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A good way of avoiding this problem is to get rid of pronouns altogether. Case in point (drumroll): Facebook's interface! You can count on one hand how many ti
by rufibarbatus 15y ago
A good way of avoiding this problem is to get rid of pronouns altogether. Case in point (drumroll): Facebook's interface!
You can count on one hand how many times they use pronouns, and those could be actually be removed as well.
- william42 15y agoIn English, yes, but in other languages this isn't always possible.
- amalcon 15y agoIn romance languages, it doesn't even necessarily require pronouns. The English sentence "Sam is tall." cannot be translated into Spanish without knowing whether Sam is male or female. Interestingly, Google Translate assumes (in this case) that Sam is male, while Microsoft Translate assumes (in this case) that Sam is female.
- wtn 15y agoFacebook abuses "their".
- ignifero 15y agoThey do! In fact, their stream stories used to allow <fb:pronoun /> tags so that when an app published something, you didn't need to refer to him/her as "them". But that changed about a year ago, so now facebook is a major paragon in familiarizing folks with the word "their" being singular.