ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis) (05/28/85)
>> Michael Ellis (ME) > Jeff Winslow. >> The fact that Bengali .. has lost gender distinctions only >> excludes this language from those that might have any bearing on Marie's >> hypothesis. >> >The hypothesis is beside the point. BOGUS!! How can Marie's OWN HYPOTHESIS be `BESIDE THE POINT' in a conversation WHICH SHE STARTED!!! Marie's hypothesis suggested that the unfairness of our generics (ie. {man,he} used to refer to both sexes) might be due to the traditional male domination of our society. Now you and others would not only discredit her hypothesis with irrelevant arguments, but you would also totally ignore her remark as `beside the point'. >The point is that (apparently) Bengali has no gender distinctions, but >Bengali society is (apparently) still as sexist as ever. NO! The original point of Marie's hypothesis is that if a language ACTUALLY HAS gender distinctions, and if that language consistently derives its generics the normal masculine terms, then perhaps a prejudice is being reflected in language use. Many men in this newsgroup do not wish to hear this statement, so they insist on mishearing women's arguments in ways that are easier to argue against -- such as by misrepresenting her argument as you just did. >You want to make English without any gender distinctions. Bullshit! I never suggested such a thing, nor has anyone else I've heard.** The major proposals have been to avoid the generic use of {man,he,him} using one of the methods below: 1. To substitute {person,they,them}. Other reasonable replacements for `person' have also been mentioned in particular contexts (fire fighter, mail carrier,...). 2. To carefully rephrase the sentence, as Marcel suggested, to avoid generic anaphoric referrents. But no one has complained about the use of {man,woman,he,she} in contexts where the sex is the person is KNOWN. **{well...not quite. Perhaps Cheryl aka BMOC has other ideas} >What do you think that will accomplish? A less sexist society? Ha. Yes, I hope the suggested usage will help to bring this about. But even if that is quixotic, there are other more down-to-earth reasons that seem entirely practical to me: 1.The older language is incorrect and fails to come to grips with recent social change. This older language came into use at a time when our society strictly delimited the roles of women, a time when `repairmen' were always men, and where there were fewer contexts where a generic `he' needed to apply to people of both sexes. These older forms have become outmoded with the advance of the women's movement. 2.The older language is prone to misunderstanding, abuse and deception. `Man' and `he' have not just been the tools of oppression by prejudiced speakers, they have been mandated by prescriptive language texts. As such they seem to fix traditional attitudes. 3.Children ARE confused by the apparent masculine preference of our language. And the proposed language constructs will sound less awkward to future generations and cause less damage if its use is encouraged NOW. 4.Many women claim that the old usage makes them FEEL like they are being excluded -- regardless of the intent of the speaker, and regardless of the authority of old-fashioned textbooks. The new usage is partly a spontaneous result of that negative subjective experience. 5.The relatively successful Black and Gay movements have been accompanied by parallel language changes. In each case, new terms supplanted an earlier designation that was perceived as demeaning, and in each case genuine improvements in society's attitudes and self-image resulted. There is probably no way to rigorously `prove' to the cynic that the proposed language change is worthwhile, involving as it does large-scale sociological, psychological and linguistic phenomena of the most complex nature. But we do MOST things without such rigorous proof. That kind of certainty is to be had only very rarely. The simple fact remains that a steadily growing number of people -- both men and women -- are finding the traditional usage to be ugly, irritating, innaccurate and prone to misunderstanding and abuse. >And your continual reference to anyone who disagrees with you about this >as "rabid conservative engineers" and "knee-jerk conservatives" makes me >seriously wonder if your grasp of the connection between language and reality >isn't slowly rotting away. {Actually, I usually say `engiNERDS', not engineers...} Other newsgroups provide a forum wherein the avowed goal of that group can be discussed without undue harassment. But this group has ALWAYS been overpopulated by an overwhelming majority of `knee-jerk male enginerds' who seem determined to prevent any feminist sentiment whatsoever from receiving fair treatment. Would net.{unix, lang.c, auto, religion.christian, motss} allow those who hate {unix, C, cars, christianity, gays} to overwhelm their bandwidth with the kind of antithetical sentiments corresponding to those below: *Provocative clothing is a major factor in rape. *Women have no business being proud when other women overcome the historical male prejudice in our society. *Quotas to improve women's chances of employment in traditionally male dominated fields are harmful because they make men feel guilty. *Today's high incidence of rape is a fact of life that women should fatalistically learn to live with. *The proposed nonsexist language is a waste of time, is ambiguous, will remove useful distinctions from the language... *Women use too much toilet paper. Nobody is saying that men should stop disagreeing with women. But net.women could be a useful place where men and women of opposing viewpoints could at least come to have understanding and appreciation for each other, if not come to agreement. Why must there be such a huge GLUT of negative contributors who must immediately overwhelm each and every feminist statement by weight of sheer numbers alone? >Stop wasting your time and get on to something really constructive. Like what? Toilet paper? -michael
sunny@sun.uucp (Ms. Sunny Kirsten) (05/29/85)
> >> Michael Ellis (ME) > > Jeff Winslow. > > >> The fact that Bengali .. has lost gender distinctions only > >> excludes this language from those that might have any bearing on Marie's > >> hypothesis. > >> > >The hypothesis is beside the point. > > BOGUS!! > > How can Marie's OWN HYPOTHESIS be `BESIDE THE POINT' in a conversation > WHICH SHE STARTED!!! > Because she's "only" a woman and she's "arguing" with men. But then, I need not elaborate, since this concept of the relative worthlessness of women's conceptualization in the minds of (typical) men has been (re)hashed recently in this forum. "When you can't discredit your opponent's logic attack your opponent directly" is the concept behind the discreditation of women's thoughts. Sunny -- {ucbvax,decvax,ihnp4}!sun!sunny (Ms. Sunny Kirsten)
jeffw@tekecs.UUCP (Jeff Winslow) (05/31/85)
Well, Michael, you've made a lot of noise about what the original point is and isn't, but none of it answers *MY* point, which I will repeat: Societies that have languages with no "inappropriate" gender references - that is, gender is referenced only when it is that of a known person - are not known for their lack of sexism. Finnish, Turkish, and Bengali have been cited by various people over the last few years on this net. This suggests to me that your efforts relative to the English language are likely to be wasted. This may not be directly related to anything Marie ever said. I don't care. (And I mean no disrespect for Marie when I say that. That *should* be obvious.) That has no effect on its validity. And, by the way, the last time this discussion came up, some people DID suggest that non-gender-specific pronouns be used even when referring to someone whose sex was known. Likewise, whether you support this or not has no bearing on the validity of my argument above. > Would net.{unix, lang.c, auto, religion.christian, motss} allow > those who hate {unix, C, cars, christianity, gays} to overwhelm > their bandwidth with the kind of antithetical sentiments > corresponding to those below: > > *Provocative clothing is a major factor in rape. > > *Women have no business being proud when other women overcome the > historical male prejudice in our society. > > *Quotas to improve women's chances of employment in traditionally > male dominated fields are harmful because they make men feel guilty. > > *Today's high incidence of rape is a fact of life that women should > fatalistically learn to live with. > > *The proposed nonsexist language is a waste of time, is ambiguous, > will remove useful distinctions from the language... > > *Women use too much toilet paper. > > Nobody is saying that men should stop disagreeing with women. > > But net.women could be a useful place where men and women > of opposing viewpoints could at least come to have understanding > and appreciation for each other, if not come to agreement. > > Why must there be such a huge GLUT of negative contributors who must > immediately overwhelm each and every feminist statement by weight > of sheer numbers alone? I suggest you go back and read every article appearing on net.women regarding these subjects. It seems to me that it's been about thirds between: 1. The sentiments above 2. Feminist and similar points of view 3. Somewhere in the middle But I suppose you think that constitutes a glut. Net.women is for the discussion of issues relating to women. It is not, and was never intended to be, limited to points of view that you (or I, or anyone else) happen to approve of. > >Stop wasting your time and get on to something really constructive. > > Like what? Toilet paper? > > -michael No, actually I was thinking of things like rape prevention and fighting discrimination. But if you require 150 line articles just to argue about who made what point when, I guess the net would suffer terminal gridlock from the articles which would result should you ever decide to address those issues. Yeah, it's a cheap shot. So was yours. Jeff Winslow PS. Actually, the toilet paper discussion has provided some needed comic relief on this newsgroup. I figured the guy would get nice and toasted, as he should. And he did. I want to say to Sophie and everyone else who took the trouble to reply that I very much enjoyed all your comments.
debray@sbcs.UUCP (Saumya Debray) (06/01/85)
> >> Michael Ellis (ME) > > Jeff Winslow. > > >> The fact that Bengali .. has lost gender distinctions only > >> excludes this language from those that might have any bearing on Marie's > >> hypothesis. > >> > >The hypothesis is beside the point. > > BOGUS!! > > How can Marie's OWN HYPOTHESIS be `BESIDE THE POINT' in a conversation > WHICH SHE STARTED!!! > Frankly, Ellis, yelling (whose ascii equivalent I see in your use of upper case and multiple exclamation marks) is not usually a very convincing mode of argument. Nor, for that matter, is name-calling (see subject line). > Marie's hypothesis suggested that the unfairness of our generics (ie. > {man,he} used to refer to both sexes) might be due to the traditional > male domination of our society. > > Now you and others would not only discredit her hypothesis with > irrelevant arguments ... Maybe you'll also tell me, some day, _why_ my arguments are so irrelevant! While I'm waiting, let me tell you why I think my (and, if I can presume to speak for Jeff, his) arguments might be relevant: The issue here is the extent to which language embodies societal attitudes, e.g. sexism. If you can demonstrate that sexism is inherent in the languages of sexist societies, I'll buy the arguments about changing language to change society; otherwise, I'd suggest you bark up another tree. In my opinion, hypotheses about the etymologies of our generics are interesting (in this discussion) only to the extent that they relate to this central issue. In a previous article, I'd argued against the thesis that "sexism is in the language" by suggesting that experiential generalization might play an important role in associating images with words, e.g. "cheerleader" evokes a female image while "chef" evokes a male one, because people usually see female cheerleaders and male chefs. If sexism was inherent in the languages of sexist societies, then one would expect it to be reflected in their generics as well. I gave some examples to show that this is not the case. Bengali, for example, has just one, gender-neutral third person pronoun; so does Hindi, and a half-dozen other Sanskrit-based languages [Sanskrit came from the Aryan tribes that later invaded Europe, so my examples aren't all that far removed]. These societies, unfortunately, are as sexist as ever (Bengali is my mother tongue, and after twenty years I know the society fairly well). Reasoning by analogy, it isn't obvious that (a) changing the generics of English will result in fundamental changes in the attitudes of this society, or (b) that not changing these generics will result in unchanging societal attitudes. I would argue that the greater visibility of women in traditionally male- dominated professions is a more potent agent of change than any amount of linguistic twiddling. Personally, I applaud this greater visibility. > Other newsgroups provide a forum wherein the avowed goal of that > group can be discussed without undue harassment. But this group > has ALWAYS been overpopulated by an overwhelming majority of > `knee-jerk male enginerds' who seem determined to prevent any > feminist sentiment whatsoever from receiving fair treatment. Ellis, if you choose to use a particular linguistic style, that's your prerogative ... I mean, hey, DoD's sinking megabucks into Ada, right? But try not to sound so damned sanctimonious, OK? I hate to disillusion you, but your identification of "disagreement" with "harassment" isn't exactly watertight. And less of name-calling and more of rational discussion would probably bolster your position quite a bit ... -- Saumya Debray SUNY at Stony Brook uucp: {allegra, hocsd, philabs, ogcvax} !sbcs!debray arpa: debray%suny-sb.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa CSNet: debray@sbcs.csnet