"gender neutral pronouns"

[Francoise Rosset]

I would be he fourth non-anglophone to address a question about
English usage. Good thing Claire and William stepped in.

>Gender-inclusive or gender-neutral language has to (or should have to) 
>do with avoiding or minimizing the emphasis on the gender of a human 
>being or group of human beings. 

Well said, but that's not all. As Claire pointed out, it is also about
removing gendered emphasis where it should NOT be, i.e. when dealing
with objects. We do not refer to Congress as "he" or the Supreme Court
or parliament as "she." In my opinion, if institutions fall into that
category, so do countries.

Yes, there is a long tradition of calling Russia and other countries 
"she."
Is tradition right or immutable per se?

Perhaps the language itself determines a gender for the name of the 
country, as in Russian, French (French has the excuse that if only 
offers male/female). It seems that grammatical gender was extended to 
invest the name of the country with an entire gendered persona.

Why should a country be a woman? Do we have a she reason? Because it 
takes strong men to run "her"? Ick.

I too welcome the effort to make language more gender-neutral, since I 
firmly believe that language encodes (and affects) culture. Sometimes 
those efforts result in weird formulations. This is not one of them, 
at least not to my non-anglophone ears.

That said, they are Robert Chandler's words: he is entitled to his
preferences, and I appreciate his careful, thoughtful phrasing of a
legitimate question.
-FR

Francoise Rosset, Associate Professor
Chair, Russian and Russian Studies
Coordinator, German and Russian
Wheaton College
Norton, Massachusetts 02766
Office: (508) 285-3696
FAX:   (508) 286-3640

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