Ukraine/The Ukraine

[Robert Orr]

Sent from my iPad

> On Jun 22, 2014, at 3:08 PM, "Jennifer L. Wilson" <jlwtwo at PRINCETON.EDU> wrote:
> 
> ...... 
> 
> "I want to add that I should have also taken Jules to task for denigrating Edyta Bojanowska's comment about gender neutral language."


I'd actually like to support Jules' comment about gender.  If I were ever in charge of "diversity training/"reeducation(?)" I would have all non-linguists write out a hundred times:

"Gender is a grammatical category and has nothing to do with sex"

And gender in its original meaning, along with its purely linguistic manifestations, is a very important part of Slavic studies.


> "If Jules or anyone else needs an example of what she meant, take a statement like "the next president of the United States, whoever HE may be." That phrasing normalizes male dominance in politics, and suggests that women in leadership are exceptions, and that men are the rule."

I don't know what fields/subfields of Russian/Slavic studies you are interested in, but if linguistics is not one of them you could maybe check out that remark in the context of markedness.

And are you asking Polish speakers to drop the "masculine personal" (sub?)gender? 

> Language absolutely matters. 
> 
It does!  But from a linguistic point of view the comment "if Jules or anyone else ..." is almost crude.
> 

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