the car, one of them will sell it) John or Jim is going to sell his car. (i.e. either one of them will sell that one's own car, or one of them will sell someone else car: if the "someone else" has just been mentioned.) John and I are going to sell our car. (i.e. we jointly own the car, together we'll sell it) John and I are going to sell his? own car. (i.e. one of us will sell the car he owns, assuming that I am male) Sylvia or I are/am/is? going to sell our car. (i.e. we jointly own the car, one of us will sell it. Remove the difficulty by changing the auxiliary verb to just "will".) Sylvia or I are/am/is? going to sell their(??) own car. (i.e. one of us will sell the car he or she owns, assuming that I am male and Sylvia is female) General concerns Additional concerns appear in compound subjects in languages other than English. In many European languages, for example, a standard problem occurs with mixed-gender compound subjects. This problem does not appear in English, because they is genderless. But e.g. French has masculine ils vs. feminine elles; Spanish similarly has masculine ellos vs. feminine ellas. In addition, Arabic has gender as well as person and number agreement on its verbs, and more specifically in its literary language and in the more conservative spoken varieties, there is gender agreement with third-person plural subjects. In addition, some languages allow subjects to follow verbs: either optionally for stylistic reasons, as in German, Latin or occasionally in English ("Now are entering John, Jim, and their wives"); as the normal state of affairs, as in Classical Arabic and Irish, where subjects precede the verb only for stylistic reasons; or even as a mandatory requirement, in languages with V-S-O or V-O-S word order and a strongly fixed word order. These languages often use different strategies for handling subjects after vs. before the verb: for example, tending to prefer an "agree with the closest phrase" strategy with a following subject, for pragmatic reasons, even when an "agree with the whole" strategy is used in other circumstances. Multiple strategies have been used to handle both compound subjects in general and category disagreement between/among the coordinate members of the subject. Languages often differ in which strategies they use. Among the strategies are: General agreement: Consider the total