in its current use) or "person", no need
to invent another word for that.

But then, I've been bugged with non-linguistic sexist assumptions even
more than by the linguistic ones. Yes, here. Like "you can't really be
a woman if you're a that good {programmer,OS person,choosewhatyoulike}".
If that's not sexist, what is?

Kind regards,

Hannah.

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