News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Learning Haskell – A Racket programmer's foray into the land of Haskell. Parent comment

Re:Learning Haskell – A Racket programmer's foray into the l... by sgrove on Wednesday March 11, 2015 @09:54PM (#9188790)
Meh, I like 'hen'[0] a lot, wouldn't mind seeing a concerted effort to introduce it in English as well. I doubt it would go over well in the states, however.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hen_%28pronoun%29

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Learning Haskell – A Racket programmer's foray into the l... by evincarofautumn on Wednesday March 11, 2015 @10:13PM (#9188846)
Unfortunately, pronouns are a closed class[1] in English; the possibility of getting people to adopt a new one is vanishingly unlikely. Fortunately, we already have “they”, which has been used as a gender-neutral pronoun in the singular for at least half a millennium.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part_of_speech#Open_and_closed...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Learning Haskell – A Racket programmer's foray into the l... by sgrove on Thursday March 12, 2015 @01:44PM (#9192442)
Interesting, hadn't heard about closed/open classes in speech. I agree that "they" serves the purpose well, but it's nice to see an explicit, consciousness-raising fix (though it's the ultimate bikeshed politically, everyone feels they're qualified to comment - even me!)
[ Parent | on HN ]