[eddington]

If you were to try to say "my friend's house" in lots of languages you have to use a gender-specific word.

In spanish, for example

La casa de mi amigo / La casa de mi amiga.

If you were to try to do it in a gender neutral manner ...

La casa de una persona que conozco bien.

Which translates roughly to "the house of a person that I know (and know well)."

[wccrawford]

Spanish speakers don't have the same hangups about using 'he' as the gender-neutral pronoun. It's just a part of their language.

English is the one where people get bent out of shape over it.

[mtts]

No, Dutchies don't like it either. I don't think it's language specific. It probably has something to do with how much machismo or political correctness there is in a culture :-)

By that logic, Americans are probably more upset about this than, say, Nigerians (I assume Nigerian culture(s) are rather less PC than American culture).

[wccrawford]

That's a good point. I don't know all languages, so I can only speak for the ones I know.

I also suspect it's a PC thing.

[nandemo]

Right, but that gender-neutral he only works we're talking about a "generic" or hypothetical someone. You cannot use in (say) Facebook or Google+ for a text referring to a female friend.

In English, some people still use they/their in this case. In Portuguese (and I think Spanish and other major Latin languages) you can't do that.

[StuffMaster]

And yet they must be able to talk about gender-unknown people...