ludemann@ubc-cs.UUCP (Peter Ludemann) (07/21/85)
The Japanese language is almost completely non-sexist, yet the culture is very sexist. Example of cultural sexism: an ad for a quick food restaurant (Macdonalds? Kentucky Fried Chicken? - I forget) which asked for males or females but offered females about 30% less pay (all in the *same* ad and for the *same* job). The language does not distinguish between Mr., Mrs., Miss, etc. - everyone gets "-san" at the end. And you may notice that Japanese speakers of English often get "he" and "she" mixed up (although Japanese can make this distinction - but such pronouns are usually avoided by using the person's name or position instead). However, looking at written Japanese, I can easily tell if the speaker is male or female and his/her social position with respect to the other people in the conversation. The language takes into account people's relative ranks rather than their sex. And women are "inferior". The major difference between Japanese and English (as I see it) is that English comes from the Indo-European tradition of classifying everything as male, female or (sometimes) neuter. Japanese doesn't have this tradition, but still manages to make women inferior. There is much more to sexism in a language or culture than whether the third person pronoun is by default "he" or "she". This is, of course, all a great simplification. I would welcome rebuttals.
franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams) (07/29/85)
The question is not, can there be sexism without sexist linguistic constructions? The answer to that is obviously yes. The question is, can sexism be eliminated while retaining sexist constructions?
steiny@scc.UUCP (Don Steiny) (08/02/85)
> > > The question is not, can there be sexism without sexist linguistic > constructions? The answer to that is obviously yes. The question is, > can sexism be eliminated while retaining sexist constructions? Good point. The Chinese language does not have gender. For instance, "husband" and "wife" are both "ai ren" ("loved one"). The Chinese are pretty sexist regardless of the lack of grammatical distinctions for sexes. A linguistics professor I once had said "language isn't sexist, people are." -- scc!steiny Don Steiny @ Don Steiny Software 109 Torrey Pine Terrace Santa Cruz, Calif. 95060