There are indeed many contexts where "she" and "her" for a country feel
perfectly right - e.g., "... Stand beside her / and guide her..." in Irving
Berlin's "God Bless America." In this case "it" would really clunk.
But a little linguistic experimentation - try every permutation you can
think of - should reveal that there are lots of contexts where the feminine
pronoun sounds quite strained, even laughable: "Why did they invade
Germany?" "Well, she started it."
In reference to the Soviet Union (and no, I'm not picking on dictatorships)
I'm not certain this sounds right: "She covers one sixth of the earth's
surface." I'd be tempted just to say (with "the Soviet Union" as the
antecedent) "The country covers ... etc.
"
No doubt other investigators can find their own examples.
Mr Kim Braithwaite, Translator
"Good is better than evil, because it's nicer" - Mammy Yokum (Al Capp)
----- Original Message -----
From: "William Ryan" <wfr at SAS.AC.UK>
To: <SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2008 4:43 PM
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] "gender neutral pronouns"
> Languages develop in all sorts of ways which cannot necessarily be
> predicted or controlled. Deliberate attempts to modify them, whether by
> Communists, Nationalists, the Academie Francaise, gender warriors, or any
> other kind of would-be social engineers, rarely have the success that was
> hoped for them. The notion of gender-neutral language can only be
> meaningful in languages which do not have grammatical gender, or
> effectively restrict it largely to pronouns as in English. Why do we
> English speakers have to agonize over this when speakers of most other
> European languages do not? Does a Russian female judge regard herself as
> oppressed because sud'ia, despite appearances, is a masculine noun; does a
> German Fraulein regard herself as being belittled because she is
> grammatically neuter (while her Swiss cousin is feminine)? (Against this I
> have to say that several Russians at various times have expressed surprise
> to me that babies in English are often referred to as 'it' - and this
> despite the Russian neuter 'ditya'.) There is an extensive specialist
> literature on this, but I cannot see that a desire for gender-neutral
> usage in English, which seems to have arisen originally from the desire to
> avoid the ambiguity caused by using ostensibly masculine forms as the
> inclusive form, rather than as a feminist issue, should exclude treating
> countries or ships as feminine. Why look for gender slights were there are
> none, and where there is no ambiguity?
>
> If you look at the Oxford English Dictionary you will find that 'she'
> historically has had a whole range of referents, most of which cannot be
> seen to have pejorative overtones: all female animals, some animals or
> birds of either sex if male is not specifically intended (e.g. cat), ship,
> boat, carriage, train, gun, kettle, the Church, a city, individual states
> of the USA, the Moon ('Softly, silently, now the moon / walks the night in
> her silver shoon'). In dialect, and colloquial Australian and New Zealand
> English, 'she' can have much wider usage. I do not know why some of these
> words appear to be feminine, although some may have inherited this from
> Latin - country, continent and some regional names tend to have latinate
> forms ending in -a, which suggests that this really is a survival of
> grammatical gender and not 'gendered emphasis'.
>
> There are many English words where the default (unmarked) form implies, or
> may be thought to imply, a male (e.g. fireman, policeman) and is where its
> use could be seen either as making a condescending assumption or as
> factually inaccurate in the modern world, and most people have adjusted
> their usage accordingly. But the use of 'she' for a country or a ship
> ('God bless all who sail in her' - imagine saying 'it' in that context)
> carries no such implications. For a publisher to insist, without the
> author's permission, on changing 'her' to 'it' in such a context, even if
> 'it' is also common usage, is ignorant and a form of censorship.
>
> Will Ryan
>
> Francoise Rosset wrote:
>> 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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