On 6/10/15 6:43 PM, Tofu Ninja wrote:
On Thursday, 11 June 2015 at 01:30:08 UTC, weaselcat wrote:
'he' has been a gender neutral pronoun for centuries, and as far as
I'm aware this has its roots in latin using 'man'(vir?) as a gender
neutral pronoun.
I am just saying that personally it sounds odd to me to use it that way
and I don't hear people use it that way either. In gender neutral
contexts where you don't know the gender I almost always say/hear
they/their. Maybe he losing its gender neutrality is a recent thing, I
don't know. Maybe its just a thing with mid-westerners?
It does appear to be a recent thing, if you trust Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neutral_pronouns#Generic_he
Also the earlier section on "Historical and dialectal gender-neutral
pronouns" is interesting: maybe we can start using "a" or "yo" as pronouns.
