This is something that I always saw as 'English syntactic sugar' as a non-native speaker. When I realized that a plural form of the third person could be used

This is something that I always saw as 'English syntactic sugar' as a non-native speaker. When I realized that a plural form of the third person could be used in a gender-neutral way for the singular form, I was in awe. * * * Trivia: In French, the common rule is "le masculin l'emporte"[1], which means the "male form wins"; if you talk about a group of 100 females and a single male, you must use the male form "ils" instead of the female form "elles". [1]: [...] on abrège parfois cette règle en "le masculin l'emporte sur le féminin", alors qu'il serait correct de dire : seul les groupes exclusivement féminin sont féminins, les autres utilisent le genre non marqué. Roughly translated to : It is more correct to say that groups exclusively composed of females are accorded using the female form, while the other groups use the 'unmarked' form (which is the male form).