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Old 01-09-2018, 09:02 AM   #17
vicky_molokh
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
Default Re: Fantasy Trip Glitches, Contradictions, Ambiguities

Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jackson View Post
Thank you for a very useful thread topic and ground rules, Ty. Now everybody play nice. I will point out that the issue Ty is pointing out is real! We are in 2018, things have changed, and we are trying to modernize gender references in our newly released material, while at the same time expecting our fans of all genders to understand that this text was written a long time ago, according to then standard manuals of style, and yes, it reads oddly now. (The punctuation is kind of funky, too.)

"Their" still sounds like a plural to me, since I learned to read in the 1950s, but "plural includes the singular" is no more strained than "masculine includes the feminine."

Scary to think that I've been doing this long enough that my oldest work requires TRANSLATION. I shall try to keep evolving.
I find the fact that of all the neuter pronouns that have been added to English (and the one that's been there all along), because it causes a loss of information. We crippled our second-person plural in official contexts; you crippled yours in all contexts, murdering its sibling 'thou', I would've hoped that Englishmen wouldn't so carelessly do it with the third-person after witnessing the ambiguity of 'you' for a lifetime.

That being said, I have an impression that the things you say about changes are heavily skewed towards viewing the world through the cultural lens of the former British Empire. For example, the assumption that this is a one-way street, or that grammatical genders are tightly linked to social genders.
Examples:
There are many peoples for which the moon is grammatically feminine, but that does not imply that a piece of rock has a social gender; a robot is grammatically masculine, even though the hypothetical individual robot may be socially feminine; the same automobile may be grammatically masculine, neuter or feminine depending on whether you spell the word fully, shorten it halfway, or shorten it to its shortest form.

It can even go further than that. Consider the following paragraph:
"A person came to see you. Her name is Arnold Schwarzenegger. He wants to become a governor."
This is a grammatically correct formation around here, because 'person', 'human', 'individual', and even '-man' when used in composites like 'Spider-Man' are all feminine words, and 'her' in this case refers to the person who came to see you.

Recently, I've been shown an even more interesting example from a culture I didn't know much about: apparently for the Jewish people, some words are grammatically masculine in singular and feminine in plural, or vice versa.
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