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oseneryesterday at 8:25 PM1 replyview on HN

It is common amongst French, Dutch etc speakers where saying "it said x" sounds unnatural.


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Anonynekoyesterday at 9:02 PM

Russian too. There is a subset of words which are referred to as "it", but for most words "he" or "she" are used regardless of whether these are living things or not. With loanwords we just decide by similarity to other words. Claude is definitely a "he" as the word is the same as a common male name.

This trips me up occasionally when I'm translating things into English. Once, when I referred to an indefinite gender player character in a gacha game as a "he" (because the word "player" is a "he"), quite a few people got mad! Even though in my head I was never trying to imply one way or the other.

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