Haha, you know what he means...

Mis-used?

It was deliberately used as such in the past. It is only in recent times that the offensive implication has been picked up and corrected. I am correctly quoting the well-known expression itself, to replace Indian with native American or any other preferred varient is to lose connection with the quote...

The purpose of which was to remind all and sundry that Sicarius seems to have forgotten about his own people's hierarchical structure.

varient being a variant of variant, of course...

And why is it dawn of mwan? Wouldn't that be a humwan construct - associating dawn w/ beginning? What if we've been using our days backward since the start?

Sorry, it's late and I'm rambling nonsense.

This whole thread is based on a rambling bit of nonsense.

Has this even bothered a female player? Sicarius is just making noise. It almost makes me long for the days of diplomat1824.

Like I said, he is winding us up...

when i read baby books (books about babies, not very small books), rather than refferring to the unborn baby as he or she or they or baby or it, they took the view that it should be called she in the first chapter, he in the second and so on.

Perhaps the programmers should randomize the useage?

If this isn't difficult perhaps they could also randomize the spelling of St Petersburg between St Petersburg and St Paulasburg?

@Chrispminis, the "royal we" is, I have always been informed, and wikipedia supports me, because the monarch speaks on behalf of his people as well.

As for the he/she argument, why is using the masculine term as gender-neutral anti-feminist? I imagine it's a hang-over from Latin/French wherein for a group of people, the masculine plural is used even if there is only one man and many women in the group. If so, surely it's PRO-feminist to use maculine as gender-neutral: women are special/more important/ etc. and therefore have their own pronouns, whereas men have to "share" the gender-neutral ones?

As is often the case, what can be seen in one way, can be seen equally validly in another. Whereas I think "his" doesn't determine conclusively someone's gender, because it is the correct gender-neutral term, if the message said "her" it WOULD indicate the gender of the person, and is therefore wrong.

@aoe3rules: I am pretty sure that French was not the official language of England for 600 years. The Normans conquered England in 1066 and introduced French but it only last lasted for about 300 years.Henry IV spoke English at court and he ascended the throne in 1399.

"GameMaster: chelsea has withdrawn his vote for a pause"
Well, it wouldn't be hard to change, by why is 'their' wrong?
"GameMaster: chelsea has withdrawn their vote for a pause"

Avoiding he/she/their should be the easier way, so to slightly change aoe3rules' suggestion:
"username has submitted a vote for a [pause, draw, etc. Remaining: [remaining users]."
"username has withdrawn a vote for a [pause, draw, etc]. Remaining: [remaining users]."

A lot of people find the singular "their" objectionable. Personally I think its okay.
What would Sicarius suggest? He/She? Or should we have to specify our sex when we create an account?

Alternately the sentence structure could be change:
"Chelsea has voted to pause" or "Chelsea has voted to unpause".

Oops I didn't see Noirin's post. I agree with Noirin.

it's actually aoe3rules' with the username instead of the nation's name, so it's not really my idea :P

Why not just forget this moot argument. Would you rather have a better forum, pm support, more user-friendly control than changing the 'he' to something more appropriate, such as ...ah I can't think of anything better than he.

Dotard! Forget this matter, overlook it, let it die, perceive it as nothing, blind-eye it, throw it into the bin, kick its bucket, etc.

So it is. I agree with ao3rules and Noirin in that case. Maybe Sicarius has made a fair point then?

Funny thread :)

1. The fact that Sicarius started it does not automatically mean it's a wind-up. Such generalizations and assumptions are, usually, wrong and somewhat stupid.

2. This issue not a big deal (from my perspective at least) - but it's also not a big deal to fix this. Now that it is on the table the right thing is to correct it and move on. Doing nothing will seem wrong - even changing it to "she" makes more sense - as this is the gender used for countries.

Sorry if this has already been suggested, but why couldn't we use each player's profile to solve this.

What if, when you signed up, you had to indicate in your profile whether you were male or female? Then the game's code could be amended so that it checks the player's profile whenever it is about to produce a gender-related message.

So if your profile indicated you were male, the code would create the message thus:

GameMaster: chelsea has withdrawn his vote for a pause

But if your profile showed you were female, it would be:

GameMaster: chelsea has withdrawn her vote for a pause

(I used 'chelsea' since that was Sicarius's original example text).

Wouldn't this be a solution to suit all parties?

Ivo, the Fatherland disagrees with your 2nd point.

In the next version (but not implemented yet) there'll be a new non-command based interface for voting, so this'll be worked out.
Also I think it's a valid nitpick, not because it might offend someone but just because it's incorrect. More of a "You have 1 new messages" problem than a "Women not allowed" problem

I'm more worried about gender becoming a problem for any future translation support, in languages where "army" or "fleet" might be different genders for example, it becomes hard to find ways to drop a single translated word into a translated sentence
(What is the official PC position on this by the way? Are people complaining about certain nouns having a sex in some langauges yet?)

Usually there is gender support, so translators can flag the nouns with their gender.

I know it's no longer relevant, but has any one considered.

"PlayerX's vote for a pause has been withdrawn"

...?

On the language side, looking from a French perspective - you've usually got multiple words across all genders.

An example:

Army could be literally called "une armée," a feminine noun. However, the option to call an army a battalion yields "un bataillon," a masculine noun.

Not sure how this pans out for other languages though...

@ DingleberryJones - maybe, but Mother Russia certainly agrees with me :)

@Noirin which translation lib is this? I'd be interested in recommendations (though it'll be a long time before translations start to get worked on)

this has been a thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining thread (if not particularly elucidating)... to me, it is a testament to the diversity of perspectives that this community embodies. to think... even on such an unimportant but relevant point we have had 50+ (mostly) useful comments. good topic!

@kestas
no idea about libs, but I have been doing some translating, and usually we add gender to the strings, adding p for plural and m/f for gender; for example: "car" in italian would change to "automobile^f" and "cars" to "automobili^pf", of course then you need a parser which checks it and adds the correct article

as a female player i've find it mildly annoying, but not a big deal. it would great to see it fixed in a gender neutral way. but as several have said, there are bigger fish to fry regarding patriarchy/feminism/etc on this site, which itself you know is peanuts compared to larger issues in the world. but conversations about gender and how it appears in our lives seem to be good to have more of, not less of, from my perspective.

If Kestas put up a 'Merry Christmas' note on the site on December 25, I am not going to be annoyed even though I don't celebrate Christmas, and I would get much more out of a 'Happy Tuesday' greeting. Is there a difference?