lew@sri-unix (08/16/82)
I looked at a book called "Handbook of Non-sexist Writing" expecting to have a good sneering session, but found it to contain calm, well reasoned arguments for the reality of sex discrimination in language. Studies were cited which showed that when people read "he" they think of a male. This is not hard to believe! What really nailed me personally was a section titled "The male animal". This meant "the animal as male", not "the (human) male as animal". Having been involved in dinosaur books with my five year old son, I realized that I implicitly thought of all dinosaurs as male, eggs notwithstanding. Anyway, it's not a trivial issue. I like the idea of the author's sex determining the use of his or her for unspecified gender. There was an article in Scientific American on child development which referred to children as female (the author was a woman.) I found myself thinking "Hey, what about the little boys!" ... and there you are. Lew Mammel, Jr. - BTL Indian Hill
john@cisden.UUCP (John Woolley) (03/13/86)
This is sort of in response to Ken Arnold's recent posting on the he/she question of English pronouns. I tried to do a 'F'ollowup and got a strange core dump. I'm sure you'll all be happy finally to have The Answer. Some nouns are clearly feminine in gender, like "princess", "ship", "bitch". (Go ahead, flame me.) Some are equally masculine, like "waiter", "gigolo", or "priest". (Make my day.) Then there are lots of nouns that have a strong gender-component in their semantic makeup, but which can be applied to individuals of either sex, like Ken's examples of "nurse" and "secretary", or "senator", "labourer", "homemaker", "soldier". (Some of these I call "tends-to-feminine", some "tends-to-masculine".) And finally, there are plenty of nouns that refer to persons without any gender-component I can detect -- "driver", "authour", "linguist", "child". The rule in English seems to be that the speaker uses feminine pronouns to refer to individuals of unspecified or unknown sex if the antecedent noun is either in the feminine or in the tends-to-feminine class. He uses masculine pronouns if the antecedent is masculine, or tends-to-masculine, or gender-neutral. There are two issues here, which we ought to separate: which particular nouns ought to be or are perceived as being in which categories? and, Is it somehow inappropriate to use masculine pronouns for actually gender- neutral nouns? In answer to the first question, I say it's a matter of the writer's choice, and we can all agree to live with each other's choices. I think Ken is right that the perceived femininity (feminicity?) of the nouns "nurse" and "secretary" affects the choice of pronoun; so someone who really wanted to emphasize his refusal to stereotype those professions might well use "he", moving them from the tends-to-feminine class into the gender-neutral class. This strikes me as entirely tolerable, even very useful at times. In answer to the second (Should "he" be used with reference to, say, "performer"), I see no compelling reason to call out the thought police to enforce a change in the language. We don't have a special pronoun for this use, the fact that we don't is no more insulting to one sex than to the other, and there's no alternative available that strikes right-thinking people (me, that is) as anything short of barbarous, awkward, ugly, like totally gross. Locutus sum -- causa finita. (Praei, nefari, diem fac mihi.) As a side question, which maybe someone can answer, what do radicals do in languages like French, where almost every noun and adjective has specific gender, or Hebrew, where even the verbs do? We think we got problems ... -- Peace and Good!, Fr. John Woolley "Compared to what I have seen, all that I have written is straw." -- St. Thomas
kwh@bentley.UUCP (KW Heuer) (03/17/86)
In article <555@cisden.UUCP> cisden!john (John Woolley) writes: >There are two issues here, which we ought to separate: which particular >nouns ought to be or are perceived as being in which categories? and, Is >it somehow inappropriate to use masculine pronouns for actually gender- >neutral nouns? Good point! Let's keep those issues separate! >As a side question, which maybe someone can answer, what do radicals do in >languages like French, where almost every noun and adjective has specific >gender, or Hebrew, where even the verbs do? We think we got problems ... I think that in most languages, "gender" and "sex" are distinct entities. In Germany I once purchased a comic book in which Spiderman "die Spinne" fought some thug whose name was translated "Killerfaust". Both characters were male, but were consistently given the feminine pronoun. I find it rather surprising that virtually all languages have noun genders. (A previous posting claimed that Hungarian does not.) The only case where "he gave it to her" is unambiguous is when there is exactly one male, one female, and one neuter object present; in other cases one must infer from additional information (which the author, seeing the ambiguity, normally provides). I can imagine a language which uses age or race rather than sex to determine the proper pronoun; in such a language there would be analagous cases where the pronoun information fully disambiguates the sentence, but I doubt anybody would suggest that such pronouns be added to any language. I've heard that the deaf-mute finger-speech uses a notation which assigns one pronoun to each entity in the discussion, and refers to that entity by pointing to its assigned area in the space around the speaker. (Which to me sounds an awful lot like register allocation on a computer.) I believe there is no gender information present; the best translation may be "the party of the first part", etc. Can somebody confirm/deny this? What about languages that were designed rather than evolved? What do the pronouns mean in Esperanto? Some years ago I heard about "Loglan", which was supposed to be a "logically" designed language (hence the name). Has anybody else heard of it? Karl W. Z. Heuer (ihnp4!bentley!kwh), The Walking Lint
arnold@ucsfcgl.UUCP (Ken Arnold%CGL) (03/17/86)
In article <555@cisden.UUCP> john@cisden.UUCP (John Woolley) writes: >This is sort of in response to Ken Arnold's recent posting on the >he/she question of English pronouns. ... I'm sure you'll all be happy >finally to have The Answer. Thanks for responding. I await Enlightenment :-). >The rule in English seems to be that the speaker uses feminine pronouns to >refer to individuals of unspecified or unknown sex if the antecedent noun >is either in the feminine or in the tends-to-feminine class. He uses >masculine pronouns if the antecedent is masculine, or tends-to-masculine, >or gender-neutral. > >There are two issues here, which we ought to separate: which particular >nouns ought to be or are perceived as being in which categories? and, Is >it somehow inappropriate to use masculine pronouns for actually gender- >neutral nouns? Actually, you are going sideways of my argument. You are addressing real questions, but not the one I was trying to raise. That question is "why does the use of 'he' conflict with 'nurse'", to which I answer, "the word 'he' retains its gender specifying function despite the clearly genderless context." Which would mean that "he" is *not *the generic pronoun it is alleged to be. You rather accurately describe the usage, but it doesn't answer the question. >In answer to the second (Should "he" be used with reference to, say, >"performer"), I see no compelling reason to call out the thought police to >enforce a change in the language. We don't have a special pronoun for >this use, the fact that we don't is no more insulting to one sex than to >the other, and there's no alternative available that strikes right-thinking >people (me, that is) as anything short of barbarous, awkward, ugly, like >totally gross. Well, I agree up to a point. I don't think either sex should be offended by the *lack* of a general pronoun. But I think women (and men, obviously) have good reason to object to *solving* this problem by using masculine forms for the general case. Ken Arnold