Thread: Software Engineer???

Originally Posted by Mario F.

It's amazing the number of different opinions on exactly how to deal with genderless pronouns. "He" is sexist, "She" is weird, "Them" is wrong. And the only genderless pronoun in the English language is ironically enough a big no-no. You just got to have fun and use them all. In fact, we should put up a calendar.

They, them, and other indefinite pronouns are only really wrong if you wish to follow an 18th century change to the language. Using the word in this context is even older, and I've seen it making a comeback thanks to gender identity awareness spreading here. I've been a big supporter of this and started doing it, where before I would use he as privileged as that seemed to be.

https://youtu.be/d7k-20y5WKU

Then again, English used in areas like Africa or Portugal might have its own rules and it's wrong that way. My $.02

Originally Posted by MutantJohn

We should reference people by the base class name, man.

Just switch to Finnish, then. We use the base object ("it"; se in singular, ne in plural) in everyday speech for everything, from people to animals to inanimate objects. The only bugs occur when the listener makes wrong assumptions, like when someone mentioning they "had to put Jack down", when you think Jack was their teenaged kid and not a twenty-year-old cat. I'd prefer to keep those bugs as a feature.

Originally Posted by whiteflags

Humans compile and execute English so...

It seems that non-native languages are executed in a virtual machine. (You use a JIT compiler only at the beginning of learning a new language, while you lack the context for constructung the virtual machine. Anecdotally, the change seems to occur when you start thinking (as opposed to subvocalizing) in the non-native language.)

As far as I know, this shows up even in fMRI images, and is what in some rare localized brain injuries cause people to talk in a completely different language.

In my case, the "gender" concept (as opposed to "sex") is pretty much limited to the virtual machine. I don't know how to translate any of it to Finnish, really; even thinking about it, I start describing instead, as if there were no related concepts. For me, in Finnish, sex ≡ gender, although I've never considered it a binary property. More like an unordered set of weighted human/animal characteristics, with the weights varying from person to person. Based on my interaction with other Finnish speakers, and observing their patterns of sex/gender descriptions, I think that is common to irreligious native Finnish speakers (basically a majority of Finns).

Originally Posted by whiteflags

Then again, English used in areas like Africa or Portugal might have its own rules and it's wrong that way.

What? If English had its own rules in Portugal, I'd be very disappointed in you.

As for English speaking countries, that's another matter altogether. We solved that problem a decade ago by agreeing to a unified set of rules all Portuguese speaking countries should follow. It met some opposition, particularly from established writers and some citizens (yours truly) who felt that language doesn't evolve by governmental decree. But a few years later I can see some benefits, even if I'm still a critic.

I don't know how hard that would be to achieve with the English language. The loss with Portuguese was that the mother tongue, as written in continental Portugal, lost some of its thousand years history when it had to change to adapt to the weight of 200 million Brazilians. UK English would probably risk a similar fate with both the cultural US impact and India population rendering it obsolete.

Originally Posted by stevesmithx

combine the pronouns

That's almost as brilliant an alternative as Tau.