[erlang-questions] Fwd: Erlang Job for $5000 in Saint-Petersburg

[David Mercer]

On Thursday, April 26, Richard O'Keefe wrote:

> On 26/04/2012, at 9:08 PM, Ivan Uemlianin wrote:
> 
> > fwiw colloquial British English uses "their" for his/her ("they" for
> he/she, and "them" for him/her).  It's quite serviceable.
> 
> However some native speakers of English find that unappealing.

Indeed, also confusing.  Just last week, a colleague was talking about
someone who was interested in transferring from another department, but to
conceal identity was using gender-neutral plurals.  I actually thought she
was talking about multiple people until I asked her how many people she was
talking about.

> Note that English has _almost_ entirely abandoned grammatical
> gender, so that people think of pronouns as referring to sex.

Almost?  Abandoned?  (1) I didn't know English ever had grammatical gender;
(2) I didn't know there were still remnants of it around.  (Unless you're
talking about referring to ships in the feminine third person, though I
thought that was sailor tradition rather than grammar.)

Cheers,

DBM