mmar@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Mitchell Marks) (06/28/85)
jeff@rtech.UUCP (Jeff Lichtman) in Message-ID: <498@rtech.UUCP> writes: > > "If you should happen to see someone, say hello to one." Sorry, the problem > still exists. The suggested answers usually fall into one of the following > categories: > > Use the plural: ^^^^^^ Let's hold off judgement on what this is, and identify it by the actual forms involved: they, them, their, theirs, and either themselves (as you might expect) or themself (as you in fact hear often). The last peculiarity leads to the argument I've offerred here before, that this process is not really using plurals to agree with an indefinite, but rather letting the forms "they" etc be used AS SINGULARS when anaphoric to an indefinite. > > "If you should happen to see someone, say hello to them." > > The argument here is that English is a flexible language > that is defined by usage, and this is how many people > already talk. Also, getting rid of sexist language is > more important than adherance to abstract rules of grammar. Distinguish """rules""" as promulgated by prescriptivists from the rules which would constitute a description of the actual language. Then the two points collapse together: advocates of this usage in fact SUPPORT adherence to the (real) abstract rules of grammar, i.e. the grammar that people use. BTW, this isn't a special characteristic of English. Any language changes under the friction of actual use, even those with a National Academy or other conservative force. > > Invent a new word: > Stick with "Standard English": > > "If you should happen to see someone, say hello to him." > > The argument here is that this is gramatically correct, > and has served for many years. Sort of; in any event that's how proponents of this option would put it. But what that means in this context is mostly "this is what has traditionally been urged". What has to be argued out about this option is whether there's anything wrong with it. After all, a normative grammarian urging this would not be able to stop others from speaking however they want, e.g. using "they" -- as S. Pemberton's citations from the OED pointed up, that alternative has survived for 600 years. What has happened is that the shoe is on the other foot. This Standard usage has come under attack from feminists as inherently reflecting assumptions about sex roles (including people like me who take a descriptivist stand and write words like "normative" and "prescriptive" with an ugly leer, yet feel no contradiction in becoming rather prescriptive ourselves as part of a social program. There's no real contradiction, and I'll happily defend that combination of stances some other time, if anyone bothers to flame me as a hypocrite). So the controversy doesn't center around that seemingly straightforward argument for the "he/him" normative standard. Rather, the issue has become the defense of it as not really reflecting assumptions about sex roles, and counterattacks to those defenses. The most frequently offerred defense, and a pretty cogent one, is that its origins are in the arbitrary and fairly innocent system of grammatical gender, which has largely died out in English leaving just this relict. But that defense won't quite do, for two reasons: (1) The history is not actually all that innocent. We term this grammatical subsystem 'gender', and call two of the genders 'masculine' and 'feminine', because in fact they largely agree with natural gender for animals and especially humans. The fact that masc is generally the unmarked gender (in the European languages for which this terminology was developed) may reflect an attitude within the speech community that it was in some way normal or 'default' to be male or to talk about males, and somewhat peculiar or out-of-the-ordinary to be female or to talk about females. (2) And in any event, Modern English hardly has any arbitrary grammatical gender -- it's always in accord with natural gender with a couple moribund exceptions. Thus "he" always carries with it the meaning 'male' today, even if at one time it did not. > > Name both genders: > > "If you should happen to see someone, say hello to him or her." > > This is an easy transformation that is always possible, > is easy, and is correct even to a strict grammarian. > Yes indeed. Sometimes it's rather clumsy, though, and becomes tedious not just to over-sensitive stylists but to anybody. There's nothing clumsy about it in Jeff's example, but you can easily construct examples where you have to use the formula two or three times in a sentence and five or six times in a paragraph, and that becomes very ugly very quickly. We've been looking at the same kind of example throughout. If you vary it a bit, you can easily find cases where this (or a coinage, or eliminating the need for a pronoun) are the only viable options: i.e., where neither "one" nor "you" nor "they" works. > Stick with standard English, but re-phrase: > > "Say hello to whomever you should happen to see." > ... Compare _A_Manual_of_Style_ (University of Chicago Press) 12th ed with _The_Chicago_Manual_of_Style_ (adopted as new official name) 13th ed, for an example of a massive job of this sort of rewriting. > > Have I missed any categories? Yes: 6) Use "she" (and related forms in other cases) consistently. Despite my abstract convictions, I admit this was quite startling the first time I saw it. But more people are trying it out, and you really do get used to it. For an example of a work that carries this policy through, see Cooper and Clancy _Oh!_Pascal!_. This does not exclude using "you" or "one" (or "we" or "they") where they will work, but rather just selects "she" over "he" or "she or he" where nothing but one of those would work. 7) Use "she" and "he" alternately or randomly from one work to another, or from one passage to another. As with option (6), this does not exclude the other alternatives when they will work. So far as I know, this suggestion was first publicly aired by J. D. McCawley in a review of Robin Lakoff's _Language_and_Woman's_Place_ (1975). I had never seen it actually carried out in anything like strict alternation until last week. The book that I stumbled upon which appears to do this (the author doesn't make a big point of it in a note or anything) is _The_Nature_of_Mathematical_Knowledge_ by Philip Kitcher (Oxford U.P. 1984). He switches back and forth like clockwork, with only one exception that I've noticed so far. I mean each passage or example, not each instance of a pronoun. (He also uses most of the other options discussed above, as well as the philosophers' oddity of sometimes writing "I" to mean something like 'any rational being'.) Any Minnesotans out there? Ask him if the strict alternation was as intentional as it looks (and how the early exception happened). -- Mitch Marks @ UChicago ...ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!mmar
mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) (07/01/85)
>7) Use "she" and "he" alternately or randomly from one work to > another, or from one passage to another. > > So far as I know, this suggestion was first publicly aired by J. D. >McCawley in a review of Robin Lakoff's _Language_and_Woman's_Place_ (1975). >I had never seen it actually carried out in anything like strict alternation >until last week. The book that I stumbled upon which appears to do this >(the author doesn't make a big point of it in a note or anything) is >_The_Nature_of_Mathematical_Knowledge_ by Philip Kitcher (Oxford U.P. >1984). He switches back and forth like clockwork, with only one exception >that I've noticed so far. I mean each passage or example, not each instance >of a pronoun.... This was the solution my wife and I adopted in our "Psychology of Reading" (Academic Press, 1983), over the objections of the copy-editor, who wanted "he or she". We prevailed, because we felt strongly that "he or she" was very clumsy in practice. When the referent remained the same (real or abstract) person throughout a passage, the pronoun remained consistent. When the referent changed, so might the pronoun. Only where the sex of the referent was absolutely or probabilistically determined would the pronoun be fixed in advance (We did not refer to a dyslexic child as "she" unless we wanted to point out an exception to the general rule that most dyslexic children are male). It is very easy to get used to the generic "she", but I think it is better to balance "she" and "he" through a text. -- Martin Taylor {allegra,linus,ihnp4,floyd,ubc-vision}!utzoo!dciem!mmt {uw-beaver,qucis,watmath}!utcsri!dciem!mmt
matt@brl-tgr.ARPA (Matthew Rosenblatt ) (07/03/85)
>> Stick with "Standard English": >> >> "If you should happen to see someone, say hello to him." >> >> The argument here is that this is gramatically correct, >> and has served for many years. >Sort of; in any event that's how proponents of this option would put >it. But what that means in this context is mostly "this is what has >traditionally been urged". > What has to be argued out about this option is whether there's >anything wrong with it. After all, a normative grammarian urging this >would not be able to stop others from speaking however they want, e.g. >using "they" -- as S. Pemberton's citations from the OED pointed up, >that alternative has survived for 600 years. What has happened is >that the shoe is on the other foot. This Standard usage has come >under attack from feminists as inherently reflecting assumptions about >sex roles (including people like me who take a descriptivist stand and >write words like "normative" and "prescriptive" with an ugly leer, yet >feel no contradiction in becoming rather prescriptive ourselves as >part of a social program. There's no real contradiction, and I'll >happily defend that combination of stances some other time, if anyone >bothers to flame me as a hypocrite). I won't flame you as a hypocrite, but I would like to read your defense of the combination of prescriptivism-as-part-of-a-social-program and descriptivism. Also, why do you think this particular prescriptivist change will succeed when so many other prescriptions have been ignored by speakers of natural language for so many years? Also, to what extent should the prescription against the "generic" he/him/his be enforced? Very often, I read a disclaimer at the beginning of a book to the effect that "the masculine pronoun includes the feminine unless there is an explicit statement to the contrary." Is this enough, or should publishers adhere strictly to the Guidelines for Equal Treatment of the Sexes in [fill in the publisher's name] Publications" that most of them adopted in the 1970's? Should a George Gilder have to go to New Orleans to get his book published? And what about speech? Should one react to a speaker's use of he/him/his in the same way as to the use of a vulgar pejorative for a nationality, religion or ethnic group? -- Matt Rosenblatt (matt@amsaa.ARPA)
crs@lanl.ARPA (07/03/85)
> >> Stick with "Standard English": > >> > >> "If you should happen to see someone, say hello to him." > >> > >> The argument here is that this is gramatically correct, > >> and has served for many years. > Isn't this, as many of the examples used in this "debate", a bit artificial? As with many phrases/sentences that people seem to object to as sexist, there is a simpler way. What on earth is the matter with: "If you should happen to see someone, say hello." I have seen few, if any, examples here that couldn't easily be converted to nonsexist form (assuming, for the sake of argument, that they *are* sexist) by just a *little* thought and common sense. Granted that we all could stand to become more sensitive to the way that what we say/write may be taken but habits are strong and the habits of speech and writing have been forming over a lifetime. Do you wonder that there is resistance to change? The great pronoun debate seems, to me, to be producing a lot of dark heat, if I may paraphrase a description of the arguments in net.abortion. I'm not strongly opposed to looking for a gender-neutral pronoun but I'm not sure that I'm strongly in favor of it either. It seems to me, as has often been suggested that a great deal of effort is being spent treating the symptoms while we die of the disease (pronounitis? :-). The examples chosen by both sides of the great debate are usually awkward constructs chosen, it seems, exclusively to promote which ever side of the argument the writer favors. In the mean time may I suggest a tactic that may help to make others as sensitive to sexist speech/writing as we enlightened netters are. (:-) Suppose that whenever we hear someone say something that is ambiguous in a sexist way (as in the example that prompted this article) we say "Do you mean a man, a woman or either?" It is less convenient with written work but letters to the editor or author or publisher are certainly possible. If people are called to account for their ambiguous usage often enough they are apt to become more sensitive and begin trying to get it right the first time. Of *course*, it is a lot of work but do you really think it is any more work than trying to overcome the resistance to changing lifelong language habits? What we really want to change, anyway, is the attitudes. As may be expected, all opinions are mine alone. -- Charlie Sorsby ...!{cmcl2,ihnp4,...}!lanl!crs crs@lanl.arpa
wfmans@ihuxb.UUCP (w. mansfield) (07/03/85)
I hesitate to bring this up, but I seem to remember from my history class that the word man (used as in "all men are created equal") at one time not only did not include women, but also did not include non-whites. I thought that in colonial america slaves and women were considered chattels of their (male) owners, not equal at all. I realize that most folk no longer subscribe to this view, but it could be behind the (my opinion) unreasonable animosity toward male-sounding nouns. I don't care much, as long as no one asks me to change my name.
ed@mtxinu.UUCP (Ed Gould) (07/09/85)
>>7) Use "she" and "he" alternately or randomly from one work to >> another, or from one passage to another. Even this doesn't always work, however. An introductory programming text written at Berkeley a few years ago used the pronouns interchangably, and randomly assigned them with a program. Somehow, whenever a bad example was given - deliberately to illustrate a point - the pronoun came out "she", or so it seemed. -- Ed Gould mt Xinu, 2910 Seventh St., Berkeley, CA 94710 USA {ucbvax,decvax}!mtxinu!ed +1 415 644 0146 "A man of quality is not threatened by a woman of equality."
morse@leadsv.UUCP (Terry Morse) (07/10/85)
Tim Leary used "se" and "hir" for the third person neuter pronoun:
he him his
she her hers
se hir hirs
I think it has a nice androgynous sound.
--
-- Peter da Silva (the mad Australian)
-- UUCP: ...!shell!neuro1!{hyd-ptd,baylor,datafac}!peter
-- ARPA: baylor.peter@RICE.ARPA
-- MCI: PDASILVA; CIS: 70216,1076; DELPHI: PJDASILVA
--
--
Terry Morse (408)743-1487
UUCP: { (ucbvax!dual!sun) | (ihnp4!qubix) } !sunncal!leadsv!morse
UUCP: { allegra | ihnp4 | dual } !fortune!amdcad!cae780!leadsv!morse
UUCP: seismo!nsc!cae780!leadsv!morsehollombe@ttidcc.UUCP (The Polymath) (07/11/85)
In article <431@mtxinu.UUCP> ed@mtxinu.UUCP (Ed Gould) writes: >>>7) Use "she" and "he" alternately or randomly from one work to >>> another, or from one passage to another. > >Even this doesn't always work, however. An introductory programming >text written at Berkeley a few years ago used the pronouns interchangably, >and randomly assigned them with a program. Somehow, whenever a bad >example was given - deliberately to illustrate a point - the pronoun >came out "she", or so it seemed. I once had to use a textbook where the genders were simply alternated, sometimes within the same sentence. The effect was _very_ distracting. Having to deal with a subject that changes sex three times in one sentence slows the reading and information absorption process enormously (at least it did for me), probably because it's so unexpected and unusual. --- -_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_- The Polymath (aka: Jerry Hollombe) Citicorp TTI Common Sense is what tells you that a ten 3100 Ocean Park Blvd. pound weight falls ten times as fast as a Santa Monica, CA 90405 one pound weight. (213) 450-9111, ext. 2483 {philabs,randvax,trwrb,vortex}!ttidca!ttidcc!hollombe
ccrdave@ucdavis.UUCP (Lord Kahless) (07/14/85)
> Tim Leary used "se" and "hir" for the third person neuter pronoun: > > he him his > she her hers > se hir hirs > > I think it has a nice androgynous sound. > -- > -- Peter da Silva (the mad Australian) > -- UUCP: ...!shell!neuro1!{hyd-ptd,baylor,datafac}!peter > -- ARPA: baylor.peter@RICE.ARPA > -- MCI: PDASILVA; CIS: 70216,1076; DELPHI: PJDASILVA > -- Sounds like the Afrikaans sy and haar, for she & her. > he him his > she her hers > se hir hirs > sy haar Is that politically fashionable these days.
dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (D Gary Grady) (07/15/85)
I don't know if someone else has pointed this out or not, but for what
it's worth several languages make do with no pronoun gender at all (that
is, not an alternative gender-neutral pronoun that means "he or she but
not it" but rather a pronoun system that does not distinguish between
gender or between human and non-human). Some languages I believe this
is true of (somebody correct me if I'm wrong) are Chinese and the
Finno-Ugric group, which included Hungarian (Magyar), Estonian, and
Finnish.
A minor aside: Dutch nouns carry two genders, but they are not male and
female. Instead there is neuter and "common" which descended from the
Germanic male and female.
--
D Gary Grady
Duke U Comp Center, Durham, NC 27706
(919) 684-3695
USENET: {seismo,decvax,ihnp4,akgua,etc.}!mcnc!ecsvax!dgaryjack@boring.UUCP (07/19/85)
In article <1647@ecsvax.UUCP> dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (D Gary Grady) writes: > >A minor aside: Dutch nouns carry two genders, but they are not male and >female. Instead there is neuter and "common" which descended from the >Germanic male and female. As far as I know, this is not strictly true. Dutch has three genders, like German: male, female and neuter. The point is, we only have two articles, "de" (M/F) and "het" (N). (And "een", of course). So while you don't see the difference normally, you should (officially) use either "hij" (he) or "zij" (she) if you refer to the word: "De vereniging dient *haar* statuten na te komen". (The society has to live by it's regulations). -- Jack Jansen, jack@mcvax.UUCP The shell is my oyster.
hmj@tut.UUCP (Hannu-Matti Jarvinen) (07/22/85)
In article <ecsvax.1647> dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (D Gary Grady) writes: >I don't know if someone else has pointed this out or not, but for what >it's worth several languages make do with no pronoun gender at all (that >is, not an alternative gender-neutral pronoun that means "he or she but >not it" but rather a pronoun system that does not distinguish between >gender or between human and non-human). Some languages I believe this >is true of (somebody correct me if I'm wrong) are Chinese and the >Finno-Ugric group, which included Hungarian (Magyar), Estonian, and >Finnish. Finnish does distinguish between human and non-human. Human is always "haen", which means both female and male, non-human is "se", but "se" is sometimes (or quite often) used to refer also humans in spoken language. Non-humans are always "se" and no pronouns to distinguish female and male exist. -- Hannu-Matti Jarvinen ASENTO - Ada Software ENgineering TOols -project Tampere University of Technology, Computer Systems Laboratory, Finland hmj@tut.UUCP, ...!mcvax!tut!hmj