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Comment by andrewl-hn | Hacker News Reader

In Russian, a simple phrase like "Another bright student has solved the problem" (другая способная студентка решила задачу for female) carries a point to a gender in EVERY word. All the things around one like doors, tables, computers, etc. also possess a gender. Trying to convert Russian phrases to a gender-neutral is almost never possible.

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It's the same in german, even to the point where obvious female words do not have a female gender. People have tried for the last 40 years to make the language gender neutral with absolute appalling results. Some gender neutral versions are almost entirely being used for satiric purposes only.

As an example "This is the girl, she is beautiful" in german is "Das ist das Mädchen, es ist wunderschön" usually uses a neutrum pronoun (object). "es" == it because Mädchen is neutrum. That's just how the language works and forcefully changing it results in terrible sentences.

A lot of people have not the slightest idea how languages work, but they FEEL very strongly about the subject. I think the all-time stupidest such idea I've heard is that it's morally wrong for a man to refer to "my wife" because "my" denotes ownership. If you take more than a second to think about that claim (it's not even necessary to look at other languages...), you'll quickly notice that "my" does nothing of the kind; it denotes some sort of relationship (of almost any kind) between you and the specified noun. In the case of "my wife", the relationship is a marriage; in the case of "my picture", it could be ownership... or it could be the fact that you appear in the picture, regardless of who owns it.

In Chinese, pronouns are not distinguished by gender; the third-person pronoun is 他[ta]. In modern written Chinese, however, they are spelled differently by gender. At some point in the recent past, some person of authority innovated the characters 她 and 它 (both, obviously, pronounced ta) to refer to females and nonhumans, in order to more easily translate European literature into Chinese. For whatever reason, they are now considered standard spelling. The twist is that it turns out to be useful sometimes to use gender-neutral language, so when a chinese text is specifically trying to be gender-neutral, instead of using 他, it will often use "TA" (the actual roman characters). I can't help but feel that it's a long, pointless rigmarole to go through in order to arrive where you started from.

(There's also a character 妳, the female equivalent of the second-person pronoun 你, but owing to the inscrutable whims of politics it hasn't caught on in the mainland.)

It's a common situation in a lot of inflected languages--words get suffixed to agree in number, gender, etc. and it's hard to escape "gendering".

What I usually do is construct the sentence to say that a person [has done something, for example], where possible. The word "person" is gender neutral by meaning, so the whole sentence comes out gender neutral in meaning regardless or grammatical gender of words. Interestingly, in Serbian, "person" has female grammatical gender, so the whole sentence comes out in that gender, but as I said it's still semantically neutral.

> Interestingly, in Serbian, "person" has female grammatical gender, so the whole sentence comes out in that gender, but as I said it's still semantically neutral.

It's the same in German and the pronoun for "Person" is consequently "sie" which is the female pronoun. Yet everybody thinks of a person as being genderless. Language gender has very little to do with real gender.

Yep. When I said it's interesting, I meant in the context of this controversy, it's gender neutral in meaning and it's grammatically female so it satisfies PC rigour from two sides.

Spanish also has grammatical gender, but it's nowadays fairly common to use gender-neutral constructions, especially in writing and especially for things like occupations. There are different approaches: "profesoras y profesores", "profesores/as", etc. This seems particularly common in the Americas, more than in Spain. In Spain left-wing newspapers will write that way, but in Mexico even non-ideological mass-market papers like El Universal do.

That will probably seem more relevant when someone tries to translate the libuv docs to Russian, or when somebody complains that a Russian sentence should use gender neutral pronouns in some software docs. I don't really think it is relevant right now.

I find it relevant. For a non-native English speaker (Ben, the "offender"), Him or Them seems not as relevant as to the people trying to burn him at stake for the offence.

What this comment about Russian is saying is that these things are very delicate to get right. In some languages even more than in others

If I were a non native speaker faced with a small text edit that I didn't understand the reason for but which many people had just gotten angry about, I would probably not publicly revert it. If Ben wishes to blame his poor English skills (and I have not seen him suggest this, only people hypothesizing on his behalf) then I would suggest he become more aware of his weaknesses and not appoint himself judge of things he doesn't understand.

This is Ben's latest position from 5hrs ago:

https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...

Until that moment, I don't think he was even asked what his position was and why he acted the way he did.

Thanks, I hadn't seen that. That seems quite reasonable and he admits he didn't understand the point of the request, and that he shouldn't have reverted it. Pretty classy work.

He was asked, sort of: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29539...

But the thread was immediately derailed in the next comment by some asshole saying he was glad the change didn’t go through, setting off the whole fiasco. It could have been a nice teaching moment, giving Ben a chance to explain his dismissal (which turned out to be logically reasonable if not tactful), followed by an explanation to a non-native speaker the importance of non-gendered pronouns. Instead, as it all too-often does, the situation became a complete shitstorm because some people can’t understand that “hostile” doesn’t require, or even imply, conscious intent. Mens Rights activists need to “lighten up”.

Naturally, said asshole is continuing to fan the flames: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29576...

It's relevant because the majority of open source developers do not have English as a first language.

Interestingly, the guys I know who have English as a second language and are developers prefer to use English for all technical documentation. Some even are actively annoyed by those who use their native tongue.

Of course, that's biased by the fact that those people speak English, that's why I can converse with them. I'd be curious to know if this was a majority opinion, or a minority!

The Chinese developers of my acquaintance (mostly) do not speak english, and consequently don't particularly appreciate english documentation. As in your case, the documentation preference is going to be strongly determined by language (in)capability.

But in Russian (as in other Slavic languages) you would use more frequently equivalents to words like 'people', 'nobody' in sentences like these, i.e., when it is not necessary to convey the sex (not grammatical gender). The fact that each noun has a grammatical gender (m/f/n) and verbs/adjectives/etc. tend to take suffixes to reflect these is a totally different thing.

In Russian, when you write "user" - "пользователь", you would definetly write "решил" - "decided (with implicit musculine gender)". That is just how the grammar work in this language. To change that one would not simply replace the pronouns but also transform about 50-60% of other words in a colloquial everyday speech. Changes like this take centuries!

You are missing my point that in languages with explicit grammatical gender of nouns, it is not true that \forall grammatical gender==implied sex, e.g. in Polish if you wrote zegarmistrz (watchmaker, masculin) you would use masculin suffixes for adj/v and you would not imply the sex since there is no feminin counterpart (even if you really tried). In your case, решил probably (I don't speak Russian) inherits the gender from пользователь.

My broader point is that in many languages, which Slavic ones are a subgroup of (but in German as well), there exists a construct that is used when you do not want to imply sex. In English they struggle with the one/he/she/they. And, BTW, in my experience she is more popular than he (e.g. in financial literature bankers are all 'she' even though female bankers are as common as female coders most likely).

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