Quote Originally Posted by MistakeNot View Post
Uh-huh. And will that work for Japanese? Or German or French? Do they have a corresponding word for someone of unknown gender?
I don't know, but it is quite possible they don't.
It can work pretty seamlessly in Japanese, as the grammar there tends to lean towards gender neutral speech to begin with - not always, but most of the time. To be honest it would be much easier to make Japanese text ambigous than it would to make English one ambigous. By a lot.

German can get complicated in this sense - there are ways to make the speech more neutral, but it's a generally heavily gendered language.

Can't speak for French as I don't know it.