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

[Jesse Gumm]

It's too bad English doesn't maintain a public repo where we can
submit a patch to deal with fact that the language lacks support for
such a fundamental and critical language feature as third person,
gender-neutral, singulars to indicate a person (as opposed to just
using "it").

-Jesse

On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 1:50 PM, David Mercer <dmercer@REDACTED> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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-- 
Jesse Gumm
Owner, Sigma Star Systems
414.940.4866 || sigma-star.com || @jessegumm