laura@utcsstat.UUCP (08/14/83)
Okay, gang, here goes: This university (University of Toronto) is poor. We are not getting enough funding. This is true of nearly every university I know. Last year, there was a concentrated effort to change all 'officially posted university documents' to use 'firefighter' et al. THIS COSTS BIG MONEY FOLKS!. Real big money. Enough to buy 10 vax 11/780s, for instance. Enough to hire all the professors back that were canned last year. Enough to hire some technical staff so that certain departments i know could finish work that they have been trying to get the extra manpower for for A DECADE. The effort did not succeed. What if it had? Would we have canned twice as many people? or would the heaters go off 3 weeks earlier in the year, or what, folks? The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a very interesting hypothesis, but, at least in terms of the "harmful effects of the sexist English language", that is all it is. Okay? It sounds good. A lot of people like it. THIS MOST EMPHATICALLY IS NOT SCIENCE FOLKS. Do you understand the difference? I know some people do not, for they have been filling my mailbox with complaints that Whorf (spelled an unbelievable number of ways, mind you, and poor old Sapir seems totally unremembered) as a scientist, proposed this so it *is* scientific. This is not the case. here is how science works these days, (as opposed to the days of the ancient Greeks, where sitting around and thinking about things which sounded good was an acceptable way to do science). You have a terrific idea. (this is called your hypothesis, as in the Sapir-Worf hypothesis). You test this idea. (you had better run a lot of tests, probably double-blind tests if this is possible) You look at the results. if they agree with your hypothesis, you publish like mad, hoping to get a lot of your collegues to repeat your experiments, (in case you made a mistake that you are unaware of, or perhaps some detail about your location effected the results in a way you did not anticipate). In time, if your hypothesis is very solid, and nobody has found any contradictory evidence that you cannot explain, your hypothesis gets moved to the rank of THEORY. This is what people who are doing research in science are DREAMING of as they work -- that they will come up with a new, important scientific theory. If your hypothesis does not test out, either when you are performing your experiments, or when a collegue gets some results that you cannot explain (shouting HE IS LYING is no good -- unless the experimenter is known to be a quack, which is not very common) then your hypothesis dies. People may still refer to it, but it is not viewed very likely to be true. What i want from you folks that want to change the English language is your tests, your results, all the evidence you have to back up your hypothesis. When I went to the University of Toronto Linguistics library i found no studies *at all* which supported the claim "the English language promotes sexism". I found 2 studies that promote the idea that children find the ambiguity confusing. This is not good enough. Children find a lot of things confusing, after all. I have my own hypothesis about this belief in 'sexist language'. Only North Americans have this belief. I have yet to find *anyone* in *any other country* who believes it, and I have travelled rather extensively. i think this is because most North Americans only speak English. I speak 3 languages, and find that by European standards i am not doing very well. If you spoke other languages you would know that while some of your thinking changes from language to language (I cannot do mathematics in Spanish, for instance, i have to do it in English and translate the answer into Spanish) your basic attitudes towards other people do not change. In Spanish words are either masculine or feminine. With all this sexist information, do you not think that a direct consequnce of the 'sexism in the English language' hypothesis would not be that Spanish speakers are either strikingly more or strikingly less sexist than English speakers? I received mail which said that Magyar does have a separate unmarked pronoun. (note: where I said neuter in my last article, i should have said unmarked. there is a difference.) have you noticed that Hungarian society is less sexist than ours? You would think that a newsgroup that some people have been calling the 'newsgroup for feminism' would have more people reading it who are aware of why this unscientific attitude is dangerous. After all, how long ago was it when it was "unecessary" to give women intelligence tests, since it was "obvious that since a woman has such a smaller head than a man she must also have a smaller brain and will therefore be less intelligent"? Do you only see injustices when you are the injured party? I have recieved a lot of hate mail in my life, but never so much as I received over my last article. (Strange. I posted the same thing about 6 months ago and there was no great outcry). There really are people out there who, from the tone of the article and the words that they used, seem to be getting the sharp rocks together and waiting for the stoning. laura creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura ps I am sorry for the mistakes in my last article. I do not spell very well, and run every submission through a sed script to fix common spelling errors which i know I make. Since i have occasionally caught myself using words like 'chairperson', a habit I would like to discourage, it changes such words as well. As a result, some words which I originally typed as 'firefighter' came out as 'fireman'. I re-read the article, and thought that I had put them all back, but I missed 2 crucial ones. mea culpa.