Re: Prefer non-gender specific pronouns

[Léa Gris]

Le 06/06/2021 à 16:34, Oğuz écrivait :

> Then there is no need to change anything.

Exactly.
As a woman, I take no offense when a documentation illustrate a fictive 
male character. (and as I will illustrate below, in French pronouns are 
tuned in gender and number with the object). I am not offended by the 
wording of the current English Bash documentation either. I am more 
annoyed by the over-abundance of children's stories in which women are 
depicted as 1950's good, dedicated and submissive housewives, cooking 
diner and taking care of kids.

But seriously, in the few Bash manual sentences giving a male gender to 
the illustrative user character. This is light-years away of a worthy 
concern to me.

I even predict this would get fixed with consensus if when more women 
will be involved in IT.

Interestingly for the story: In the 1960's and 1970's, when we were more 
widely seen as housewives, we were more represented in IT, science and 
engineering overall than of today, that gender equity and equality are 
accepted modern standards.

And no, I can't believe rewriting Bash documentation with gender neutral 
is a good thing or that it can contribute to evening the balance of 
gender representation in IT either.



> > What word(s) are used in translations of the manual into languages other
> > than
> > English ? Do similar problems exist.
>
> In mine, no. Turkish has only one pronoun for male, female, and inanimate.

In mine, possessive pronouns are gendered to the possessed target.
Example with current Bash documentation place that have been subject to 
these gender-neutral changes, translated to French:

> in a non-writable directory other than his home directory after login,

dans un répertoire autre que son répertoire HOME après connexion,
                             ^^^
French "son" (his) is male because "répertoire" (directory) is male in 
French. User character's gender is not even mentioned.


--
Léa Gris