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Why do you put "her responsibility", instead of "his responsibility", as captain's grammatical gender is masculine?
by minz 9y ago
Why do you put "her responsibility", instead of "his responsibility", as captain's grammatical gender is masculine?
- grzm 9y agoEnglish doesn't generally have gendered nouns, and the few it has are generally going out of use. I'm not aware of captain as being gendered in English.
- minz 9y agoHow do you choose between his or her in this case?
- grzm 9y agoThis is more involved than I care to get into here. Here's a Wikipedia article which discusses it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun Why create an account to make your initial comment? It doesn't seem very substantial or on-topic. The two reasons I can think of aren't very charitable, which is why I'm asking, assuming that it's neither of those.
- schrodinger 9y agoMy charitable explanation is that it's a non native speaker of English genuinely asking the question to learn.
- aaron695 9y agoYou don't, unless it's to create off topic arguments/trolling. To answer your question if you know the sex, you say the sex. If not you use sexless pronouns like "their" and "they" even if they are not 'proper' by old strict standards, basically they are, because language evolves.
- andrewflnr 9y agoI grew up speaking english, including reading a few older books, and I'm not aware of any gendered nouns at all. Which ones are you thinking of?
- grzm 9y agoI was thinking of pairs such as steward/stewardess, actor/actress, and fiancé/fiancée. They're not gendered in the sense of nouns in French or German, but are gender specific.