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Sorry, old chap, I realise that the above is probably not related to the point you were trying to make. But I felt it was relevant anyway.

How can you simultaneously realise that it's not related and feel that it is relevant?

You know, on second thoughts, I'm going to delete that, Tom. I'm not averse to you going off at a tangent, but try to stay in the right ambience: a post about an interesting point of linguistics is not to be turned into a diatribe about abortion. It's not like we're so short of political and moral arguments round here that we need to crowbar extra ones in.

Cheers.

This could be complete half-remembered bollocks, but I vaguely recall hearing that Finnish is the only European language with a genuinely gender-neutral third-person pronoun.

(I tested this with an online Finnish translator, which reckons that "he said she said" is "hän mainittu hän mainittu").

English used to have. The word "she" is a relatively recent addition to the language, introduced because the language was becoming so ambiguous it was useless.

Ooops, my sincere apologies for that. I misjudged the ambience, as you said.

No worries. We've all done it.