At Friday 04 June 2010, Russ Allbery <[email protected]> wrote:
> Eric Blake <[email protected]> writes:
> > Thanks for the report. However, English is one of those silly
> > languages where the pronoun "his" can have a neuter sense rather
> > than masculine, and this is one of those cases. Politically
> > correct pundits are trying to eradicate that usage, but
> > personally, I'm still of the opinion that "his" looks better than
> > "his/hers", as long as you understand that the usage is not
> > locking down the gender of the antecedent.
>
> The long-standing gender-neutral pronoun in English is singular
> "their," as used by such people as Jane Austen. I would rewrite
> the sentence as:
>
> "The developer expresses the recipe to build their package in a
> Makefile"
>
Such a formulation could however confuse non-native speakers,
especially if their mother tongue lacks gender-neutral pronouns of
this kind, and they don't read Jane Austen often ;-)
In particular, that formulation would have confused *me*, and I'd have
probably ended up by suggesting a patch with s/developer/developers/
or s/their/his/, to fix the perceived "grammatical error".
Just my 2 cents.
Regards,
Stefano
