> > I thought of you. :) I still have to figure out Shao Sean. The only > > thing I remember is that his/her name is backward to Western > > conventions. English needs a non-gender human pronoun. > > Often you can just use "they", when the person referred to is > unspecified, as in "If the user gets confused they can > contact tech support." (This usage is cropping up more and > more in English, and reportedly there are even examples of it > in Shakespeare.) But there is no good solution when you're > referring to a specific, named person. > Maybe we need to borrow from German "man" or Polish "pan": > > "Ask Robin. Man knows what man's doing." (Hmmmm. Doesn't > exactly solve the gender-neutral thing, does it.) > > I'll go ask my friend Dana. Pan's a linguist.
We also don't have the thing (its been a long, long time since I took linguistics!) where once a person is identified, you can drop the name or pronoun, like in some languages - that's a "high context" language situation, right? Of course, there's always the special "married to this person too long" reference which seems to be in every culture, the grunt + head gesture to refer to once's spouse :-) Best regards, Lynn Fredricks President Proactive International, LLC - Because it is about who you know.(tm) http://www.proactive-intl.com _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
