Re: Optimum number of symbols,

Christophe Grandsire scripsit:
>
> En r=E9ponse =E0 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 gend=
> er
> making no difference between masculine and feminine, except with pronouns=
> ? If
> so it's then like Dutch, where feminists hold the same view. In my opinio=
> n,
> it's one of the examples where the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis may apply: in a
> language where the distinction between masculine and feminine is grammati=
> cal,
> 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 sh=
> ould
> be given two forms, so that it cannot be implied that one profession woul=
> d 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. 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 ha=
> ve a
> 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.
IIRC, there is some pressure in Quebec (and I saw this a long time
ago, so details are fuzzy and may be wrong) to use, e.g. "professeur"
as an epicene noun, "le professeur"/"la professeure", because
"professeuse" had the historical meaning "wife of professor".
German had/has something like this rule too, and in E-o IIRC
there is actually an archaic noun suffix meaning "wife of" in this way.

> Different languages bring to different strategies for feminists :)) .
Indeed.

--
John Cowan <jcowan@...>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_

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