this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
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As I recently saw in a video about bible translations: Greek used (uses?) generic masculine forms for plurals. So a mixed group of stewarts and stewardesses would be called "these stewarts". If there's no context added, it's impossible to tell whether the group was actually all male or not.
I think that's how a large part of European languages still work.
yup, german for example (and i believe all languages that are closely connected to it) assigns gender per articles: der is the masculinum, die for the femininum and das for the neutrum nominative singular, and just "die" for all nominative plural forms. Since the biological and linguistic gender are conflated in ungendered language, it runs into the same issues as the stewards above: everyone except the males become invisible. Also, in spoken language there is the tendency to use just the singular m. form for many professions: "Ich ging zum Arzt" - "I went to the doctor(m)" is used even if the doctor is a woman (which would be "Ich ging zur Ärztin")
The first form is to just adress both genders: "Die Ärzte und Ärztinnen" translates to "the doctors(m) and doctors(f)". In this form you have still the issue that you name one gender first, which is always the male form - some say this is still discriminatory, and there is no way to adress any other gender.
The second form is the "Binnen-I" to mark that the word can mean both genders: instead of "die Ärzte", "die ÄrztInnen" is used. Some say that it makes stuff harder to read and looks ugly, but in my experience you get used to it quickly. A derivative of this form which has become the defacto standard (and in my opinion, the most preferable one) is the "Gendersternchen" ("Gender Starlet"): "Ärzt*innen" is inclusive of all genders.
And then you can try to avoid gendered forms altogether: "Personen mit medizinischer Ausbildung" (People with medical training) avoids using any gendered words at all. As you can see, it can get quite a mouthful in spoken language, and it is very formal, but i quite like it in written language - it's a bit more verbose, but flows nicely when reading.
Absolute bullshit, most of the time you see the feminine form first.
I stand corrected. The issue that one gender must be named first remains.
So...like English then?
In many aspects English doesn't distinguish between genders at all.
I chose the words above specifically because they are gendered. I'm not a native speaker, but as far as I know, teacher, butcher, officer, warrior, president, welder, etc. can each mean male or female. There's maybe a connotation, but the words are not gendered. English also has no concept of a grammatical gender. Articles, adjectives, etc. are gendered in most European languages.
English absolutely has grammatical gender, it just defaults to "male" so much people forget there's other options. For example, "teacheress" is a real word, it's just so archaic that the male word now means both, same with how "you" is both singular and plural.
Take "The has a yellow ". Which gender do these nouns have? In German, I could tell you. Both articles and the adjective have a gender.
Of course, you can use gendered nouns, but only a very small minority of nouns actually have female forms.
Being immediately identifiable isn't the standard, for example in languages that don't use the definite article (Slavic languages, for example) the first noun wouldn't necessarily exhibit it's grammatical gender, but it wouldn't mean it doesn't have one. Also, the brackets you used get parsed by boost as html tags.
The very existence of gendered nouns and pronouns means English has gender. It's just less noticeable because unlike the German "-innen" approach, English typically shoves most things into neuter and mostly defaults to male for persons and then hides it behind "he or she" or a singular "they". You can argue it's archaic or vestigial, and I'd agree, but it is there. Same how nouns don't exhibit cases, but pronouns do. Compare:
"The man stood there, the man's hand on the coffee cup, the cup warming the man".
"He stood there, his hand on the coffee cup, the cup warming him."
I mean if you want to go that far, there's an argument to be made that the gendered terms wifman, werman, man, woman, and men were all simplified, to the gender neutral term of man and the feminine specific term of woman. We seem to have gone back and forth linguistically.
Well, uh, yes. The thread OP notes greek (as in bible) uses generic masculine forms for plural. Modern English takes that tack much more broadly, using the theoretically masculine term for everything. And you can tell it's masculine, not neuter, because, eg. a steward (of Gondor) is a steward, but a (-n air) stewardess is now a flight attendant.
Having some feminitives in lexicon is not the same as having grammatical gender. I mean, is having a word for werewolf the same as having a "wolf" gender?
"Some feminitives" is disingenuous. It's an Indo-European language, it shares the structure of other IE languages, in some cases pared down and/or in disuse, but they're still there, same as vestigial base-12 counting.
I don't get why people are so upset about the concept of grammatical gender, though. It's gramatical, it's not actual gender - original division in PIE was "animate" and "inanimate". Hell, I vaguely remember a conlang that had separate genders for terrestrial and aquatic animals, so you could absolutely make one that has a gender for "wolf".
I'm not talking about that, frankly. Just that grammatical gender means usually its own inflections for cases, for adjectives, for verbs. At least some of those.
Fair point. My point would be that English doesn't really inflect words at all, but when it does, namely pronouns, it has both cases and genders.
For comparison, in German, cases don't change nouns either (except some genitives - kinda like English, now that i think about it), they instead affect articles, and even then the nominative and accusative case are identical, except for masculine singular nouns, and first and second person pronouns. So, if n. and f. nouns dominate, you could make the case that German doesn't have an acc. case, and then make a carveout for m. noun "outliers". Except step into first and second person, and acc. pops back out, meaning it was always there, even for f. and n.
OK, I agree with the argument, but one can call that a rudiment - same as for Russian some people say it has not 6, but 7 cases. That is, a vocative case (which archaic Russian speech would have, Belorussian and Ukrainian have without doubt, but standard Russian does not formally). It's used when calling someone by name, like "Вась, Петь, Миш, Маш".
Well, it's never clear cut with languages
True.
Hunter, huntress, huntsman
Waiter, waitress, waitsman
Actor, actress, actsman
Nobody says waitman or actsman. I had to fight my phone’s autocorrect just to type those.
No one uses Wifman and Werman anymore either. Doesn't make them any less some of the last gendered nouns for humans, in English, since if one goes back that far man is neutral gendered, and while woman exists, it's for a woman that is a spinster.
Consider that German and French gender basically everything. Your desk has a gender in those languages. English is almost genderless on comparison.
Aviator, aviatrix, aviatman.
Director, directrix, directman.
Executor, executrix, executman.
Chairman, chairwoman, chair.
Interestingly, as the language has evolved, words like "actress" are falling out of favor. So there are times when non-gendered is preferred for the sake of equality.
Drag agrees. Drag is spreading knowledge of male gendered words in order to counteract the myth that the normal versions of the words are gendered. If someone tells drag that "actor" is for men, drag points out the existence of "actsman". Actor is a gender neutral term and we need to use linguistics to make people realise it sooner.
Stewards he said, gently mansplaining.
Well it's not like we use the words Wifman and Werman anymore.
Maybe you don't.