Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2001 15:06:41 +0100 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org> Cc: "G. Adam Stanislav" <adam@whizkidtech.net>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Laugh: [Fwd: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS01-008] Message-ID: <20010208150641.A15166@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <xzpzofxffa2.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>; from des@ofug.org on Thu, Feb 08, 2001 at 02:57:57PM %2B0100 References: <3A81DDC9.EF6D7D84@originative.co.uk> <3.0.6.32.20010207223155.009d42a0@mail85.pair.com> <20010208110159.E2429@lpt.ens.fr> <xzpzofxffa2.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>
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Dag-Erling Smorgrav said on Feb 8, 2001 at 14:57:57: > Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> writes: > > The idea is that if "his" is supposed to be gender-neutral in > > generic situations, "her" should also be regarded as gender-neutral. > > This discussion reminds me of the LaTeX macros that you use instead of > third person singular pronouns and possessive adjectives, which > alternate between the male and female form. I didn't know about this. Is it available on the ctan archives? > BTW, Norwegian has a very useful word which means "the concerned > person", which makes it relatively easy to construct gender-neutral > phrases. The only way to do that in English is to "play the pronoun > game", i.e. use (gender-neutral) plural forms instead of singular > forms, which makes for some pretty corny sentences... And I learned of this amusing situation in French: the plural pronoun, unlike in English, is gender-biased; it's "elles" only when the gender of all parties is feminine, otherwise (for all-masculine or mixed) it's "ils". So normally when you see "elles" you think the reference is to women. But the word "personne" for person is feminine, so legal documents often start off with "personnes" and continue with "elles" even though there's no assumption that they're referring to women; if you read such a thing from the middle, you may get confused... R To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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