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java software naming question

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  java software naming question mcheung63@gmail.com - 2013-01-07 01:11 -0800
    Re: java software naming question "Aryeh M. Friedman" <Aryeh.Friedman@gmail.com> - 2013-01-07 01:21 -0800
    Re: java software naming question "Aryeh M. Friedman" <Aryeh.Friedman@gmail.com> - 2013-01-07 01:26 -0800
    Re: java software naming question Muco <muco@nomail.com> - 2013-01-07 20:38 +1100
      Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-07 11:12 -0800
    Re: java software naming question Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> - 2013-01-07 07:03 -0800
      Re: java software naming question "Aryeh M. Friedman" <Aryeh.Friedman@gmail.com> - 2013-01-07 07:08 -0800
      Re: java software naming question Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net> - 2013-01-07 08:34 -0800
        Re: java software naming question Magnus Warker <magnus@mailinator.com> - 2013-01-07 18:26 +0100
          Re: java software naming question markspace <markspace@nospam.nospam> - 2013-01-07 10:54 -0800
            Re: java software naming question "Chris Uppal" <chris.uppal@metagnostic.REMOVE-THIS.org> - 2013-01-07 19:41 +0000
              Re: java software naming question Eric Sosman <esosman@comcast-dot-net.invalid> - 2013-01-07 17:13 -0500
                Re: java software naming question Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net> - 2013-01-07 18:44 -0800
                Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-07 19:37 -0800
          Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-07 19:33 -0800
            Re: java software naming question Mark <i@dontgetlotsofspamanymore.invalid> - 2013-01-08 09:39 +0000
              Re: java software naming question Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-08 20:26 -0500
                Re: java software naming question Mark <i@dontgetlotsofspamanymore.invalid> - 2013-01-09 09:32 +0000
                  Re: java software naming question Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-09 18:41 -0500
                    Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-09 16:23 -0800
                      Re: java software naming question Mark <i@dontgetlotsofspamanymore.invalid> - 2013-01-10 09:44 +0000
                        Re: java software naming question lipska the kat <"nospam at neversurrender dot co dot uk"> - 2013-01-10 10:16 +0000
                          Re: java software naming question Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-12 17:07 -0500
                        Re: java software naming question Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-12 17:03 -0500
    Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-07 11:11 -0800
      Re: java software naming question lipska the kat <lipskathekat@yahoo.co.uk> - 2013-01-07 19:48 +0000
      Re: java software naming question Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-07 18:56 -0500
        Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-07 16:05 -0800
    Re: java software naming question Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-07 18:55 -0500
    Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-07 18:04 -0800
      Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-07 18:33 -0800
        Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-07 19:57 -0800
          Re: java software naming question Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net> - 2013-01-07 20:11 -0800
          Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-07 23:05 -0600
            Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 09:40 -0800
              Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 11:18 -0800
                Re: java software naming question Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> - 2013-01-09 11:59 -0800
                  Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 23:20 -0800
                    Re: java software naming question Stuart <DerTopper@web.de> - 2013-01-10 09:32 +0100
                Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-10 01:09 -0600
              Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-09 23:59 -0600
                Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 23:36 -0800
          Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-07 21:46 -0800
        Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-07 21:58 -0600
          Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-08 00:19 -0800
          Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-08 00:22 -0800
            Re: java software naming question "Aryeh M. Friedman" <Aryeh.Friedman@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 00:30 -0800
              Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 09:41 -0800
              Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 10:51 -0800
                Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-09 23:27 -0600
            Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 07:07 -0800
              Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-08 09:31 -0600
                Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 07:36 -0800
            Re: java software naming question Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net> - 2013-01-08 08:47 -0800
              Re: java software naming question Stuart <DerTopper@web.de> - 2013-01-08 21:56 +0100
                Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 13:04 -0800
              Re: java software naming question Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> - 2013-01-08 14:14 -0800
                Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 15:19 -0800
                Re: java software naming question Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net> - 2013-01-08 16:22 -0800
                Re: java software naming question Mark <i@dontgetlotsofspamanymore.invalid> - 2013-01-09 09:34 +0000
                Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 09:50 -0800
                  Re: java software naming question Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net> - 2013-01-09 10:10 -0800
                    Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 10:49 -0800
              Re: java software naming question Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-08 20:37 -0500
          Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-08 00:26 -0800
            Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 07:12 -0800
              Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-08 09:27 -0600
                Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 07:32 -0800
                  Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 09:55 -0800
                    Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-09 12:53 -0800
                      Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 23:37 -0800
                Re: java software naming question Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net> - 2013-01-08 08:50 -0800
            Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-08 09:26 -0600
              Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 09:59 -0800
                Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-09 23:31 -0600
      Re: java software naming question "Aryeh M. Friedman" <Aryeh.Friedman@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 00:24 -0800
    Re: java software naming question johnjagu25@gmail.com - 2013-01-08 08:39 -0800

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#21283

On 1/9/2013 11:40 AM, Roedy Green wrote:
> On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 23:05:15 -0600, Joshua Cranmer
> <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone
> who said :
>
>> Given the pride many
>> Chinese have in having a hard-to-learn language, I doubt that Mandarin
>> Chinese will become a working lingua franca in the future.
>
> English is pretty hard to pronounce and is quite irregular. That did
> not stop it becoming the defacto world language.  That happened not
> because of any features of the language, but because of the success of
> the British Empire.

I think if you look at the timeline of the dominant language of 
diplomacy, French was replaced sometime in the 20th century, well after 
the British Empire had reached its apex. The rise of English as the 
primary world language is almost certainly due to the center of most 
scientific and technological research shifting to the United States; 
that Russian did not also become a major language in this era is 
probably due in part to the Sino-Soviet split and in part repercussions 
of how the communist systems worked.

> Mandarin might succeed for the same reason.

It probably won't for several reasons, largely a death by a thousand 
papercuts:
1. Exclude Mandarin from the Sino-Tibetan language family, and you'll 
find only around 100m speakers of those languages; exclude English from 
the Indo-European, and you'll find perhaps 2b speakers of those 
languages. An Indo-European lingua franca is more accessible to more 
people than a Sino-Tibetan one.

2. Nearly all keyboards in the world are set up to be able to easily 
input the Latin alphabet and script. A relatively small portion, 
especially outside China, are set up to be able to input Chinese characters.

3. Similar to the above, the US-ASCII subset of characters is the only 
set of characters that reliably works everywhere in practice on modern 
technologies. Non-ASCII characters still have conversion problems, 
although everyone is slowly starting to move towards UTF-8, UTF-16, or 
UTF-32.

4. The last 20 years has codified English--and particularly American 
English in terms of spellings--as the primary language of computers, 
which gives it an immense network effect in the low level; something 
that other languages (particularly Chinese) would find hard to break into.

5. Mere economic heft doesn't make a country's language global. Note 
that German never became a major global language, despite Germany being 
a major world power in the early 20th century; also note the distinct 
lack of Russian as a major global language, despite the USSR being a 
second superpower for about 50 years.

> I did some digging on computerised typesetting in Chinese just as
> electronic typesetting in English was getting off the ground. I went
> to visit a Chinese newspaper where women were keying into a DOS app.
> The speed was blinding.  It required memorising numbers for words.

I'm not a student of Chinese, but I recall that the characters are 
basically build up of unique sets of radicals, which offers, for 
example, a uniform way to look stuff up in dictionaries. I think most 
IMEs actually have you enter what amounts to the pinyin (Romanization of 
the text) and it will select an appropriate character.

> There were dozens of schemes for keying, all requiring much more skill
> than we have with QWERTY.  It would be interesting to learn how it
> shook down.  Today, even my own website can appear in Chinese by
> clicking a Google Translate button at the top of the page.  We may
> avoid the need for an interlanguage.

French is the only foreign language I know to any degree of accuracy, 
and I can assert that the state-of-the-art for machine translation of 
English<->French is only good enough to get you the gist of a text and 
would be inadequate for, e.g., anything you'd want to use as an official 
translation.

I have played with a toy called "Translation Party", which repeatedly 
translates between English and Japanese until an idempotent translation 
is achieved. The result quickly degrades in gibberish. As an example, 
one of the sentences in this post found equilibrium as the following:

   Most global language Russia 2 ）, provides a lack of Soviet agitation
   and 50-year-old superpower relationship.

I have noted as other examples the text doing things such as dropping 
the word "not" (substantively altering the meaning of the sentence). 
While Chinese is not Japanese, they both share the difficult 
characteristic of being so far removed from English that the grammar and 
word order look almost nothing alike at times, so I would assume both 
would have about the same levels of accuracy in terms of sensical 
translation (which is to say, very poor quality).

-- 
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not 
tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth

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#21288

On Wed, 09 Jan 2013 23:59:43 -0600, Joshua Cranmer
<Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone
who said :

>3. Similar to the above, the US-ASCII subset of characters is the only 
>set of characters that reliably works everywhere in practice on modern 
>technologies. Non-ASCII characters still have conversion problems, 
>although everyone is slowly starting to move towards UTF-8, UTF-16, or 
>UTF-32.

But keying is still hit and miss.  We don't have keyboards for keying
UTF-8.   As a Canadian there are a fair number of French words in
common use that need accents, particularly &eacute;  I handle this by
using HTML and entities and macros to generate common accented words.
It is hard to proofread though.  I do a little UTF-8 editing, but
mostly ISO-8859-1 simply because my old familiar editor has macros and
editing keys below awareness. 

We are moving toward programmable keyboards, where you can with a few
keystrokes convert the layout.  Sooner or later keys we will have
variable legends to help you navigate Icelandic or whatever you need
sporadically. You can buy keyboards with LEDs in the keys, but I can't
see they have any function other than looking kewel.

Browsers have nailed the encoding/fonts problem. I routinely see
Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew and Thai in browsing without any
special effort on my part.
-- 
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products http://mindprod.com
Students who hire or con others to do their homework are as foolish 
as couch potatoes who hire others to go to the gym for them. 

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#21194

Roedy Green wrote:
> Lew wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :
>> So how is that "obsessed with gender"?
> 
> Consider the sentence.
> He made a pot of  Sumatran coffee.
> She made a pot of Sumatran coffee.
> 
> I am constrained by English to specify the flavour of genitals of the

Well, you aren't, really, 

> coffee maker even though it is completely irrelevant to the process of
> making coffee.  That I call obsession with gender.

and that really is an overblown interpretation.

Do you deny there is a difference between males and females?

So those sentences provide descriptive specificity. Oh, and they don't 
refer to genitalia; that's *your* obsession.

If you want gender-neutrality the usual is to say "they". As in "There 
was one person there, and they made a pot of Sumatran coffee.

So for at least half a millennium English has had a widely-accepted idiom 
for not specifying the gender of who made the coffee.

Other languages make *every single noun* have a gender, not just ones that
describe humans or other animals, who at least actually have gender in the 
real world, despite your attempt to suppress that.

Again, the obsession is not in English, but in the beholder.

> English has another obsession.  I discovered it when I learned
> Esperanto which is even more obsessed.  TIME.  You can't talk about

Esperanto is an artificial language.

> anything happening without specifying past, present, future. You can

Again, that is not uncommon among languages. Can you use a verb without 
tense in French?

> though say that something habitually happens, without specifying when.

Urdu?

> You can in Chinese. If tense is important to be explicit, you add some
> adverb.  E.g., I come tomorrow.

Basque?

> You notice Asian speakers, often say strange things like
> my wife, he sick.
> Frog die.
> Please give 12 egg.

So foreigners' difficulty with English is evidence that English has obsessions?

> To them gender, tense, and plurality need not be specified. They are
> implied.
> 
> Esperanto is like English in its concern with precise tense, gender
> and plurality.  It has some other obsessions of its own, roughly
> equivalent to direct/indirect object though it has many other uses.

You realize that "obsession" is a psychological term, correct?

Languages do not have psyches.

> I suppose Mandarin might become the next interlanguage as English
> fades.  Bahasa Indonesia was an early attempt at an interlanguage

What evidence do you have that English will fade?

> devised by traders moving between thousands of islands. It is easy to
> pronounce, and has a  relatively simple grammar.

Common among all Pidgins, which spring up everywhere, not just in Indonesia.

> I don't know much about Mandarin other than the code I wrote at
> http://mindprod.com/products.html#INWORDS to convert integers into
> words, including Mandarin. It was the simplest of all languages I
> tackled (Icelandic was the hairiest). I gather the difficulties are
> pronunciation and the many many synonyms for the same word.
> (Makes for great fun with puns).

Thank you for sharing your linguistic expertise.

-- 
Lew

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#21189

On 1/7/2013 8:33 PM, Lew wrote:
> On Monday, January 7, 2013 6:04:09 PM UTC-8, Roedy Green wrote:
>> English is obsessed with plurality/number.  You can't say anything
>> without being specific. It is similarly obsessed with gender.
>
> Unlike French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and a host of other languages,
> English does not have much in the way of feminine vs. masculine distinctions.
>
> So how is that "obsessed with gender"?

I expect he's actually referring to the fact that English possessives 
agree in gender with the possessor instead of the possessed, as would 
happen in, say, French. This can make third-person gender-neutral 
constructs hard to complete: think about how you should complete the 
following sentence: The student did not turn in ____ homework.

In contrast to Romance languages and many others, English in general 
distinguishes much less between male and female versions of, say, an 
occupation: in French, you'd have to pick between étudiant and 
étudiante. Also note that we have a single third-person plural variant 
("they", which can also be used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, 
although some would frown at such a usage [1]), in contrast between 
French where you are forced to pick between "ils" and "elles."

As for obsessed about number, note that we do not distinguish between 
singular and plural second-person and have not for 400-500 years. "They" 
does a remarkably good job about conveying uncertainty about number as 
well as gender too, and it wouldn't surprise me if it became more 
prevalent in singular third-person in 400 years.

Note, however, that this kind of inflectional agreement in English is 
largely limited to the various inflections of pronouns; in many Romance 
languages, inflection is required on adjectives and the verbs themselves.

[1] Singular they has even been used by Shakespeare, so I would 
personally classify attempts to outlaw it on the same level as those who 
hate sentences ending in prepositions: it may be bad style, but 
incorrect English it is not.

-- 
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not 
tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth

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#21197

On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:58:17 -0600, Joshua Cranmer
<Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone
who said :

>In contrast to Romance languages and many others

But German and French use gender is a rather chaotic ways, assigning 3
or 2 genders more or less arbitrarily to nouns.  In those languages
specifying a gender does have quite the same genital implication it
does in English.

The Swedes have the same problem as English. They have corrected it
recently by introducing a new singular pronoun hen, which is
gender-non-specified.

Compare the grammars of a human language and a computer language.
Human languages are mainly about describing what happened in the
universe or describing it.  Computer languages are all about commands
to compute something. Its statements are implicitly imperative.
Computer languages are evolving to become more and more declarative,
letting the computer figure out what needs to be done (e.g. GUI
layouts, XML schemas.)

-- 
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products http://mindprod.com
Students who hire or con others to do their homework are as foolish 
as couch potatoes who hire others to go to the gym for them. 

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#21198

On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:58:17 -0600, Joshua Cranmer
<Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone
who said :

>well as gender too, and it wouldn't surprise me if it became more 
>prevalent in singular third-person in 400 years.

English is beginning to use "they" as a singular gender-unspecified
pronoun.  Unless some replacement singular catches on, the number
distinction will disappear.  "he" is supposed to play that role, but
you won't find many people defending that view any more.

Maybe we could borrow the new hen from Swedish.

-- 
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products http://mindprod.com
Students who hire or con others to do their homework are as foolish 
as couch potatoes who hire others to go to the gym for them. 

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#21201

On Tuesday, January 8, 2013 3:22:41 AM UTC-5, Roedy Green wrote:
> On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:58:17 -0600, Joshua Cranmer
> 
> <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone
> 
> who said :
> 
> 
> 
> >well as gender too, and it wouldn't surprise me if it became more 
> 
> >prevalent in singular third-person in 400 years.
> 
> 
> 
> English is beginning to use "they" as a singular gender-unspecified
> 
> pronoun.  Unless some replacement singular catches on, the number
> 
> distinction will disappear.  "he" is supposed to play that role, but
> 
> you won't find many people defending that view any more.
> 
> 
> 
> Maybe we could borrow the new hen from Swedish.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products http://mindprod.com
> 
> Students who hire or con others to do their homework are as foolish 
> 
> as couch potatoes who hire others to go to the gym for them.

This is as pointless as saying Java is obsessed with semicolons, ()/[]/{}, etc.

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#21253

On Tue, 8 Jan 2013 00:30:37 -0800 (PST), "Aryeh M. Friedman"
<Aryeh.Friedman@gmail.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone
who said :

>This is as pointless as saying Java is obsessed with semicolons
It is ridiculously obsessed with {}
-- 
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products http://mindprod.com
Students who hire or con others to do their homework are as foolish 
as couch potatoes who hire others to go to the gym for them. 

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#21259

On Tue, 8 Jan 2013 00:30:37 -0800 (PST), "Aryeh M. Friedman"
<Aryeh.Friedman@gmail.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone
who said :

> obsessed

Surely requiring you to specify gender in situations where it is
irrelevant shows some sort of unhealthy preoccupation with gender.
-- 
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products http://mindprod.com
Students who hire or con others to do their homework are as foolish 
as couch potatoes who hire others to go to the gym for them. 

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#21281

On 1/9/2013 12:51 PM, Roedy Green wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Jan 2013 00:30:37 -0800 (PST), "Aryeh M. Friedman"
> <Aryeh.Friedman@gmail.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone
> who said :
>
>> obsessed
>
> Surely requiring you to specify gender in situations where it is
> irrelevant shows some sort of unhealthy preoccupation with gender.

Surely requiring you to specify the subject of a sentence where it is 
easily inferred from context shows some sort of unhealthy preoccupation 
with subjects.

Or maybe it's just a very useful piece of information that adds 
redundancy in the language to improve comprehension in lossy media, like 
a marketplace.

-- 
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not 
tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth

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#21210

Roedy Green wrote:
> English is beginning to use "they" as a singular gender-unspecified

"Beginning"? The usage goes back at least to the fifteenth or sixteenth 
century. Shakespeare used it.

> pronoun.  Unless some replacement singular catches on, the number
> distinction will disappear.  "he" is supposed to play that role, but
> you won't find many people defending that view any more.

Eh. It still happens.

> Maybe we could borrow the new hen from Swedish.

That'll work out about as well as "te" and "ter" did a few decades ago.

The point is that contrary to your claim of "English" having an obsession, 
English has had a gender-neutral pronoun in use for centuries.

Centuries.

-- 
Lew

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#21214

On 1/8/2013 9:07 AM, Lew wrote:
> The point is that contrary to your claim of "English" having an obsession,
> English has had a gender-neutral pronoun in use for centuries.

It's called "it". :-)

-- 
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not 
tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth

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#21216

Joshua Cranmer wrote:
> Lew wrote:
>> English has had a gender-neutral pronoun in use for centuries.
> 
> It's called "it". :-)

Funny. The smiley tells me you're joking, and realize that "gender-neutral" 
and "neuter gender" are not the same.

-- 
Lew

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#21218

On Tue, 08 Jan 2013 00:22:41 -0800, Roedy Green
<see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> wrote:

>On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:58:17 -0600, Joshua Cranmer
><Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone
>who said :
>
>>well as gender too, and it wouldn't surprise me if it became more 
>>prevalent in singular third-person in 400 years.
>
>English is beginning to use "they" as a singular gender-unspecified
>pronoun.  Unless some replacement singular catches on, the number

     It has been used for centuries.

>distinction will disappear.  "he" is supposed to play that role, but
>you won't find many people defending that view any more.

     Because "he" is also used for the masculine.  I use "he" for
neuter, because it is the correct form, but I do not like that there
is no differentiation between neuter and masculine.

>Maybe we could borrow the new hen from Swedish.

     "hen" being a female bird, we need a different word.  I thought
of "per" (short for person):
          I - me - my - mine
          per - per - per - pers

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

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#21220

On 08 Jan 2013 Roedy Green wrote:
>> Maybe we could borrow the new hen from Swedish.

On 01/08/2013 Gene Wirchenko wrote:
>       "hen" being a female bird, we need a different word.  I thought
> of "per" (short for person):
>            I - me - my - mine
>            per - per - per - pers

What do you think of Gene's suggestion, folks? Hasn't per had a good idea?

See, we are already using it.

Regards,
Stuart

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#21221

Stuart wrote:
>Roedy Green wrote:
>>> Maybe we could borrow the new hen from Swedish.
> Gene Wirchenko wrote:
>>       "hen" being a female bird, we need a different word.  I thought
> > of "per" (short for person):
>>            I - me - my - mine
>>            per - per - per - pers
>
> What do you think of Gene's suggestion, folks? Hasn't per had a good idea?
> 
> See, we are already using it.

The royal "we" is in use there.

I doubt it will fare better than "te/ter" did.

Apparently the English-speaking is so used to having a gender-neutral pronoun already 
that it refused to adopt a redundant one.

-- 
Lew

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#21223

On 1/8/2013 8:47 AM, Gene Wirchenko wrote:
> On Tue, 08 Jan 2013 00:22:41 -0800, Roedy Green
..
>> English is beginning to use "they" as a singular gender-unspecified
>> pronoun.  Unless some replacement singular catches on, the number
>
>       It has been used for centuries.

Also, I distinctly remember being taught in school not to use "they" for
gender-neutral singular.

Native speakers of a language learn its real rules as infants. For
example, consider the subject-verb-object order of a typical English
declarative sentence. I didn't need to be taught it in school. I did
have to learn that Latin has a different default order.

Rules native speakers only learn in school are very fragile. If schools
stopped teaching people not to use "they" for gender-neutral singular it
would become the norm in at most a generation.

Patricia

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#21226

Patricia Shanahan wrote:
> Also, I distinctly remember being taught in school not to use "they" for
> gender-neutral singular.
> 
> Native speakers of a language learn its real rules as infants. For
> example, consider the subject-verb-object order of a typical English
> declarative sentence. I didn't need to be taught it in school. I did
> have to learn that Latin has a different default order.
> 
> Rules native speakers only learn in school are very fragile. If schools
> stopped teaching people not to use "they" for gender-neutral singular it
> would become the norm in at most a generation.

It already is the norm in spoken English, and has been ensconced in classic 
literature for dozens of generations. Wikipedia quotes a source that it has been in 
use since the 1300s.

Examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Generic_they

-- 
Lew

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#21230

On Tue, 08 Jan 2013 14:14:31 -0800, Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org>
wrote:

>On 1/8/2013 8:47 AM, Gene Wirchenko wrote:
>> On Tue, 08 Jan 2013 00:22:41 -0800, Roedy Green
>..
>>> English is beginning to use "they" as a singular gender-unspecified
>>> pronoun.  Unless some replacement singular catches on, the number
>>
>>       It has been used for centuries.
>
>Also, I distinctly remember being taught in school not to use "they" for
>gender-neutral singular.

     Likewise.

>Native speakers of a language learn its real rules as infants. For
>example, consider the subject-verb-object order of a typical English
>declarative sentence. I didn't need to be taught it in school. I did
>have to learn that Latin has a different default order.

     And they get broken, too.  "Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
..." is not your typical imperative sentence.

>Rules native speakers only learn in school are very fragile. If schools
>stopped teaching people not to use "they" for gender-neutral singular it
>would become the norm in at most a generation.

     It pretty much is already.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirhenko

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#21246

On Tue, 08 Jan 2013 14:14:31 -0800, Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org>
wrote:

>On 1/8/2013 8:47 AM, Gene Wirchenko wrote:
>> On Tue, 08 Jan 2013 00:22:41 -0800, Roedy Green
>..
>>> English is beginning to use "they" as a singular gender-unspecified
>>> pronoun.  Unless some replacement singular catches on, the number
>>
>>       It has been used for centuries.
>
>Also, I distinctly remember being taught in school not to use "they" for
>gender-neutral singular.
>
>Native speakers of a language learn its real rules as infants. For
>example, consider the subject-verb-object order of a typical English
>declarative sentence. I didn't need to be taught it in school. I did
>have to learn that Latin has a different default order.
>
>Rules native speakers only learn in school are very fragile. If schools
>stopped teaching people not to use "they" for gender-neutral singular it
>would become the norm in at most a generation.

Even though English is my first language I was only taught grammar
when first learning a foreign language.  For English we were just
expected to 'know'.
-- 
(\__/)  M.
(='.'=) If a man stands in a forest and no woman is around
(")_(") is he still wrong?

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