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That's interesting, because when I learned English in school the pronoun for "a person whose gender isn't specified" was he.
by DeathArrow 2y ago
That's interesting, because when I learned English in school the pronoun for "a person whose gender isn't specified" was he.
- pjc50 2y agoMust have been a long time ago, because efforts to remove "he" as the default gender have been ongoing for years (80s?) and everybody has more or less settled on they rather than the awkward he/she.
- bmn__ 2y agoYou are in a bubble if you think that "everybody has […] settled on they". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21179524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21179524
- pjc50 2y ago> All natural languages I know are gendered the same way English is. Finnish has always been gender-neutral: https://finland.fi/han/article/ https://finland.fi/han/article/ Chinese and Japanese also do not have grammatical gender. Chinese imported gendered pronouns about a century ago for ease of translating Western gendered languages, but both languages tend to either refer to people by name or have no word at all and infer from sentence structure.
- DeathArrow 2y agoTrue, it was a long time ago. I studied English in high-school in the 90's.