attributive freshman

[Wilson Gray]

There are many languages in which it is not possible to distinguish
men from women pronominally, e.g. Japanese and Turkish, to name but
two, but that has not prevented the assignment of women to an inferior
position, socially.

WRT English, what would impress me would be the dropping of -or, etc.,
and their replacement by -ess, etc. and / or the replacement of "he,"
etc. by "she," or, perhaps, the elimination of both in favor of "it."

Interestingly enough, Turkish has a pronoun for the neuter, but none
for the masculine or the feminine.

-Wilson

On 11/2/06, Alison Murie <sagehen at westelcom.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Alison Murie <sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM>
> Subject:      Re: attributive freshman
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> >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
>  ~~~~~~~~~
> I solved this little problem for the English-speaking world *years*ago in a
> short essay  ("Man the Epicene") in a lit-micromag but the ungrateful world
> has paid scant attention  & thus here we are in 2006 still plagued by  the
> awkwardness of fumbling around for polite ways of being either inclusive or
> exclusive of persons.
> As I --- harrumph --- said then:
> ....." calls for someone to come up with a set of ungendered pronouns  and
> nouns  so that the various dodges that have been employed in recent
> years--since women's gripes  about the language of patriarchy  have become
> more audible--can be abandoned. I think the reason these dodges have proved
> so unsatisfactory is that the problem hasn't been properly identified. It's
> not that we haven't got these undifferentiated nouns and pronouns.  We do:
> man, mankind, he, him, his .  The problem is that /men don't have a set of
> their very own/.
> "Masculine man, perhaps feeling  a touch of the old Adam, got to thinking
> of himself as the true type, from whose rib the subtype  was made, thence
> the assumption of the title, *man,* for himself particularly....*woman*
> would do for the other, feminine man."
> I went on to suggest a set of nouns & pronouns for the masculine population
> & invited other nominations, but the project never got wings............the
> micromag disappeared, and here we were still saying "s/he" & "his or her"
> &c.
> Ah, well.
> AM
>
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--
Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our
race. He brought death into the world.

--Sam Clemens

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