LL-L "Gender" 2009.10.28 (01) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 28 October 2009 - Volume 01
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From: DAVID COWLEY <DavidCowley at anglesey.gov.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Gender" 2009.10.27 (05) [EN]

Tom wrote:
 'On public transport ladies dispensing tickets were conductresses. Pure
Male chavinism!'

Forgive me, but I'm going to dare to stick my neck out here and say I don't
agree that this kind of ending is 'male chauvanism' (I don't think you said
that as a joke - right?). Its just an old feature of expression. I was
brought up with conductress, stewardess, actress and so forth and never
thought of these words as being any more than giving more information than
if they had been 'unisex' words.
Old English and all other tongues I know something about seem to happily use
male and female forms, but because much gender use has died out from
English, even what little is left is attacked. I recall talking to a
feminist who declared that Welsh, German and French use of gender for
unliving things is 'sexist'. Also hearing an English foreign lang. teacher
wasting much of a lesson lecturing a beginners' class on not saying
'stewardess', but rather 'flight attendant'.

PC over-reaction I'd say - next thing it'll be sexist to say 'he' or 'she'
when talking about folk - that's only taking the same thing further ...

David Cowley

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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk>
 Subject: LL-L "Gender" 2009.10.27 (05) [EN]

> From: Tom Mc Rae <thomas.mcrae at bigpond.com>
> Subject: LL-L "Gender" 2009.10.27 (04) [EN]

> In Scotland in many business the lady who handled accounts
> correspondence and generally kept things
> going was seldom known by the well deserved title of Secretary.
> Instead she was the Clerkess and this title even appeared in job
> adverts. On public transport ladies dispensing tickets were
> conductresses. Pure Male chavinism !

And here was me calling them clippies  :)

> Even worse a lady following Judaism was known as a Jewess yet we never
> heard of any Protestantesses
> or Catholicesses.

A few years ago I bought pile of old writers' magazines from the early
1960's in a second-hand shop.

I remember particularly that one had a job advert for an "editress". Why
an "editress" rather than any editor, I wondered? Then I realised it was
because an editress in those days would only cost half as much as an
editor! But this isn't just keeping women poor, is it? It's also keeping
men out of work, even though men in general did, and I think still do,
get the advantage of the historical situation.

I don't think it means that such words are bad in themselves, it's the
abuse that's bad. Dropping the words won't solve anything if the law
allows discrimination, because you could just as easily advertise for a
"lady editor".

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

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From: M.-L. Lessing <marless at gmx.de>
 Subject: LL-L "Gender" 2009.10.27 (04) [EN]

 Dear Jacqueline, that is strange and interesting. I always felt otherwise,
much as I consider myself a feminist. I envy English its "neutrality" as to
gender, because neutrality as to gender -- i.e. non-discrimination -- is
exactly what feminism is up to. It does not matter whether your hairdresser
is a woman or a man, what matters is her/his skill. The qualifier often
directs attention to gender even where gender should not matter. I
especially like the beautifully neutral terms for professions, so as
"physicist" -- for not always confronting me with the sad fact of how
shamefully few women still are there in some scientific professions
(differently from hairdressers...). Even if someone says "I am a feminist"
nobody could say from this sentence alone whether the person is a male or a
female feminist -- it is just the person's mind, *as ought to be*. Where
gender plays no role, it should remain unnamed. I always felt German was
literally haunted by these classifiers, and I often wished them away -- not
to cover up real discrimination, but to ease the path for unbiased thinking.
Imagine we had classifiers as well for race, age, income...!!!! Though the
classifiers in themselves might be value-free -- just technical features of
the language --, language itself would be felt turning a sneering face on
those who are discriminated against in our society.

And then there is the ocean of embarrassment as to political correctness.
Political correctness has to *neutralize* all qualifiers!!! Results:
"Bürgerinnen und Bürger", "BürgerInnen", "Bürger/innen" ("Bürger/innen" is
often considered insulting because it "cuts women off" (imagine the
touchiness!); "Bürger(innen)" is completely forbidden because of
in-bracketing (or out-bracketing) women), "Studentinnen und Studenten",
"Studierende" (evading the gender-problem!) -- and finally, the inimitable
Erich Honecker's legendary nasal "Genossinnen und Genossen"-mumble... With
more qualifiers e.g. as to race this ocean would grow exponentially... and
soon even Honecker would have greeted by a simple "Hallo" :-)

Of course all this is due to the imperfect state of human society. In
Germany now, we have a Bundeskanzler*in*, and, to be honest, I feel less
resentment against our qualifiers when they indicate a woman's success :-)
True, a woman has a harder way upwards; but still, a uterus is not a
substitute for character -- nor for good politics.

Hartlich!

Marlou


From: Jacqueline Bungenberg de Jong <Dutchmatters at comcast.net>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.27 (02) [EN]

In Dutch there are many more of those gender markings than in English. In
the early days of feminism I felt that having them was an advantage in this
new world order. You did not have to qualify that your hairdresser was male
or female. There was ‘kapper’ and ‘kapster’ after all.


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From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
 Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.27 (02) [EN]

Hi all,

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

 The label "noun classification" is a bit misleading perhaps. It is true
> that nouns are classified, but this classification affects the grammatical
> morphologies of other types of words as well. Among the Indo-European
> languages, for instance, adjectives morphologically adapt to the gender of
> the noun, and among the Bantu languages adjectives and verbs similarly adapt
> to the classes of the nouns with which they are associated. In Hebrew,
> Aramaic, Arabic and other Semitic languages (a branch of Afro-Asiatic)
> pretty much /all/ types of words (including numerals) must be
> morphologically adapted to the gender of the noun or pronoun, which is
> either masculine or feminine. (No way of speaking in a gender-neutral way
> there.)
>
> Most languages of the world, however, do not have gender classification.
>

I feel that the business isn't much to do natural gender, but more to do
with conventional grammatical agreement. Nouns are classified into agreement
classes, which in most languages are only partially coincident with natural
gender. (In at least some Dravidian languages like Kannada, gender and human
sex are totally coincident - all nouns denoting human females are feminine,
all nouns denoting human males are masculine, everything else is neuter).
>From this point of view, Bantu nouns are distributed among many 'genders'.
Chinese with its noun classifiers would thus appear to be a (minimalist)
gender language.

 This includes the Iranian and Armenian branches of Indo-European, while
> gender is predominant in Indo-European languages of Europe and Southern
> Asia. I don't think we can tell if the Iranian and Armenian branches never
> developed gender or if they lost it
>
Iranian had the classic pIE three gender system. The earliest attested
Iranian languages, Old Persian and Avestan, are grammatically comparable to
Vedic Sanskrit. (very comparable - much more similarity than say between
Latin and Greek).

 (perhaps Iranian under Turkic influence and Armenian under Iranian
> influence).
>

I mentioned in a previous post in this about there being a tension between
communicative clarity (encouraging redundancy) and communicative efficiency
(discouraging redundancy), which was one of the forces driving linguistic
change, but nobody asked me what on earth I meant by this unqualified
assertion. Gender is one of the prime examples of this - the classification
of nouns and agreement of pronouns and adjectives with these noun classes is
a system with a lot of redundancy (class is marked on every element), and
the loss of gender over time decreases the amount of redunancy. The loss of
gender had already occurred by Middle Persian times, and Turkic influence is
not possible (at least, Turkic is not attested in the area at this period).

Paul Tatum.

----------

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

Thanks, all.

Those are really interesting points, Paul, an interesting way of viewing
this subject matter. So, if I understand you correctly, we are really
talking about a broader group of what we might call "classifying languages"
within which gender is only one type of classification, a type in which
gender classification includes actual gender but often grows beyond natural
gender (as in most Indo-European languages).

I must admit, though, that I still find it somewhat hard to believe that a
language or an entire language branch abandons such classification on its
own accord, without "stimulation" by way of outside influences or drastic
social changes. The case of gender beginning to disappear in the Middle
Iranian period (4-9th centuries, i.e. before Islam) is definitely food for
thought, though I do believe that there was at least some contact with
Turkic in Central Asia then.

I still believe that classification does not fall out of the sky but was
originally based on actually perceived classes, such as flat objects, long
objects, beasts of burden, wild animals, honored humans, and so forth in
counting objects in the languages of Eastern Asia (not mentioning actual
measure words). Gender would be another classification of this sort in other
languages. And in many cases this later grows to include other objects and
the agreement classification "loses sight" of the original semantic
limitations.

There must be something that triggers removing such redundancies, though, if
not outside influences then surely other types of changes, perhaps social
changes. In Mandarin you can see several very specific classifiers
disappearing and the neutral classifier *ge* (個, 个) spreading. Use of very
specific classifiers used to be and perhaps still is a sign of superior
education, and social changes in Mainland China may have triggered
simplification.

So my basic question is this: Can such redundancies disappear on their own
accord, and if they can not, what sorts of factors can lead to abandoning
classifying?

David:

PC over-reaction I'd say - next thing it'll be sexist to say 'he' or 'she'
when talking about folk - that's only taking the same thing further ...

That's already happening. "They" is spreading ...

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

•

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