Talk:Reverse the gender of a string

political correctness

This task will be fraught with much angst. Many gender-specific words are now considered derogatory if not vulgar.

Many of those words are no longer used or even condoned in polite society.

The task will require a translator in context, something way above my ability.

The male/female names of various animals is problematic as there's a lot overlap. More so, with human names (which I elected not to enter nor support).

I was toying with the idea of flagging some of the XXXman/XXXwoman/XXXmen/XXXwomen words to make the list smaller.

Perhaps, to save space, a common list of words could be constructed and programmers could just read that file. -- Gerard Schildberger 08:18, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Linguistically impossible task

To a linguist, this task is completely laughable on many levels. First of all, you can't reverse the gender of a string because strings don't have gender. But even allowing that the string represents a text with gender-based references, you can at best do a partial effort at each linguistic level: the morphological level, the lexical level, the semantic level, and the pragmatic level. And physiologically speaking, at some point you're going to be trying to decide whether certain sexual characteristics can be considered "opposite", which is unknowable without deep understanding of the text, since to calculate an opposite you have to know in which sense something is being taken, and only change one aspect of it. Plus all the other problems. But the lexical problems are the real killer; sometimes the opposite of "a cock" is simply "a hen". And be careful how you cock that gun... --TimToady 23:56, 24 October 2012 (UTC)