Re: Optimum number of symbols, though mostly talking about french now

Christophe wrote:
>
>En réponse à 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.
> >
>
>Doesn't Swedish have a 'common' and 'neuter' gender, with the common gender
>making no difference between masculine and feminine, except with pronouns?
Well, that's basically true, but there are some leftovers from the old three
gender system, the amount and nature of which varies from speaker to speaker
(not to mention what's left of the dialects; some seem to have the three
gender system quite intact). For me, the main thing is that adjectives
refering to masculine entities in certain cases ends in -e rather than in
-a, as they do when refering to feminine or sexless things (this only
applies to common/n-gender words - not to masculine entities refered to by
neuter/t-gender words).

>If
>so it's then like Dutch, where feminists hold the same view. In my opinion,
>it's one of the examples where the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis may apply: in a
>language where the distinction between masculine and feminine is
>grammatical,
>having to refer to one sex using the opposite gender is considered sexist,
>and
>thus feminists will tend to hold the view that all nouns of profession
>should
>be given two forms, so that it cannot be implied that one profession would
>be
>reserved for one sex. In languages where the opposition between male and
>female
>is nearly absent of the grammar on the other hand, using common forms
>applicable for everyone sounds better than adding distinctions that the
>language woudn't naturally make anyway.
Thing is, many of the endings etc Swedish uses for forming nouns of
profession is sex-specific or at least implies a given sex. To really annoy
right-thinking feminists, for many professions there is one
gender-nonspecific word and one explicitly feminine ...

>In short, if your feminists hold this
>view, it's in part because it is possible in your language to make gender-
>neutral words. It's something impossible in French, which doesn't even have
>a
>neuter gender! In French, a common form is mandatorily masculine or
>feminine,
>and thus by essence sexist (at least according to feminists). The only way
>to
>get rid of that, and of the usual assumption of the language that the
>"basic"
>gender is masculine, is to double all nouns applicable to people with
>masculine
>and feminine forms.
>
>Different languages bring to different strategies for feminists :)) .
The solution is obvious: Femperpanto!

                                                       Andreas

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