LL-L "Gender" 2008.03.22 (03) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 19 March 2008 - Volume 03
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From: Maria Elsie Zinsser <ezinsser at icon.co.za>
Subject: LL-L "Gender" 2008.03.21 (02) [E]

Hallo Ívison,

No problem! I did say it tongue in cheek (as in humour) but I am glad you
thought about it.
Now I've learnt something new, as well as you.

Obrigado!
Elsie

From: Ivison dos Passos Martins <ipm7d at OI.COM.BR>
Subject: LL-L "Orthography" 2008.02.06 (02) [E]

Dear Maria Elsie Zinsser,

I'm really sorry I'd written "dear sirs". I did want to sound sexist.
Next time I'll pay attention to it. As my first language is Portuguese I
didn't notice it, because to me the word "sirs" refers to ladies and
gentlemen. But thanks for your comments. You're right.
  And please feel free, like anyone else,to email me on what language
subject you want.

       My apologies,

      Ívison.

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From: Marsha Wilson <marshatrue at mtangel.net>
Subject: LL-L "Gender" 2008.03.21 (09) [E]

 How about taking reference to gender(s) out of it entirely?
"If claimant's documents cannot be provided, claimant must request
duplicates." (or...."duplicates must be requested."  This sort of go-round
nearly always worked when I was writing office procedures.

Marsha Wilson

----- Original Message -----
    When I want to write an instruction for what to tell one of our
Unemployment Insurance claimants, I have to work creatively with it.  Let's
say I want to tell our Customer Service Reps that the claimant should do
something specific.  I will write, "If the claimant cannot provide
[possessive pronoun] documents, then [subject pronoun] must request
duplicates."  What do I put in the space for the pronouns?  Spanish would
say use the masculine pronouns, and everyone will know it includes both
genders.  Well, not in the USA.  None of the solutions provide a
satisfactory (IMO) outcome.  I can try:

----------

From: M.-L. Lessing <marless at gmx.de>
Subject: LL-L "Gender" 2008.03.21 (09) [E]

Hello Mark & Mark,

I know, I know, it is a great nuisance with gender-correct language. I too
do not like the artificial constructions and the hateful pressure to use
them and all that. But still, your argument (Mark Dreyer) that "sirs" refers
to both sexes and that "man" embraces "woman" does not hold. As far as I am
informed, the sentence "Alle Schweizer sind wahlberechtigt" has been part of
the swiss constitution for centuries, and still the female swiss men
(Schweizerinnen) had great difficulty in proving that they were "embraced".
And even if they were ---? What then? Remember old gravestones? "Hier ruht
Karl Meier und Frau." Well, yes, the woman was dead too, and her body was
lying there too. But her name was not named. Remember old telephone books?
Full of men. Well, yes, the women could be phoned too, and they could pay
the telephone bills, too; but their names were not named. Women know that
they exist; each single woman knows. But does anybody else know of her
existence under such circumstances? Since language is the substance thougts
are made of, it is at least questionable whether something that does not
appear in language does appear in human bewusstsein; and that is almost as
much as existence.

Now all this sounds uncomfortable and hard. But do you know, I have a name
and I have a sex, and I would never want to live a life without my being
visible in my own beloved language. (Not that I would ever have lived a life
as a man's appendix and "embraced" by other words and ending up under a
gravestone as "...und Frau". But that is over for ever, I hope.)

Still, how can language fulfil the task of making all its speakers visible
without running mad? And here, dear Mark (Brooks), your complaint made me
laugh. Do you have any idea how much more difficult such things are in
German? In German, the very nouns that you deal with have two sexes: Kunden
and Kundinnen -- where the -innen ending denotes the female. And yes!,
political correctness demands for both forms to be named! Ladies first, of
course. In every official document ("Die Studentinnen und Studenten des
Fachbereichs Maschinenbau", even when Maschinenbau has only 5% female
students) and in every official speech ("Ich danke den Wählerinnen und
Wählern!", "Wir grüßen unsere Soldatinnen und Soldaten in
Afghanistan!"). This leads to famous things as Erich Honeckers "Genossinnen
und Genossen!", where both words were so blurred that they sounded
practically equal. Yes, DDR had it too, partly. We live with that, dear
Mark. Compared to the monster we fight yours is a teddybear. So, pity us and
be comforted! :-) -- But we notice a tendency to leave the female form out
when something negative has to be stated. "Die Politiker sind doch alle
korrupt!" Are Politikerinnen (= female politicians) "embraced" here? We may
suppose so. That may be a form of old-fashioned chivalry -- practised on so
extravagant an object as corrupt female politicians. Ah, for old chivalry!
:-))

But still. But still. How can language name the names of both sexes, without
such things as "embracing"? Gender-neutral pronouns would be fine. Finer
even if they were a natural phenomenon and had not to be invented and
applied artificially. We gemans would be glad if we only had your
gender-neutral nouns. As long as we have none, some progressive people have
decided that now is the time for males to be "embraced" for some centuries,
since females seem fed up with such embracings. Recently when I visited
church, the pastor -- a middle-aged man -- spoke of "die Verfasserin des
Hebräerbriefes" (= the female writer of the letter to the hebrews). Now,
this for St. Paul! He was embraced here by a female form, and I don't know
how he would have liked it. It sounded queer and even unhistoric to my ears.
But in fact it was nothing different than the other way round... Recently,
in the german protestant church, a new bible translation has been made and
printed, the "Bibel in gerechter Sprache" (= bible in just language,
gender-correct language). It is full of such embracings: Richterinnen,
Pharisäerinnen, Soldatinnen, female forms of nouns where there never have
been female persons. Opinion about this work widely differs. Some think it a
great breakthrough, others think it a great waste of money and time. I think
it is at least a great Murks (please, Reinhard, translate "Murks" into
English!) with german language. But our language is Murks here itself. I
don't know how to help it. But I won't be embraced without being asked :-)

Herzliche Ostergrüße!

Marlou

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Gender

Dear Lowlanders,

*Murks* might be translated as "botch-up" or "bungling," Marlou.

Folks, speakers of European languages tend to accept linguistic gender
distinctions as a given. But in reality it is not common to all languages
and language families, and languages that do not have it cope very well
without it.

As far as I can tell, "innate" linguistic gender distinction is heavily
clustered in Europe and Western Asia, with predominance in Indo-European and
Semitic.

In the Semitic family (which includes Arabic, Aramaic and Hebrew), there is
only masculine versus feminine distinction with no neuter. Almost all types
of words are marked accordingly. This includes verbs, adjectives and
numerals.

Many, if not most, other languages do not mark words by gender (which does
not mean that there aren't any gender-specific nouns).

This applies or originally applied for instance among the Uralic
(Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic), Altaic (Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic),
Sino-Tibetan and Oceanic languages (among many others), originally probably
also in Japanese and Korean.

Among the Turkic languages, there is no trace of grammatical gender
distinction, and even in most of those spoken by Islamicized and
Christianized communities Arabic, Russian and other European influences were
not able to introduce grammatical gender distinction or even feminine noun
marking. This sort of distinction tends to go against the grain of speakers
of such languages, and they tend to have a hard time with it when using
foreign languages that do have it.

I understand that most non-Altaic languages of Siberia, too, have no
grammatical gender distinction.

Interestingly, under Western influence, Chinese introduced pronominal gender
distinction in writing only (by changing the "radical" part of the
character), making originally gender-neutral 他 the masculine form and
creating feminine 她 and neuter 它, even though they are all pronounced alike
(e.g., Standard Mandarin *tā*).

The Bantu languages are well known for their noun classification (in which
nouns are allocated to various semantic groups and they and dependent words
are marked accordingly), but there is no gender-based classification. Among
the neighboring Niger-Kongo languages, however, noun classes do include male
and female.

It is a mixed bag among the American languages with predominance of systems
that do not have gender distinction.

It is a mixed bag among the languages of Australia as well, where some seem
to have no gender distinction and others have noun classes that include
gender distinction but are not *based* on gender distinction. The Dyirbal
language of northeastern Queensland, for instance, has four noun classes:
(1) animate objects and men, (2) water, fire, violence and women (!), (3)
edible plants, fruit and vegetables, and (4) all others. The Diyari language
of South Australia has only two noun classes: (1) female, and (2) other (!).

Of course, this begs the question if there are any correlations between this
and the corresponding social systems. One would assume there are,
considering that languages tend to reflect the way societies view the world
and themselves. However, this is difficult to determine in many cases
because of numerous of cultural and developmental layers. For example,
gender distinction has been strong throughout recorded Chinese history. But
Chinese culture is so ancient and has absorbed so many other cultures that
much is shrouded in mist. Yet, if we take a look at the earliest recording
of ancient Chinese songs (the 詩經 *Shī Jīng*) we notice that status of
females then was much higher than it was in later times. Also, rural
Tibeto-Burman (hence also Sino-Tibetan) societies in which shamanism is
still practiced have much gender equality. It is similar if we look at
Turkic peoples. Gender equality is predominant among Kazakh and Kyrgyz
people that are still nomadic or semi-nomadic, and their folktales have both
male and female heroes, where female heroes riding super-fast steeds
occasionally rescue males in distress. This is similar to related Mongolic
traditions. In a horse-back betrothal ceremony that survives among
traditional Kazakhs (who are officially Moslems) marriageable girls pursue
and catch marriageable boys of their choice (not the other way around!).

All food for thought, I hope.

Happy Easter to those of you that celebrate it! Also happy Nowruz (New Year)
to our Persian, Kurdish, Turkic and Baha'i friends! And happy Purim to our
Jewish friends as well!

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
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