John Cowan wrote:
>
>Andreas Johansson scripsit:
>
> > I meant in the generic sense "an English person". If I get you
>correctly,
> > "Twelve Englishmen entered the room" can only mean that "Twelve English
>men
> > (=male persons) entered the room" - I was under the impression it didn't
> > necessarily show gender.
>
>For me it definitely does, although there's evidence that that wasn't true
>in the past, e.g. "Fifty million Frenchmen can't be wrong" (although that
>could merely have meant that the political opinions of French women were
>at the time unimportant).
Excpet for the fact that there have never been fifty million French men
alive simultanouesly (assuming that men of non-French ethnicities from the
colonies weren't included).
Andreas
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