This is not a common way of speaking anymore, IMO. When I read "all the developers are men", I didn't understand what you meant at all. I thought maybe you were making some kind of ironic joke about sexism. I did get what you meant after re-reading of course, but "All people are men" sounds very archaic to me, like something out of Tolkien.

Usually when we want to talk about humans as a species or whatever, we now use the word "human."

This is going to sound stupid but at some point, it's less important what's right and more important how something makes people feel.

Language is fluid. The thing that was "right" to say 500 years ago wasn't right 100 years ago, and what was "right" 100 years ago wouldn't be right now. There are clear arguments for why encouraging people to think about the gendered language that they use and how it perpetuates gender roles would be beneficial in combating sexism. The arguments for maintaining existing language because it is currently the most popular tend to be pretty thin.

When you move into how people feel are we introducing inequality? People feel at different rates. Some can go into a rage in an instant while others can be a rock. Are we rewarding the primate brain over scientific obvervations when we choose to accept personal feeling as the gold standard? Should we be encouraging one over the other?

Sure, but the idea of "mankind" is gendered / male-centric in the first place. We just defaulted to male because we always default to male.

Training yourself to default to non-gendered language like person-kind and to think about whether a term originates from problematic aspects of gender dynamics is a relatively easy first step towards breaking down some of the insidious aspects of sexism that are imbedded in language.

> Sure, but the idea of "mankind" is gendered / male-centric in the first place. We just defaulted to male because we always default to male.

That is not actually true. The Old English word for a male human being is wer, as in werewolf; it is cognate to the Latin vir (also meaning a male human being, and the source of modern English words like virile & virtue). That word is no longer in common use in modern English, although I think maybe it survives in some dialects.

The word man(n), OTOH is the gender-neutral Old English word for a human being, as found in such words as woman (from wifman, a wife-man) or leman (a mistress, or love-man), both notably referring to female human beings. It is cognate to modern German mann, again referring to any human being.

The word mankind thus refers to … any kind of man.

Modern German "Mann" is an adult, human male. Ehemann (husband), Fachmann (expert), Kaufmann (salesman). The parallel, of course, is Frau (adult, human woman), which also does double-duty on its own as a word for "wife": Ehefrau (wife), Fachfrau (expert), Putzfrau (cleaning lady). That "Putzfrau" is a long-standing word but "Putzmann" doesn't exist, and that "fachmännisch" and not "fachfrauisch" (fachfräulisch?) is a word are examples of the sexism deeply embedded in languages a lot of us are going on about. Thoughtful Germans are finding their way towards more gender-neutral terms, especially in job postings, which used to be horribly gendered - think "Reinigungskraft" (cleaning power) instead of "Putzfrau", or "Entwickler*in" instead of "Entwickler" (developer, grammatically male).

Modern German "man" (single 'n') is an indirect pronoun that is usually best translated as "one" or "someone", but even then, you fall into the sexism of male as default. "Man ist was man isst" (one is what one eats)

This is amazing.

This is why I come to read HN =) - interesting content like this, or esoteric/cool facts, or awesomely deep tech discussions.

Out of curiosity - do you have a background in this kind of thing (linguistics), or its just an interest topic for you?

(As a side-note, this whole SJW crusade does irk me somewhat, but hey, I guess it resulted in gems like this).

> Out of curiosity - do you have a background in this kind of thing (linguistics), or its just an interest topic for you?

I love languages. Each one is beautiful and endearing and ugly and infuriating in its own way. I really love English, because it’s my native tongue and I know the most about it, but I love studying languages in general. One thing I have found is that the more one knows about many languages the less likely one is to go off half-cocked about perceived problems in one’s own.

I did study a little bit formally, but I also love computers and there’re a lot more career opportunities in software development than in philology or etymology, so that’s where I focused.