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08c9912
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A better way to do this (using actually correct english) would be to tweak the language a bit further, so you have "a trusted site" instead of "a site they trust", "pick his preferred colour" to "pick a preferred colour", etc.
English (like most european languages) is gendered, and numbered (well, it at least has concepts of singluar and plural - weaker than e.g. slavic or arabic). Breaking the latter in an attempt to dispense with the former strikes me as a bad path to follow if you're trying to reform the way people think.
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Yeah, someone should tell those guys Chaucer and Shakespeare not to use singular they.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Although I'd certainly welcome additional patches to either rewrite to avoid gender or else use plural subjects (where everyone agrees that English is not gendered). We can collaborate.
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Additional patches are indeed welcome, and I also like to think that we can collaborate :)
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The spec uses Hixie English, which not only allows singular they, it actually requires it with a "should". To my knowledge this is the only normative definition of English.
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I would tell Shakespeare he got it wrong, but I'm prepared to limit my linguistic pedantry to the living (who therefore have a probability of actually determining the language…).
Is there really a normative definition of en-??-x-hixie? I thought there was just an algorithm: "Ask Hixie what he thinks. If he says yes, you're good. If not, you're chaals" ;) (There is also globish, which I think has a normative definition, and is english…)
I only fell on this by accident. I do applaud the goal of de-gendering the spec, whether it ends up meeting my particular linguistic preferences or not. And at some point I'll probably do some work on that which is usefully collaborative... but not yet.:(
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https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-they-and-the-many-reasons-why-its-correct/
The idea that it's incorrect and the prescription of alternatives wasn't even a concept until grammarians arbitrated such, and most people ignored them anyway. It's OK, really.
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@chaals Normative definition is at http://ian.hixie.ch/bible/english (first google hit for [hixie english]).