Posted by: Daniel Carrera
on December 10, 2004 10:53 PM
>>The problem here is that English is a >>gender-biased language.
> Like French and many other languages,
No, actually. English is more gender biased than Romance languages.
> but frankly if you want to change this, the > only real fix would be to add a genderless > pronoun to English,
Wrong again. It is not only possible, but *easy* to write gender-neutral English. I work at the OpenOffice.org user guide. We have a 400 page gender-neutral document. It's not hard really.
Now, *technically* English does have a gender neutral third person singular pronoun. It's "one". One could say "one doesn't have to say 'he' all the time, doesn't one?". But that feels akward, especially to USAians. Hence, the use of "one" has to be limited a bit and instead one should opt for some of the alternatives I suggested.
> In the meantime, avoiding usage of "he" because > of "gender-bias" looks frankly stupid to me..
Why should you refer to a general user as "he" if the user need not be a "he" ?
Writing gender-neutral language is not hard and it does not result in akward phrasing. For example, the above sentence ("Why should<nobr> <wbr></nobr>...") refers to a third person user without implying gender. Did you think it was a terribly akward phrase? Do you think I had to think a lot to write it? It all came naturally.
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Re:Dividing Humanity
Posted by: Daniel Carrera on December 10, 2004 10:53 PM>>gender-biased language.
> Like French and many other languages,
No, actually. English is more gender biased than Romance languages.
> but frankly if you want to change this, the
> only real fix would be to add a genderless
> pronoun to English,
Wrong again. It is not only possible, but *easy* to write gender-neutral English. I work at the OpenOffice.org user guide. We have a 400 page gender-neutral document. It's not hard really.
Now, *technically* English does have a gender neutral third person singular pronoun. It's "one". One could say "one doesn't have to say 'he' all the time, doesn't one?". But that feels akward, especially to USAians. Hence, the use of "one" has to be limited a bit and instead one should opt for some of the alternatives I suggested.
> In the meantime, avoiding usage of "he" because
> of "gender-bias" looks frankly stupid to me..
Why should you refer to a general user as "he" if the user need not be a "he" ?
Writing gender-neutral language is not hard and it does not result in akward phrasing. For example, the above sentence ("Why should<nobr> <wbr></nobr>...") refers to a third person user without implying gender. Did you think it was a terribly akward phrase? Do you think I had to think a lot to write it? It all came naturally.
Cheers,
Daniel Carrera.
OpenOffice.org volunteer.
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