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It's a common situation in a lot of inflected languages--words get suffixed to agree in number, gender, etc. and it's hard to escape "gendering". What I usuall
by nzp 13y ago
It's a common situation in a lot of inflected languages--words get suffixed to agree in number, gender, etc. and it's hard to escape "gendering".
What I usually do is construct the sentence to say that a person [has done something, for example], where possible. The word "person" is gender neutral by meaning, so the whole sentence comes out gender neutral in meaning regardless or grammatical gender of words. Interestingly, in Serbian, "person" has female grammatical gender, so the whole sentence comes out in that gender, but as I said it's still semantically neutral.
- the_mitsuhiko 13y ago> Interestingly, in Serbian, "person" has female grammatical gender, so the whole sentence comes out in that gender, but as I said it's still semantically neutral. It's the same in German and the pronoun for "Person" is consequently "sie" which is the female pronoun. Yet everybody thinks of a person as being genderless. Language gender has very little to do with real gender.
- nzp 13y agoYep. When I said it's interesting, I meant in the context of this controversy, it's gender neutral in meaning and it's grammatically female so it satisfies PC rigour from two sides.