Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on December 11, 2004 03:27 AM
>> Like French and many other languages, >No, actually. English is more gender biased than Romance languages.
Uh? In French, when a pronoun refers to both men and women, the rule is to use the 'male' form of the pronoun.. And many job tittle do not have really female form: 'le docteur' not 'la docteur', some women accept 'la doctoresse' (which sounds quite terrible) but many prefers being called 'docteur' (the opposite exists also for some job traditionaly done by women)
>Why should you refer to a general user as "he" if the user need not be a "he" ?
Because AFAIK by default, English rules say to use he when you don't know the gender of the person you're refering to at the 'third person'.
[Note that I find very strange to read on<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/. 'a developer, she<nobr> <wbr></nobr>..', maybe this is an US-English rule that I haven't learn at school? (I'm French)]
And changing a sentence to use only you instead of he or she, isn't natural. Yes in many case one can only use 'you' but if I'm talking about a third person he or she, will probably comes quite natural: 'the support person is responsible to answer you, he will have to contact you later before...' avoiding the usage of 'he' is awkard IMHO: I prefer 'good style' over what looks to me as some kind of political correctness..
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Re:Dividing Humanity
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 11, 2004 03:27 AM>No, actually. English is more gender biased than Romance languages.
Uh? In French, when a pronoun refers to both men and women, the rule is to use the 'male' form of the pronoun.. And many job tittle do not have really female form: 'le docteur' not 'la docteur', some women accept 'la doctoresse' (which sounds quite terrible) but many prefers being called 'docteur' (the opposite exists also for some job traditionaly done by women)
>Why should you refer to a general user as "he" if the user need not be a "he" ?
Because AFAIK by default, English rules say to use he when you don't know the gender of the person you're refering to at the 'third person'.
[Note that I find very strange to read on<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/. 'a developer, she<nobr> <wbr></nobr>..', maybe this is an US-English rule that I haven't learn at school? (I'm French)]
And changing a sentence to use only you instead of he or she, isn't natural. Yes in many case one can only use 'you' but if I'm talking about a third person he or she, will probably comes quite natural: 'the support person is responsible to answer you, he will have to contact you later before...' avoiding the usage of 'he' is awkard IMHO: I prefer 'good style' over what looks to me as some kind of political correctness..
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