Re: Optimum number of symbols, though mostly talking about french now
| From: | Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, May 25, 2002, 19:46 |
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Quoting Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:
> Funny. I know more than one feminist who claims that even having
> gender-specific forms for ANY profession, let alone using, is sexist. Some
> of them think that all the plentiful Swedish profession words ending in
> "-man" should abolished, and in extreme cases also the impersonal pronoun
> "man" too, while others take the more workable approach that "man" in these
> cases should be seen as gender-neutral.
Yeah -- these people sound like the anglophone feminists who insist
that the word "woman" should be spelled "womyn" because the Old English
construction "wífmann" was sexist, despite the fact that synchronically
for most modern speakers "woman" is monomorphemic, and bears only
phonological remsemblance to "man". This kind of linguistic naivite
annoys me every bit as much as prescriptivists' benighted views of
English dialectology.
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Thomas Wier "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637 Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers
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