attributive freshman

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:06 PM -0500 11/2/06, hpst at earthlink.net wrote:
>What do you call an actress these days, a woman actor or simply an actor?
>
>As far as I can tell the use of a word which denotes the sex of a person is
>going out of style and therefore the use of gender specific words denoting
>the sex of the person is disappearing..
>
>If I were to argue about the reason for this I would suggest that it is due
>to the fact that the use of the female ending of such words as actress
>implies an invidious distinction between actors and actresses and as a
>result many actresses choose to call themselves actors which puts them on
>the same level as their male colleagues.

Agreed.

>
>If I wanted to carry my argument further I would suggest that the male
>endings of such words as actress or actor and the current dominance of the
>latter could be explained in terms of the fact that historically men
>dominated the stage and that ess ending could be considered to suggest that
>actors did something different from what actresses did which of course is
>not true.
>
>Or versus ess?: historical or cultural with roots back in socio-cultural
>history which in turn explains the reason that freshmen are freshmen and
>not fresh persons.

It's not really -or vs. -ess historically, but agentive -or/-er vs.
fem. agentive -or/-er + -ess, with morph. adjustment, so the fem.
ending is additional.  In calling herself an actor, a woman is
(etymologically at least) not assimilating herself to men, but just
declining to mark her gender.

>
>The men got there first and as a result the words they were called by came
>to dominate and became more prestigious and in turn were adopted by women.
>

Note that men didn't come to this planet first (unless you accept the
Adam and Eve story as evidence), but generic terms for human
("man(n)" in Gmc., derivatives of "homo" in Romance) came to take on
the [+ male] feature referentially, as with modern "man", "Mann",
"homme", "hombre", "uomo",...  So it's not really an issue of
temporal precedence fundamentally as much as cultural dominance.  Or
so it can be argued.

LH

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