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

Jesse Gumm gumm@REDACTED
Tue May 1 21:03:20 CEST 2012


Or, for that matter, a non-ambiguous second person plural. I'm
personally fine with "y'all" despite not being from the American
South.

On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 1:59 PM, Jesse Gumm <gumm@REDACTED> wrote:
> 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



-- 
Jesse Gumm
Owner, Sigma Star Systems
414.940.4866 || sigma-star.com || @jessegumm



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