On 11/06/2015 2:30 AM, weaselcat wrote:
On Thursday, 11 June 2015 at 00:57:34 UTC, Tofu Ninja wrote:
On Wednesday, 10 June 2015 at 20:14:10 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
Contrary to technical official definition, in REAL WORLD usage, "he"
is BOTH a masuline AND a gender-neutral pronoun. A few occasional
nutbags who deliberately ignore the "gender-neutral" possibility in
order to promote their "you are all sexists" agenda is NO excuse for
bowing to thier pressure.
Personally I don't perceive he as ever being gender neutral(us native
speaker). If I am trying to be gender neutral then I will use "they"
or "that person" or "one". If some one did try to use he in a gender
neutral context then I think it would sound weird to me.
'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.
As far as I know, "he" was not historically gender neutral, but "man"
used to be. In Old English, "man" was simply the suffix that meant
"person" ("person" being a newer loan word), hence words like "chairman"
and "foreman" are gender neutral (The rise of "chairperson" is feminism
gone mad (or ignorant) -- she said). The Old English word for man was
weiman (or werman), literally a male-person and was probably dropped as
in some dialects it would likely be pronounced to similarly to "woman".
A...
