# Language and the male rule



## Lusitania

Hello to all of you, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I receive a PM from one of the foreros saying that I should avoid saying "Olá a todos e a todas" making the distinction between genders as the norm has always been the Masculino Plural and that is the correct way of doing it. I replied saying that I didn't felt included and I didn't agree to which he replied that I was ignorant regarding Languages facts.

I decided to put a thread on the Portuguese forum to have the opinion of other portuguese speaking people and it seems that they mostly agree with him.
So I'm bringing the issue to a broader audience and hopefully get more views from other countries.

Should/do women feel included in this male norm?

Do you think that we should move further to non-sexist languages or should we just leave it as it is because it has always been like that?

Many thanks


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## képi

I agree with the foreros. When we say, "Hola a Todos" it includes women. At least it does in French and Spanish. It seems like it would also work in Portuguese. It's one of those things that have been accepted for centuries. It's not that we're trying to exclude women by using the Male Plural. It's just the way it works


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## Lusitania

Képi, I don't mean it here, I mean it in everyday life. Isn't that sexism in language?


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## képi

The same applies to real life. 
I mean, at back-to-school night, our principal said, "Bienvenidos." No one took offense to that because that is the way it has been. When you think about it, I would say, yes, it is sexism, because the Romance Languages were created in a time when society was still *severely* underdeveloped, and women still allowed men to abuse them and make them imvisible. But since it has been that way for a such a long time, it has lost its sexist quality and has become the standard. I mean, if you ask 10 people on the street, five male, five female, i assure you that at least 8/10 would be okay with keeping the male plural as the standand plural form for both sexes.


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## Elibennet

Lusitania, I agree with you. When somebody says "hola a tod*o*s", I feel included because I have been trained to forget that I am a woman in such cases. For all those forers who disagree with Lusitania, how would it feel if the convention were to use the feminine to include male and female? Language reflects ideology, and not seeing that shows that that ideology is so deep rooted in the minds of the people that they fail to realize it. What´s worse, I can´t see winds of change in the horizon.


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## Hakro

képi said:


> When we say, "Hola a Todos" it includes women. At least it does in French, Spanish, and English.


As far as I know, in this case there is no possibility in English to separate male and female genders. At least I don't know how to say "Hello you all" in feminine form.


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## képi

You're right! I got my language grammar mixed up for a second!


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## Lusitania

Elibennet said:


> Lusitania, I agree with you. When somebody says "hola a tod*o*s", I feel included because I have been trained to forget that I am a woman in such cases. For all those forers who disagree with Lusitania, how would it feel if the convention were to use the feminine to include male and female? Language reflects ideology, and not seeing that shows that that ideology is so deep rooted in the minds of the people that they fail to realize it. What´s worse, I can´t see winds of change in the horizon.


 

The winds of change already arrived to some countries, fourtunatelly. In my country they are coming, slowly and there are already some changes done in practise, but peoples minds tend to remain in the past.


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## Lusitania

Hakro said:


> As far as I know, in this case there is no possibility in English to separate male and female genders. At least I don't know how to say "Hello you all" in feminine form.


 

That's neutral in english in Portuguese or Spanish is "todos" or "todas" for feminine. Both should be used nowadays.


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## képi

In normal conversation, I think it'll take a long time, because I bet you that people don't realize it's sexist.


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## KaRiNe_Fr

I dislike when someone begins saying "bonjour à tous" (hello to males or hello all) and seeing I'm the only woman in the meeting, daring at me and adding "... et à toutes !" (...and hello to females).
But I don't feel offended when a man is saying "bonjour à toutes et à tous" and not the opposite (à tous et à toutes). 

Edit: it reminds me that French presidents used to begin their speeches with "françaises, français..." (female French, male French). And now they are saying "mes chers compatriotes" which works for males and females. Isn't it "political correctness"?


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## jabogitlu

Well, there's been a big movement within English to remove such references - "all of mankind," "chairman," etc.  Humorously, some strange folks take this to another level and remove all mention of "man/men" in words, regardless of its true meaning, and thus we end up with words like "womansion" (mansion).

But, anyway, I'm far from a native Romance speaker, but I agree with Lusitania.  I think we should eliminate, if at all possible, references to "everyone" but use only the male gender.  Easier said than done, but...


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## Outsider

Elibennet said:


> For all those forers who disagree with Lusitania, how would it feel if the convention were to use the feminine to include male and female?


If I had grown up speaking a language where that was normal, I'm sure I wouldn't mind.

Just as English speaking men and women do not feel "excluded" by the fact that "Hi everyone" neither refers specifically to men nor to women.


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## papillon

I remember 3 years ago a female Spanish colleague had a report to write for the Spanish Ministry of Science. In the report she referred to her degree as _doctor*a*_ because she didn't feel included under _doctor. _A countryman of hers vehemently disagreed saying that such usage was not sanctioned by the Academia Real, the word _doctor_ being perfectly gender-neutral.

Three years later, I don't know where the Academia stands. But the word doctora has become ubiquitous. Only a small step, but a step in the right direction.


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## .   1

Lusitania said:


> Do you think that we should move further to non-sexist languages or should we just leave it as it is because it has always been like that?


I agree that we should move to non sexist languages as soon as possible.  Anybody who pretends to not understand a word due to the gender of the word is revealing something about themselves.



Hakro said:


> As far as I know, in this case there is no possibility in English to separate male and female genders. At least I don't know how to say "Hello you all" in feminine form.


G'day everybody,
Yes you are quite right and as it should be.



Lusitania said:


> The winds of change already arrived to some countries, fourtunatelly. In my country they are coming, slowly and there are already some changes done in practise, but peoples minds tend to remain in the past.


I try to write and speak by avoiding sexist words like he or she.  My language is evolving to recognise the existance of female blokes but the process seems to be as slow as yours.

.,,


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## panjabigator

Then why did they go the opposite way with the words steward and stewardess?  Now we just have flight attendant.  

I am not a sexist individual, but I really really don't care about creating a seperate "ellas" type distinction for women in language just for the sake politcal correctness.  In Panjabi, the formal form for men and women is the same as the plural for men.  It doesn't bother me either.


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## danielfranco

There's no winning here... In Spanish, there are words in which the feminine plural is the general plural to include both male and female. But of course, feminists may take exception to such blatant display of male-centered language usage. Consider:
"Enfermeras" (nurses).
"Recepcionistas" (receptionists).

I can picture Gloria Steinem going postal over this, declaring vehemently that this is a chavinist pig's way of keeping women dominated. I can hear her in my head going, "OI! How come the feminine plural for 'chief of state' or 'CEO' is not a general plural? Sexist PIG!"

'Tis just the way it is. "Coupla" hundred years of feminism cannot undo a good fifteen thousand years of ideology. We can try, but it'll take a while yet, I'm afraid....


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## képi

I am not sexist either, and I have no problem either. It's not sexist. It just *is.*


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## gaer

Outsider said:


> If I had grown up speaking a language where that was normal, I'm sure I wouldn't mind.
> 
> Just as English speaking men and women do not feel "excluded" by the fact that "Hi everyone" neither refers specifically to men nor to women.


But that's different. "Everyone" has no gender. There is not even a potential objection.

In English, a better example would be:

"Everyone is entitled to *his* own opinion."

The problem now is that "its", while logical, is not allowed when talking of people.


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## danielfranco

I suppose in English one could carry on speaking in the indefinite third person until one finally grows weary of such stilted figure of speech. Everyone is entitled to one's own opinion.
Rather pompous, no?


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## gaer

danielfranco said:


> I suppose in English one could carry on speaking in the indefinite third person until one finally grows weary of such stilted figure of speech. Everyone is entitled to one's own opinion.
> Rather pompous, no?


One is entitled to one's opinion, no matter how odd it makes one appear. 

Seriously, no matter what solutions we choose, I think that sooner or later we run into constructions that have to be carefully restructured to avoid such problems.


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## panjabigator

danielfranco said:


> There's no winning here... In Spanish, there are words in which the feminine plural is the general plural to include both male and female. But of course, feminists may take exception to such blatant display of male-centered language usage. Consider:
> "Enfermeras" (nurses).
> "Recepcionistas" (receptionists).



What about the word dentista?  Not necessarily a male position.  Although, with the first one, you have a point.  A male nurse often isn't taken seriously because they are a male, and have stepped into a traditionally female job.

(Argh...did I just make a sexist statement?)


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## maxiogee

Lusitania said:


> Hello to all of you, Ladies and Gentlemen,
> 
> I receive a PM from one of the foreros saying that I should avoid saying "Olá a todos e a todas" making the distinction between genders as the norm has always been the Masculino Plural and that is the correct way of doing it. I replied saying that I didn't felt included and I didn't agree to which he replied that I was ignorant regarding Languages facts.



I think your correspondent has shown that it is he who is ignorant of "languages facts".
If the masculine plural is the 'correct' way, maybe he needs to ask why it is so, and are people happy with it being the 'correct' way.

By all means, do whatever you wish to do, or feel the need to do, in order to feel included - but most importantly, do whatever you need to do to feel comfortable when using your own language. That is how languages survive. Sticking to 'the correct way' is a surefire way to kill something which only needs a few small adjustments.


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## ireney

Personally I find it cumbersome when I feel I have to use both the male and the female words in any language (including my own) and don't feel excluded when the male ones are used. I also dislike having to twist my sentences (especially in my language) in order to avoid using both by going for the neuter.
I do dislike the "ladies first" rule that makes people around the world always say "ladies and gentlemen" for some reason but not to the point of making a fuss about it (_someone_ must be named first).

However this is me. If you feel more comfortable using both you should most certainly do so.


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## jabogitlu

> I suppose in English one could carry on speaking in the indefinite third person until one finally grows weary of such stilted figure of speech. Everyone is entitled to one's own opinion.
> Rather pompous, no?



Well, I always write "Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion."

However, in spoken colloquial AE the third-person plural possessive pronoun has supplanted other usages.  "Everyone's entitled to their own opinion."


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## Brioche

ireney said:


> Personally I find it cumbersome when I feel I have to use both the male and the female words in any language (including my own) and don't feel excluded when the male ones are used. I also dislike having to twist my sentences (especially in my language) in order to avoid using both by going for the neuter.
> I do dislike the "ladies first" rule that makes people around the world always say "ladies and gentlemen" for some reason but not to the point of making a fuss about it (_someone_ must be named first).
> 
> However this is me. If you feel more comfortable using both you should most certainly do so.


 
The sequence, in English, Ladies and Gentlemen is not necessarily "putting women first".  In English, it is normal for the shorter word to come first.
Men and women
Cups and saucers
Friends, Romans and Countrymen
Nymphs and Shepherds

I'm not impressed by the "sexism" in language arguments.  

Malay is a "non-sexist" language. One pronoun means both he and she. All words describing occupations are neutral. They don't say _son_ or _daughter_ but _male child_ or _female child_. There is no word for _bull _or _cow,_ or _rooster_ or _hen._ You have to say _male bovine_ or _female bovine_, or _male bird_ or _female bird_. 

However, Malay society is firmly patriarchal, and believes that males and females by nature have different roles and responsibilities.


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## Hakro

Also Finnish has only one pronoun for he and she, but we have different words for son/daughter, bull/cow etc.

The words describing occupation or status, where there has traditionally been the part "man", have lately been changed to "person", for example "doorman" is nowadays "doorperson". Sometimes these words sound ridiculous. They are also ridiculed purposely by using non-existing words like "hit person", "ladies' person", "enlisted person" etc.


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## maxiogee

Hakro said:


> They are also ridiculed purposely by using non-existing words like "hit person", "ladies' person", "enlisted person" etc.


 
Do you not have enlisted females in the armed forces?


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## Hakro

maxiogee said:


> Do you not have enlisted females in the armed forces?


Yes, we have, but I meant in fact the lowest rank in the army, literally translated "warman". At least in Finnish "warperson" sounds ridiculous. This is of course one of those untranslatable jokes.


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## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> If I had grown up speaking a language where that was normal, I'm sure I wouldn't mind.
> 
> Just as English speaking men and women do not feel "excluded" by the fact that "Hi everyone" neither refers specifically to men nor to women.


 

I believe that many things changes while you grew up and they keep changing. I'm sure you're adapted to most of them. I'm sure this wouldn't be that difficult.


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## geve

ireney said:


> Personally I find it cumbersome when I feel I have to use both the male and the female words in any language (including my own) and don't feel excluded when the male ones are used. I also dislike having to twist my sentences (especially in my language) in order to avoid using both by going for the neuter.
> I do dislike the "ladies first" rule that makes people around the world always say "ladies and gentlemen" for some reason but not to the point of making a fuss about it (_someone_ must be named first).
> 
> However this is me. If you feel more comfortable using both you should most certainly do so.


My thoughts exactly! 
To me all genders-inclusive formulations often sound artificial and are in no way representative of the speaker's opinion on women and their place in society.


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## maxiogee

geve said:


> My thoughts exactly!
> To me all genders-inclusive formulations often sound artificial and are in no way representative of the speaker's opinion on women and their place in society.




Personal Computer sounded weird too until we got used to the concept.
It just seems we're taking longer to get used to the concept of gender equality


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## jabogitlu

> They don't say _son_ or _daughter_ but _male child_ or _female child_. There is no word for _bull _or _cow,_ or _rooster_ or _hen._ You have to say _male bovine_ or _female bovine_,



This is preposterous and has no relation that I can see to the original question.  Since a bull has a penis and is, by definition, male, and a cow has an udder and is, by definition, female, why would you eliminate them?  It's not as though a bull can be a cow or a cow a bull.

Edit- Oh.  Hmm, I was raised on a farm and thus differentiate between cow and bull, but a friend just commented that for many people 'cow' means both male and female.  How odd...

But the argument still holds true for son/daughter.


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## geve

maxiogee said:


> Personal Computer sounded weird too until we got used to the concept.
> It just seems we're taking longer to get used to the concept of gender equality


I don't understand what you mean  It's not about gender equality, it's about gender equality _in language_. And I didn't say _weird_, I said _artificial_... whether a sexist jerk carefully uses both masculine and feminine pronouns when speaking doesn't make much of a difference to me.
If people choose to use both genders, fine by me; but it seems to me that forcing them to do so is fighting the wrong fight. 

_________________

Ceux qui parlent français trouveront peut-être intéressants ces fils sur la féminisation des noms de métiers :
Féminisation des titres, métiers et fonctions 
Écrivain au féminin ?


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## .   1

geve said:


> I don't understand what you mean  It's not about gender equality, it's about gender equality _in language_.


It is entirely about gender equality as gender equality in language can not exist in a society lacking gender equality.

.,,


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## Pedro y La Torre

On French TV (game shows etc.) I almost only hear "_Bonjour à tous_". I don't know I guess there are more important things to worry about than language gender equality.


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## Outsider

jabogitlu said:


> This is preposterous and has no relation that I can see to the original question.  Since a bull has a penis and is, by definition, male, and a cow has an udder and is, by definition, female, why would you eliminate them?  It's not as though a bull can be a cow or a cow a bull.


  

Did you even read Brioche's post?



. said:


> It is entirely about gender equality as gender equality in language can not exist in a society lacking gender equality.
> 
> .,,


Yes, it can. See Brioche's point about Malay, above.

There is no relation between gender equality and grammatical gender.


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## jabogitlu

> Did you even read Brioche's post?


Oh.  Evidently not, but now I have fully.  Sorry!


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## Athaulf

The whole "gender-neutral language" business started in the English-speaking countries, and most people who support it are unaware of several  important facts about language in general that I'll outline below. (Please notice that I'm saying _most_, not _all_, so please don't take offense if you're among the exceptions -- and I expect that a disproportional number of such exceptional people will be found on a language-centered forum like this. I will be happy to hear reasonable counter-arguments to this post.)

First, English is a language in which only faint vestiges of grammatical gender exist today. Words that carry any sort of grammatical gender are an exceptional minority, and they can be changed or eliminated without any drastic changes to the language. However, in many other languages, the situation is very different, and achieving "gender-neutrality" would be possible only by introducing drastic changes in the grammar and mutilating the language altogether. For example, in Croatian it's impossible to speak in the past tense without implying the gender of the subject (to be precise, you could use some archaic verb forms, but that would sound ridiculous). Furthermore, gender-neutral words like, say, "employee" are nonexistent -- you can only say "masculine employee" or "feminine employee." The same holds for "worker," "colleague," "assistant," "student," and whatever else you can think of. For all that I know, other Slavic languages are similar in this regard, and most Romance and Germanic languages are only somewhat less problematic. So one can either accept the _de facto_ standard of using the masculine form as universal or insist on impossibly radical changes to the language.

Second, grammatical gender and biological sex are two different things, which are correlated in many languages, but by no means identical even in Indo-European ones. The most famous examples are probably the German words for "woman" and "girl" ("Weib" and "Mädchen"), which have neuter, rather than feminine gender, but there are also many other examples from different languages where the grammatical gender of a noun doesn't correspond to the biological sex of the entity it denotes. So if it the grammatical gender can be independent from the biological sex in these cases, why not accept a similar discrepancy when a masculine noun refers to a mixed company?

And finally, I don't find much credibility in the idea that a "masculine" language somehow reflects the male domination in society, while a "gender-neutral" language reflects the equality of sexes. Historically, the circumstances in which various languages have gained or lost the grammatical gender show no correlation whatsoever with the social status of women. A good example is Persian, which lost its grammatical gender entirely while spoken in a society that makes the Western "patriarchies" look rather favorable from the feminist perspective (additionally, from what I've read, Persian doesn't even have separate titles for married and unmarried women -- it developed its version of "Ms." quite spontaneously). Even in English, the grammatical gender had already been vanishing long before anyone advocated the equality of sexes in England -- feminists today are battling its last tiny remnants. 

Of course, I will respect the writing guidelines of institutions for which I work, and I will follow the expected norms of behavior when communicating with people who might be offended by such matters. But for the reasons above, I'm definitely less than enthusiastic about the whole idea of "gender-neutral language."


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## cuchuflete

I don't mean to sidetrack the social side of this conversation at all.  I have a question about language.  When, as a native English speaker, I attempted to learn Spanish and other Romance languages, I was taught that, in addition to masculine and feminine forms, there was a neuter gender form, which looked like the masculine, but included both genders.   Is that a mistaken way to describe it, used only by foreigners?


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## Outsider

Spanish has a neuter of sorts (I'm quoting Wikipedia ). It manifests itself in the article _lo_ -- as opposed to masculine _el_, and to feminine _la/el_ --, but in little else. This could be what you're thinking of.

If a man who has a son and a daughter says _tengo dos hijos_, I would tend to say he is using the masculine plural, not a neuter.


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## gaer

cuchuflete said:


> I don't mean to sidetrack the social side of this conversation at all. I have a question about language. When, as a native English speaker, I attempted to learn Spanish and other Romance languages, I was taught that, in addition to masculine and feminine forms, there was a neuter gender form, which looked like the masculine, but included both genders. Is that a mistaken way to describe it, used only by foreigners?


In German, the name of an animal, for instance, can be masculine, feminine or neuter, and it is strictly grammatical.

Das Pferd, the horse.

It's just an extension of what happens in Spanish, I think, but there is always a third possibility.

In many cases there are words that corrspond to such English words as "mare" and "stallion", and then these forms take on the appropriate articles and endings.

I don't know if that answers your question or not. 

Gaer


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## cuchuflete

Outsider said:


> If a man who has a son and a daughter says _tengo dos hijos_, I would tend to say he is using the masculine plural, not a neuter.



That's a good example of what I am uncertain about.  Tengo dos hijos could clearly be the masculine plural, in reference to two male children.  It could behave as a neuter form if the reference is to a boy and a girl.  Likewise, if the parent speaks of the children as _ellos_, this looks like a masculine pronoun. Is it masculine or neuter according to usage?


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## Dr. Quizá

That's absurd. Women are not adressed by masculine plurals. They are adressed by the femenine plural or by the *NEUTRAL* plural, that also agrees masculine plural. I can even say then these languages are "femalist" because they lack pure masculine plural  but I don't play these silly games. The end "-os" means nothing respect that. Do you call men "machistos"? Are there only machistas women?  

Is German "femalist" just because the femenine singular article "die" (la/a) is exactly the same as the plural for the three genres?

Thank god RAE could properly handle in Spain this "issue".


*GRAMMAR<>BIOLOGY
GÉNERO<>SEXO*





Outsider said:


> There is no relation between gender equality and grammatical gender.



Of course there isn't  




cuchuflete said:


> I don't mean to sidetrack the social side of this conversation at all.  I have a question about language.  When, as a native English speaker, I attempted to learn Spanish and other Romance languages, I was taught that, in addition to masculine and feminine forms, there was a neuter gender form, which looked like the masculine, but included both genders.   Is that a mistaken way to describe it, used only by foreigners?



No, it isn't. Just see the neutral article "lo" (and BTW its obvious resemblance to "los").


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## Outsider

cuchuflete said:


> That's a good example of what I am uncertain about.  Tengo dos hijos could clearly be the masculine plural, in reference to two male children.  It could behave as a neuter form if the reference is to a boy and a girl.  Likewise, if the parent speaks of the children as _ellos_, this looks like a masculine pronoun. Is it masculine or neuter according to usage?


For an English speaker, grammatical gender seems to be a difficult concept to grasp. You have to free yourself of one temptation, which is to _semanticize_ gender (is this a word?) In a language like Spanish, grammatical gender is not fundamentally (or at least not exclusively) semantic. 

It's about morphology. If a word "looks" masculine, then it typically _is_ masculine, whatever its meaning.

In reply to your question, I would say that _hijos_ is always grammatically masculine, regardless of whether it refers to two males, or two a male and a female person.

The same goes for _ellos_. As far as morphology is concerned it's always masculine. Semantics is another story.


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## cuchuflete

Thank you Outsider.  Your point is clear.  Grammatical mechanics do not imply meaning.  

Now I can relax, free of the fear that the necktie in the closet (_la_ corbata) might have any sexual attributes.

The writer of the first post suggested "Olá a todos e a todas", which struck me as redundant, as todos, semantically, refers to
both sexes, regardless of the grammatic gender of todos.  A difficulty English speakers may have in following this conversation is that the words 'male' and 'masculine' in English do have sexual implications, and generally have no grammatical gender meanings apart from these unless one is describing some other language.  

It is all too easy for the English speaker to confuse grammatical gender with something biological.  Nouns and adjectives have no biology.  To compound the confusion, English has fairly recently adopted the widespread use of "gender" for "sex", in deference to social puritanism.


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## Athaulf

cuchuflete said:


> That's a good example of what I am uncertain about.  Tengo dos hijos could clearly be the masculine plural, in reference to two male children.  It could behave as a neuter form if the reference is to a boy and a girl.  Likewise, if the parent speaks of the children as _ellos_, this looks like a masculine pronoun. Is it masculine or neuter according to usage?



Grammatically, _ellos_ and _hijos_ are unambiguously masculine plural, but they are used to refer to a mixed group. As far as I know, there is no other way to talk about a mixed company in Spanish, since _ellas_ and _hijas_ refer to a strictly female-only group. 

Also, I might be misreading your post, but you seem to be slightly confused about the use of neuter gender in languages that have it. Neuter forms generally aren't used to be gender-inclusive in languages that have them; they exist as wholly separate entities. The vestiges of neuter in Spanish like _lo_ and _esto_ have their specific usages, but none of them has the purpose of gender-neutrality. It is true that sometimes a language will have a neuter noun whose specific purpose is to be gender-neutral (e.g. in Croatian you'd use the neuter _djeca_ when you want to refer to someone's sons as well as daughters), but these are special cases rather than a general rule.

In languages with elaborate gender-based grammar rules, a noun that is semantically sex-neutral may be of any gender. In many languages, such nouns are mostly masculine, but one can easily find numerous counterexamples, e.g. in Croatian _osoba_ (person) or _budala_ (fool) are feminine, applicable to a person of either sex, and without any masculine counterparts. The same goes for _die Person_ in German and so on.

Much confusion stems from equating biological sex and grammatical gender. They are often strongly correlated, but by no means identical notions.


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## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> For an English speaker, grammatical gender seems to be a difficult concept to grasp. [...]



I started writing my last post before I saw this excellent reply of yours. Sorry for the redundancy.


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## Outsider

cuchuflete said:


> The writer of the first post suggested "Olá a todos e a todas", which struck me as redundant, as todos, semantically, refers to
> both sexes, regardless of the grammatic gender of todos.


I agree with you. 

However, some people ask "Why should the masculine form be the one that is semantically polyvalent?" They see this as a sign of sexism. And perhaps they are right. Maybe the fact that the masculine rather than the feminine form is the default, has its roots in the patriarchalism of other times. Where I part ways with Lusitania and others with the same idea is in that I don't think such linguistic fossils from bygone times are a serious problem that should be fought. I don't approve of throwing convicted criminals to the beasts, but I don't see that as a reason to tear down the Colosseum.



cuchuflete said:


> A difficulty English speakers may have in following this conversation is that the words 'male' and 'masculine' in English do have sexual implications, and generally have no grammatical gender meanings apart from these unless one is describing some other language.


I have noticed some confusion, at times. When we say "masculine" and "feminine" in a grammatical context, of course we don't mean "butch" or "ladylike". (At least, I don't.)  



cuchuflete said:


> To compound the confusion, English has fairly recently adopted the widespread use of "gender" for "sex", in deference to social puritanism.


That has been happening in other languages, too.


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## Outsider

Athaulf said:


> I started writing my last post before I saw this excellent reply of yours.


Thanks, but your reply is no less excellent. I subscribe to it.


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## natasha2000

gaer said:


> But that's different. "Everyone" has no gender. There is not even a potential objection.
> 
> In English, a better example would be:
> 
> "Everyone is entitled to *his* own opinion."
> 
> The problem now is that "its", while logical, is not allowed when talking of people.


 
And what about "their"? Can we put their?  

I think that all nouns that can be put in femenine gender and sound good in femenine gender, should be put, but we shouldn't mistreat the languages. I'll explain what I mean by mistreat the language. For example, in Serbia, it seems that these days there is a fierce "sexist-feminist" fignt for femenine names of ocupations. It is useless to give any examples here since I am sure that there is nobody who speaks Serbian here, but I'll just say this: Some professions can be put in femenine without any problem, but some simply cannot! If you try to add some of usuall sufixes that denominate female gender, it just sounds - ridiculous! 
It is for example as if we would like to put profesor, butcher, or translator, or plumber to a femenine by adding ess in English. Profesoress, butcheress, or translatoress and plumberess... It's just.. Ridiculous. Personally, I prefer being called translator than translatorness...

On the other hand, if it is possible and sounds NATURAL, femenine gender in nouns, adjectives, pronouns etc. should be always used.  I also think that Spanish language is very handy for doing it. You just have to add A and most of the nouns sound just fine. English, more or less, since we just change man to a woman or to a person, and it also sounds OK. But there are other languages  that simply cannot do it.


----------



## gaer

cuchuflete said:


> That's a good example of what I am uncertain about. Tengo dos hijos could clearly be the masculine plural, in reference to two male children. It could behave as a neuter form if the reference is to a boy and a girl. Likewise, if the parent speaks of the children as _ellos_, this looks like a masculine pronoun. Is it masculine or neuter according to usage?


Let me be sure that I understand:

hijo, boy (never girl)
hijos, children (boys, girls or both)
hija, girl
hijas, girls only

If this is correct, I would definitely think of "hijos" as something very different from "hijas", grammatically.

Is there even a grammatical term for a word that indicates only one sex in singular but both in plural?

Gaer


----------



## gaer

natasha2000 said:


> And what about "their"? Can we put their?


Not if you are following conservative, prescriptive rules. If you are interested in a "can of worms", there are several threads about this problem!

Gaer


----------



## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> However, some people ask "Why should the masculine form be the one that is semantically polyvalent?" They see this as a sign of sexism.



The development of grammatical genders in Indo-European languages is an interesting topic, about which linguists have done much research. A nice summary of the current standard theory on this question can be found on this link: http://www.zompist.com/lang21.html#28.

Obviously, in an area like this, where actual science has a lot to say, it makes little sense to argue simplistic theories about "sexism" before one has familiarized oneself with the relevant research, which indicates that the true story is much more complex, to the extent that it can be reconstructed at all. 

Furthermore, advocates of the supposed causal link between the subjugation of women and the prevalence of masculine gender will certainly have a hard time explaining why of all places around the world where Indo-European languages are spoken, grammatical gender has spontaneously disappeared nowhere else but in -- Iran.


----------



## natasha2000

gaer said:


> Not if you are following conservative, prescriptive rules. If you are interested in a "can of worms", there are several threads about this problem!
> 
> Gaer


 
Gaer, this was rethorical question...


----------



## Outsider

gaer said:


> Let me be sure that I understand:
> 
> hijo, boy (never girl) "Son" or "child" (of either gender, in the latter case).
> hijos, children or sons (boys, girls or both)
> hija, daughter
> hijas, daughters, girls only


----------



## Lusitania

képi said:


> I am not sexist either, and I have no problem either. It's not sexist. It just *is.*


 
Probably that's what Rosa Parks heard when she refuse to seat in the back of the bus. The back of the bus policy was normal for non-white, wasn't it. It just *was*.


----------



## Lusitania

panjabigator said:


> Then why did they go the opposite way with the words steward and stewardess? Now we just have flight attendant.


 
The same way President is Presidente and in most of languages shall be considered neutral. Now what I meant was words like Mankind to be turned into Human Kind, Humanity, that of "All men are created equal" can be said but I don't feel included.

This are just few examples.


----------



## Athaulf

natasha2000 said:


> For example, in Serbia, it seems that these days there is a fierce "sexist-feminist" fignt for femenine names of ocupations. It is useless to give any examples here since I am sure that there is nobody who speaks Serbian here,



Kako bre nema?  



> but I'll just say this: Some professions can be put in femenine without any problem, but some simply cannot! [...] On the other hand, if it is possible and sounds NATURAL, femenine gender in nouns, adjectives, pronouns etc. should be always used.


An additional "problem," however, is how to refer to a mixed company. Serbian has 3rd person plural pronouns _oni_/_one_ that present the same "problem" as _ellos_/_ellas_ in Spanish. Furthermore, there is the "problem" of the verb-subject gender agreement in the past tense. This probably sounds bizarre to non-Slavic speakers, but in Serbian you actually can't just say "I worked" -- you have to specifically say "I masculine-worked" or "I feminine-worked." Thus it's impossible to be gender-neutral in expressions like "we wish to thank everyone who helped us" and similar. (I've seen some horrible butchering of language taking place with the intention of getting around this "problem.")

By the way, everything I wrote about Croatian in this thread holds for Serbian too, and vice versa.


----------



## Outsider

Athaulf said:


> This probably sounds bizarre to non-Slavic speakers, but in Serbian you actually can't just say "I worked" -- you have to specifically say "I masculine-worked" or "I feminine-worked."


Not when I think of French: _Je me suis assis_ (m.) / _Je me suis assise_ (f.) "I sat down".


----------



## Lusitania

geve said:


> I don't understand what you mean  It's not about gender equality, it's about gender equality _in language_. And I didn't say _weird_, I said _artificial_... whether a sexist jerk carefully uses both masculine and feminine pronouns when speaking doesn't make much of a difference to me.
> If people choose to use both genders, fine by me; but it seems to me that forcing them to do so is fighting the wrong fight.


 
would you feel confortable to called: anchorman, cameraman pr chairman? If you were in these positions of course: would it be so dificult to change it to anchor or anchorperson or chairperson or camera operator.

Not necessary feminine but not androcentric.


----------



## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> Did you even read Brioche's post?
> 
> Yes, it can. See Brioche's point about Malay, above.
> 
> There is no relation between gender equality and grammatical gender.


 

Aren't we here because we like to communicate? And that we wish to improve our knowledge of languages so we can understand and be understood more effectively? 


So, this is where you start. By respecting differences, wheter they are cultural or linguistic or if it's a gender issue. Try it, it's not dificult.


----------



## Outsider

Lusitania said:


> Aren't we here because we like to communicate? And that we wish to improve our knowledge of languages so we can understand and be understood more effectively?
> 
> 
> So, this is where you start. By respecting differences, wheter they are cultural or linguistic or if it's a gender issue. Try it, it's not dificult.


If those remarks have any relation to the post of mine you quoted, I fail to see it.

Saying "todos e todas" has absolutely zero to do with respecting / not respecting differences, in my opinion.


----------



## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> Not when I think of French: _Je me suis assis_ (m.) / _Je me suis assise_ (f.) "I sat down".



I know next to nothing about French, but isn't _assis_ an adjective referring to the subject, rather than a verb here? Thus, isn't this phrase analogous to, say, _me hice viejo/vieja_ ("I grew old") in Spanish?

In the Crotian/Serbian perfect tense, the verb itself has to agree with the subject's gender, without exception, and this tense is the only way to express past in these languages nowadays (other past tenses are approximately as archaic and out of use as "thou" in English). Thus gender-neutral talk about the past is impossible as a matter of principle in these languages.


----------



## Lusitania

Dr. Quizá said:


> That's absurd. Women are not adressed by masculine plurals. They are adressed by the femenine plural or by the *NEUTRAL* plural, that also agrees masculine plural. I can even say then these languages are "femalist" because they lack pure masculine plural  but I don't play these silly games. The end "-os" means nothing respect that. Do you call men "machistos"? Are there only machistas women?
> 
> Is German "femalist" just because the femenine singular article "die" (la/a) is exactly the same as the plural for the three genres?
> 
> Thank god RAE could properly handle in Spain this "issue".
> 
> 
> *GRAMMAR<>BIOLOGY*
> *GÉNERO<>SEXO*
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Of course there isn't
> 
> 
> 
> 
> No, it isn't. Just see the neutral article "lo" (and BTW its obvious resemblance to "los").


 

There is Sexismo involving women and men. Do you have a problem in saying Hola a todos y todas, Gracia a todos y todas?

There are Master thesis on this one of them "O falso neutro" could maybe open up some minds on the power of language.

The language has an extreme power on representations. Check it if you understand portuguese.


----------



## Lusitania

cuchuflete said:


> It is all too easy for the English speaker to confuse grammatical gender with something biological. Nouns and adjectives have no biology. To compound the confusion, English has fairly recently adopted the widespread use of "gender" for "sex", in deference to social puritanism.


 

Sex is biological, gender is a social constrution. These are two different concepts. It's not social puitanism, it's for the respect of other people. For example, a person might identify herself or himself with the biological sex that he/she was born with. It's to avoid its, it's meant to be inclusive.


----------



## Lusitania

Athaulf said:


> Grammatically, _ellos_ and _hijos_ are unambiguously masculine plural, but they are used to refer to a mixed group. As far as I know, there is no other way to talk about a mixed company in Spanish, since _ellas_ and _hijas_ refer to a strictly female-only group.


 

As in Portuguese Courts nowadays they will write Filhos e Filhas, Pais e Mães, like hijas and hijos, Padre y Madre. By referring to both.


----------



## Athaulf

Lusitania said:


> There is Sexismo involving women and men. Do you have a problem in saying Hola a todos y todas, Gracia a todos y todas?
> 
> There are Master thesis on this one of them "O falso neutro" could maybe open up some minds on the power of language.
> 
> The language has an extreme power on representations.



So, assume -- as is indeed the case -- that I speak a Slavic language in which you can't say, for example, "those who worked", but only "masculine-those masculine-who masculine-worked" (_"on*i* koj*i*__ su radil*i*"_) or "feminine-those feminine-who feminine-worked" (_"on*e *koj*e* su radil*e*"_), and the former is normally used to refer to a mixed group. 

What am I supposed to do in this case? Write _"oni/one koji/koje su radili/radile"_? That would make a total mess -- even if you can stand the ugliness, almost every other word in a typical text would have to be doubled. It seems like my native language is irreparably sexist.


----------



## Lusitania

natasha2000 said:


> And what about "their"? Can we put their?
> 
> I think that all nouns that can be put in femenine gender and sound good in femenine gender, should be put, but we shouldn't mistreat the languages. I'll explain what I mean by mistreat the language. For example, in Serbia, it seems that these days there is a fierce "sexist-feminist" fignt for femenine names of ocupations. It is useless to give any examples here since I am sure that there is nobody who speaks Serbian here, but I'll just say this: Some professions can be put in femenine without any problem, but some simply cannot! If you try to add some of usuall sufixes that denominate female gender, it just sounds - ridiculous!
> It is for example as if we would like to put profesor, butcher, or translator, or plumber to a femenine by adding ess in English. Profesoress, butcheress, or translatoress and plumberess... It's just.. Ridiculous. Personally, I prefer being called translator than translatorness...
> 
> On the other hand, if it is possible and sounds NATURAL, femenine gender in nouns, adjectives, pronouns etc. should be always used. I also think that Spanish language is very handy for doing it. You just have to add A and most of the nouns sound just fine. English, more or less, since we just change man to a woman or to a person, and it also sounds OK. But there are other languages that simply cannot do it.


 

It doesn't sound natural because it wasn't natural so far. This is what I meant.


----------



## Lusitania

Athaulf said:


> What am I supposed to do in this case? Write _"oni/one koji/koje su radili/radile"_? That would make a total mess -- even if you can stand the ugliness, almost every other word in a typical text would have to be doubled. It seems like my native language is irreparably sexist.


 

Well, I don't know your Language, but regarding mine, there has been an effort and it's possible. Hope that language is the only sexist problem you have in your country but I seriously doubt it.


----------



## cuchuflete

The question was not addressed to me, but I won't be timid.

"Olá a todos" doesn't seem sexist to me, but as a non-native reader of Português, my opinion is of scant value.  "Olá a todos e todas" is not a problem for me, and if it makes someone feel better, that is their own choice.  

What should be done with routine expressions such as  "os meus pais"?  Should every _noun, pl.  masc._ be deconstructed into its component semantic parts in order to alleviate a potential problem in interpretation or misinterpretation?   Should 'os meus filhos' become 'as minhas filhas e o meu filho' to describe my daughters and son?    I am glad that this will be decided by Portuguese speakers, and not me.  

I'm sure that they are, too.


----------



## Athaulf

Lusitania said:


> As in Portuguese Courts nowadays they will write Filhos e Filhas, Pais e Mães, like hijas and hijos, Padre y Madre. By referring to both.



Um... yes, but this doesn't have exactly the same meaning. You can refer to a group of two men and a woman as _ellos_, but not as _ellos y ellas_ (who would be _ellas_?). Similarly, you can refer to someone's two sons and a daughter as _sus hijos_, but not really _sus hijos y hijas_. 

You could of course complicate things to the bitter end and prescribe the accurate usage of _ellos y ella_, _él y ellas_, and all other possible options, but I sure wouldn't want to have to bother with it because someone feels offended by a little _o_ in _ellos_ and _hijos_. 

So either way, we're still without an expression for a mixed company that would be valid regardless of whether both se genders are represented in it by more than one specimen. 


On a related note, I'm surprised that nobody has yet (to my knowledge) felt offended by the fact that in constructs such as "he or she," the masculine form takes precedence more than 90% of the time.


----------



## Lusitania

cuchuflete said:


> The question was not addressed to me, but I won't be timid.
> 
> "Olá a todos" doesn't seem sexist to me, but as a non-native reader of Português, my opinion is of scant value. "Olá a todos e todas" is not a problem for me, and if it makes someone feel better, that is their own choice.
> 
> What should be done with routine expressions such as "os meus pais"? Should every _noun, pl. masc._ be deconstructed into its component semantic parts in order to alleviate a potential problem in interpretation or misinterpretation? Should 'os meus filhos' become 'as minhas filhas e o meu filho' to describe my daughters and son? I am glad that this will be decided by Portuguese speakers, and not me.
> 
> I'm sure that they are, too.


 

Not by Portuguese speakers only, it's part of gender mainstreaming and it's happening in many countries.

Because you can say "my children" it's inclusive "os meus filhos" it's not inclusive if you have a girl and vice versa.
Non-sexist language it's just a step and if this is scary, I can only imagine the rest.

To Max and Gaer, thanks 

Here you have more in several languages.


----------



## Athaulf

Lusitania said:


> [about the feminine occupational nouns in Serbian] It doesn't sound natural because it wasn't natural so far. This is what I meant.



Unless you speak at least some other Slavic language, you're hardly aware how hilariously unnatural artificial constructs can sound in Serbian and Croatian. Are you familiar with the people's reaction to the attempts to re-engineer the Croatian language for (quite different) political reasons in the 1990s?  

And as for the link above, I was puzzled to find out that the phrase "Old Masters" has been placed on the _index verborum prohibitorum_.   Oh, and they don't provide an accurate synonym for "statesmanship," because in English there simply isn't any. (Does it really have to go to the point of purging out such rather cool-sounding words just because there is a "man" somewhere far back in their etymology? )


----------



## cuchuflete

There is a simple alternative that would require changes in only two words in a language, and leave tens of thousands of noun and adjectival phrases intact:

Change the term "Masculine" to "type P" or some other letter with no gender or sexual significance, and change "Feminine" to "type B" or another letter.   Then the grammatical gender<>human biological/sexual link will be broken, and we won't have to re-invent our respective languages.


----------



## cuchuflete

Assuming that we want to take any perceived sexism out of language, shall we create a masculine version of _pessoas_?

Any suggestions for a non-exclusionary form of pessoas jurídicas and pessoas físicas?  The latter has homens and mulheres, but what about the legal entities?


----------



## Athaulf

cuchuflete said:


> There is a simple alternative that would require changes in only two words in a language, and leave tens of thousands of noun and adjectival phrases intact:
> 
> Change the term "Masculine" to "type P" or some other letter with no gender or sexual significance, and change "Feminine" to "type B" or another letter.   Then the grammatical gender<>human biological/sexual link will be broken, and we won't have to re-invent our respective languages.



Unfortunately, _exactly the opposite_ process has taken place in practice. Until several decades ago, "gender" used to be a grammatical term with a precise technical meaning, with no more links to biological sex than your proposed "type P/B." 

More recently, however, the term "gender" was given a new meaning in social sciences, which was initially still fairly useful and well-defined, denoting something like the social role of a typical person of particular sex. However, subsequently came the conflation of such "gender" with the original grammatical one, driven by a mixture of ideological zeal and ignorance about history, linguistics, and non-English languages in general. 

If you think I'm exaggerating with this last remark, please ask yourself how many people who advocate the theory of grammatical genders being an artifact of sexism have ever read a single paragraph of what the actual science has to say about the (pre-)historical development of genders in various Indo-European languages.


----------



## gaer

natasha2000 said:


> Gaer, this was rethorical question...


If you are referring to everyone is entitled to *his* own opinion vs."everyone is entitled to *their* own opinion", you are talking about a difference of opinion that has been a problem for at least a couple centuries. So I don't understand your point. 

Ousider, you put this all in a quote, so I could not refer to it:


> hijo, boy (never girl) "Son" or "child" (of either gender, in the latter case).
> hijos, children or sons (boys, girls or both)
> hija, daughter
> hijas, daughters, girls only


So "hijo" could refer to a girl? That's a shock to me. If you have a girl and are referring to her, would you possible use "hijo"?

Or do you use "hijo" if you are talking about a child, generalizing?

I did see "hijo" defined as both "Junge" and "Kind" on a Spanish/German site. I thought it was a mistake. Apparently not.

What in blazes do we call a noun referring to the sex of a human being that is sometimes male only and sometimes either male or female? Do we have anything like this in English? <very confused>

Gaer


----------



## képi

_Hijo_ is used when you're generalizing about a child in general.

In any case, nowadays, this whole "sexism" problem is one a problem in everyday conversation. I mean, whenever a formal speech is given, Ihear "Ladies and Gentlemen" or "damas y caballeros."


----------



## gaer

képi said:


> _Hijo_ is used when you're generalizing about a child in general.


If so, and I trust what you say, I would still like to know how such words are classified.

I wonder, for instance, what the correct word or temr would be for "child". If we don't consider a word as "neuter" that can describe people of either sex, how do we classify such a word?

Gaer


----------



## ireney

Hip, ankle, neck are of masculine gender in Greek
Sole, belly, vein are of feminine gender
We should change these too? Every word in Greek has a gender (mas, fem, neut). What do we do in our case? 
Let's take the following two sentences

Η γυναίκα είναι ο συνδετικός κρίκος της οικογένειας
The woman (fem) is the connective (m) ring(m) of the family (f)

Οι άντρες είναι η πληγή της κοινωνίας 
Men (m) are the wound (f) of the society (f) 

To make these sentences genderless we'd have to create new words. 
And what do we do with _πατρίδα_? It means father(land) (though I doubt there are many Greeks who even think of its etymology and even I  that  do know it "interperet" it as meaning "homeland") but is of female grammatical gender.
And πατρώα εδάφη (another way of referring to the territory belonging to "us")  means the grounds/soil of (our) fathers but is of neuter gender


----------



## képi

gaer said:


> If you are referring to everyone is entitled to *his* own opinion vs."everyone is entitled to *their* own opinion", you are talking about a difference of opinion that has been a problem for at least a couple centuries. So I don't understand your point.
> 
> Ousider, you put this all in a quote, so I could not refer to it:
> 
> So "hijo" could refer to a girl? That's a shock to me. If you have a girl and are referring to her, would you possible use "hijo"?
> 
> Or do you use "hijo" if you are talking about a child, generalizing?
> 
> I did see "hijo" defined as both "Junge" and "Kind" on a Spanish/German site. I thought it was a mistake. Apparently not.
> 
> What in blazes do we call a noun referring to the sex of a human being that is sometimes male only and sometimes either male or female? Do we have anything like this in English? <very confused>
> 
> Gaer


 


képi said:


> _Hijo_ is used when you're generalizing about a child in general.


 


gaer said:


> If so, and I trust what you say, I would still like to know how such words are classified.
> 
> I wonder, for instance, what the correct word or temr would be for "child". If we don't consider a word as "neuter" that can describe people of either sex, how do we classify such a word?
> 
> Gaer


 
According to WR, it is masculine. 

The thing is that when, say, Spanish was derived from Latin, it was a time when sexism was at its peak. I am not saying we should allow sexist to keep ruling the languages, but the fact is that the whole "use Masc. Pl." to describe a group of people. At time went on and women gained more and more respect in society, the langauge didn't chance. It simply lost it's meaning. When Spanish was created, a society  that had a male-dominant government set the standard. But you can't ask that the whole Language be re-written as to be neutral-neither male nor female. 

Ladies and Gentlemen
Damas y Caballeros

is used. People are starting to get the fact that saying "Tod*os* hagan la tarea" can be considered sexist. And I am sure it is. But in a way, this is sexism, it's laziness. 

Hola a todos.
Hola a todos y a todas

would take longer to say and people want to say as little as possible, hence the pronouns


----------



## Athaulf

gaer said:


> If so, and I trust what you say, I would still like to know how such words are classified.
> 
> I wonder, for instance, what the correct word or temr would be for "child". If we don't consider a word as "neuter" that can describe people of either sex, how do we classify such a word?



Your confusion will disappear once you understand the point that several posters in this thread (including me) have already made: in general, the grammatical gender of a noun has NOTHING to do with its meaning, and the nouns of neuter gender are NOT used for some sort of "gender-neutral" reference to people (or animals). You can understand "gender" in grammar merely as a way of classifying nouns in several broad classes by their grammatical properties, i.e. how they inflect and how exactly the corresponding articles, adjectives, etc. have to agree with them. It is entirely beside the point that in some languages these classes tend to correlate -- by no means completely!-- with the the biological sex for nouns denoting people and animals.  A noun of any gender might refer to male beings, female beings, asexual beings, or a group that combines any of those. Hence, for example, German has a neuter word for "girl," Croatian a feminine word for "person," and Spanish a masculine word for a "child." Such examples can be found in ANY language that has grammatical genders. 

In fact, I would argue that in Slavic languages, one would be entirely justified to define at least one or two additional genders, specifically for the animate masculine nouns and the nouns that combine the properties of the masculine and feminine gender. 

English doesn't have grammatical genders, except (arguably) in a few vestigial cases, and therefore in general, it makes no sense to ask for the "gender" of an English noun.


----------



## gaer

Athaulf said:


> Your confusion will disappear once you understand the point that several posters in this thread (including me) have already made: in general, the grammatical gender of a noun has NOTHING to do with its meaning, and the nouns of neuter gender are NOT used for some sort of "gender-neutral" reference to people (or animals).


I know that. I am VERY familiar with the fact that the gender of a noun in countless languages has nothing to do with its meaning. You are misunderstanding my question.

Das Mädchen, neuter, does not mean that a girl is sexless. It is a diminutive, and in German such words are neuter by form, grammatically. I did not want to make this about German, but I have no choice, since obviously you have assumed I am rather ignorant of grammar in any language but English and perhaps in English itself.

Die Person, feminine, has nothing to do with the sex of a person.

But there is one heck of a difference between the gender of an object, which can be masculine, feminine or neuter and has nothing to do with the nature of a a sexless object, and the gender of a noun indicating an animal or person, which may or may not agree with the sex of the animal or person.


> You can understand "gender" in grammar merely as a way of classifying nouns in several broad classes by their grammatical properties, i.e. how they inflect and how exactly the corresponding articles, adjectives, etc. have to agree with them.


Good grief, I already know that. That has _*nothing*_ to do with my point or my question.


> It is entirely beside the point that in some languages these classes tend to correlate -- by no means completely!-- with the the biological sex for nouns denoting people and animals.


Again, I know this. I tried to ask what I thought was a reasonable and logical question. When a word is used for only a male in singular but is used for both males and females in plural, is there a grammatical term for such a word, or for such a concept?


> A noun of any gender might refer to male beings, female beings, asexual beings, or a group that combines any of those. Hence, for example, German has a neuter word for "girl," Croatian a feminine word for "person," and Spanish a masculine word for a "child." Such examples can be found in ANY language that has grammatical genders.


And again, I know this. You are telling me what I know and have known for most of my life. I asked if there is a word for such examples, a grammatical term. If there is, please tell me. If you know for a fact that there is not, then enlighten me.


----------



## natasha2000

Lusitania said:


> It doesn't sound natural because it wasn't natural so far. This is what I meant.


 
I am really sorry, Lusitania, but I can't agree with you on this. I really like my language as it is now, and I do not think that if a man says "hola todos y todas" would say anything about his attitude towards women. I prefer to be TREATED by ACTS as an equal, even though called by MALE NAMES than vice versa. You know, there's a saying in Serbian "call me "pot" if you wish, but don't break me" (Zovi me i loncem, samo me nemoj razbiti), and I think it is very true. 

Athaulf, I'm sorry, I saw you participated here after I have posted... I don't know about Croatian, but the recent discovery of PREDUZIMAČICA, PREVODITELJKA, BORKINJA (od borac, naravno), PSIHOLOŠKINJA (od psiholog) ETC in Serbian made my hair go up!


----------



## Athaulf

gaer said:


> I know that. I am VERY familiar with the fact that the gender of a noun in countless languages has nothing to do with its meaning. You are misunderstanding my question.
> Das Mädchen, neuter, does not mean that a girl is sexless. It is a diminutive, and in German such words are neuter by form, grammatically. I did not want to make this about German, but I have no choice, since obviously you have assumed I am rather ignorant of grammar in any language but English and perhaps in English itself.



I'm sorry if my response sounded that way. The whole thread has been permeated by misunderstandings of this point, even by people who are obviously familiar with languages in which gender is important gramatically, so I may have gotten a bit carried away trying to repeat it for the N-th time. I certainly didn't think that this implied your ignorance of grammar -- many people knowledgeable about grammar somehow fail to grasp this point. 

What made me misunderstand you was a sentence that sounded as if you were repeating the error of some previous posters, who seemed to believe that the neuter gender has something to do with the word being sex-neutral in its meaning. Again, I'm sorry if that wasn't what you meant.



> I tried to ask what I thought was a reasonable and logical question. When a word is used for only a male in singular but is used for both males and females in plural, is there a grammatical term for such a word, or for such a concept?


Yes, I have obviously misunderstood your question. I don't know of such a term, although of course this doesn't guarantee that it doesn't exist. 

However, I'm not sure if you are entirely correct about the singular of Spanish nouns such as _hijo_ being male-specific. For example, if you said _"quieren tener un hijo_,_"_ I think it would be understood as "they want to have a child," rather than specifically as "they want to have a son." Thus it seems to me that _hijo_ can have the less specific meaning even in singular. I'm not 100% sure of this though, so it would be interesting if a better speaker of Spanish than me (which certainly doesn't say much ) clarified this. 

In fact, I'm not sure if there are any examples of words (in any language with which I'm familiar) that are used really _exclusively _for males in singular, but become sex-neutral in plural. All the ones I can think of can be used with the more general meaning even in singular (unless I'm wrong about _hijo_ and similar words in Spanish).


----------



## natasha2000

Athaulf said:


> However, I'm not sure if you are entirely correct about the singular of Spanish nouns such as _hijo_ being male-specific. For example, if you said _"quieren tener un hijo_,_"_ I think it would be understood as "they want to have a child," rather than specifically as "they want to have a son." Thus it seems to me that _hijo_ can have the less specific meaning even in singular. I'm not 100% sure of this though, so it would be interesting if a better speaker of Spanish than me (which certainly doesn't say much ) clarified this.


I can confirm this. Another word that behaves like hijo, is niño.

On the other hand, a word "hermano"occurs to me as an example of a word that in singular referrs only to male and in plural it can refer to both female and male, as well as only to male.

hermano - brother
hermana - sister
hermanos - brothers, or brothers and sisters

How many brothers and sisters do you have? - ¿Cuántos hermanos tienes?
Now, If the answer is: Tengo dos hermanos. That might mean:
I have two brothers, or I have a brother and a sister. That is why usually a speaker explains further: Un hermano y una hermana. Or: Los hermanos. Or in some other way to clear it that both of his hermanos are males. If both are girls, then the answer would be Tengo dos hermanas.


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## jabogitlu

So in other words, the word 'hermanos' can translate as either 'siblings' or 'brothers' in English?  Hmm... I'd never thought of it like that!


----------



## mirx

cuchuflete said:


> I don't mean to sidetrack the social side of this conversation at all. I have a question about language. When, as a native English speaker, I attempted to learn Spanish and other Romance languages, I was taught that, in addition to masculine and feminine forms, there was a neuter gender form, which looked like the masculine, but included both genders. Is that a mistaken way to describe it, used only by foreigners?


 

No Cuchu, you were taught well, the plural for neutral is the same as the plural for masculine and has always been, and most of poeple use it that way.

I belive it would be sexist to try to do it any other way, I dare say most of us -like somebody already said- go in our lives without even realizing that we are using a male plural that involves both male and females, and who ever finds fault with it is sexist, why to point out something that nobody notices or even cares of, right!!! because he is sexist and needs a separate version of who he is.

For those of you who don't agree with this, feel free to substitute the "he's" by "she's", that may make you feel more comfortable.


----------



## natasha2000

mirx said:


> No Cuchu, you were taught well, the plural for neutral is the same as the plural for masculine and has always been, and most of poeple use it that way.
> 
> I belive it would be sexist to try to do it any other way, I dare say most of us -like somebody already said- go in our lives without even realizing that we are using a male plural that involves both male and females, and who ever finds fault with it is sexist, why to point out something that nobody notices or even cares of, right!!! because he is sexist and needs a separate version of who he is.
> 
> For those of you who don't agree with this, feel free to substitute the "he's" by "she's", that may make you feel more comfortable.


Well, mirx, thank you. I am a sexist and I am female, too. Strange.. Never thought of myself in this way... And only because I don't mind being called translator and not translatoresssssss........


----------



## geve

Athaulf said:


> I know next to nothing about French, but isn't _assis_ an adjective referring to the subject, rather than a verb here? Thus, isn't this phrase analogous to, say, _me hice viejo/vieja_ ("I grew old") in Spanish?


_Assis_ in Outsider's example is the past participle of the verb "asseoir", and as such, a part of the _passé composé_, along with the auxiliary. If the auxiliary is _avoir_, the past participle doesn't agree (gender or plural); in the fewer cases where the auxiliary is _être_, the past participle does agree.


Athaulf said:


> ...in Serbian you actually can't just say "I worked" -- you have to specifically say "I masculine-worked" or "I feminine-worked."


So in Serbian, it always agree with the subject?


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## natasha2000

geve said:


> So in Serbian, it always agree with the subject?


 
Yes, because Serbian/Croatian has also neutral gender, too.

Man has worked.
Čovek je radi-O.

Woman has worked.
Žena je radi-LA.

Child has worked.
Dete je radi-LO.

As you can see, the base is RADI-, and the sufixes are:
Masculine -O
Femenine -LA
Neuter -LO


----------



## geve

I have no problem whatsoever with "Bonjour à tous" - the French equivalent of "Hola a todos". I don't feel excluded, I feel included in a group regardless of the sex of people in this group. Actually, maybe I feel more included than if someone said "Bonjour à toutes et à tous" (Hola a todas y todos), which separates the group into two categories: "tous"(todos) on one side, and "toutes"(todas) on the other side. (Natasha, I think that's what mirx said in a way )
But that's because I don't feel threatened as a woman; I don't need the existence of my sex to be acknowledged every time someone speaks.

Sometimes I say jokingly "Salut les gars"(hi guys) to an assembly of women, or "Salut les filles"(hi girls) even if there is one male person in the group - and I mean this in the inclusive manner too: we're having a girls' night, and you're one of us too! (I usually pick friends with a good sense of humour)


Lusitania said:


> would you feel confortable to called: anchorman, cameraman pr chairman?


About names of professions, I'm not shocked either. (There are so many other things to get shocked at!) 
Were I to write a best-seller, no, I wouldn't want people to call me an _"auteure"_ (built on the masculine word "auteur"/author) because it has no logic and you can't even hear the difference, so to me it just looks like a spelling mistake; nor would I like to be called _"écrivaine"_ (built on the masculine word "écrivain"/writer), because in "écrivaine" you hear "vaine" too much (=unproductive or trivial). Please just call me _auteur_ or _écrivain_; yes, they're masculine words, but they're the words that describe what I do (in my theoretical example that is - don't go looking for books written by geve!). 



Lusitania said:


> Now what I meant was words like Mankind to be turned into Human Kind, Humanity, that of "All men are created equal" can be said but I don't feel included.


Lusitania, in "Humanity" there is "man"... As a matter of fact, in "woman" there is "man"!!


----------



## Fernando

If we begin the witchhunt, I propose the following words to change their gender to neuter. The following words are FEMENINE in Spanish:

Beauty, Intelligence, Science, Mathematics, Truth, Nature, Religion, Medicine, Goodness...

Meanwhile, you have god and goddess (Sp. dios/diosa) but you do not have woman-devil (Sp. f. diablesa is weird).

People (f.) who makes cinema (m.) are making films (f.). I am a person (f.) who studied Law (m.), which deal with laws (f.) and Economics (f.), who deals with money (m.).

If I want to insult someone, I will say he (m.) is an animal (m.), a pig (m.), a male-goat (m.).

Yeah, the language is sexist, in favor of who?

PS, at least in Spanish you have Humanidad (Mankind) is a femenine word.


----------



## Outsider

gaer said:


> So "hijo" could refer to a girl? That's a shock to me. If you have a girl and are referring to her, would you possible use "hijo"?


If you know that the person in question is female, you must say _hija_. However, as *Athaulf* has explained, if a woman says _Me gustaría mucho tener un hijo_, she doesn't necessarily mean "I would love to have a son". She may mean "I would love to have a child". When the true gender of the child is unknown or when you are being generic, you default to the masculine.



gaer said:


> What in blazes do we call a noun referring to the sex of a human being that is sometimes male only and sometimes either male or female?


Nouns are neither *male* nor *female*; they are abstractions. Only living beings can be "male" or "female". That's a confusion that English speakers often make when thinking about grammatical gender.

The noun _hijo_ is *masculine* in Spanish. This is a grammatical *label*, not a physical or psychological descriptor.



gaer said:


> If so, and I trust what you say, I would still like to know how such words are classified.
> 
> I wonder, for instance, what the correct word or temr would be for "child". If we don't consider a word as "neuter" that can describe people of either sex, how do we classify such a word?


The proper term is simply "masculine". That's how the masculine gender normally works, at least in Romance languages.


----------



## Outsider

natasha2000 said:


> On the other hand, a word "hermano"occurs to me as an example of a word that in singular referrs only to male and in plural it can refer to both female and male, as well as only to male.
> 
> hermano - brother
> hermana - sister
> hermanos - brothers, or brothers and sisters


_Hermano_ works just like _hijo_ and _niño_.

_Me gustaría tener un hermano._ --> "I wish I had a brother" , or "I wish I had a sibling" 

The reason why you normally don't notice this ambivalence is that in practice when you talk about a sibling you know exactly whom you are talking about, and so you use _hermano_ if he is a male, and _hermana_ if she is female.


----------



## Lilla My

> Now what I meant was words like Mankind to be turned into Human Kind, Humanity,



Let's do it in french : so we have to stop using "on" (which can be third person, or we, or impersonal...) because it has the same origin that "homme" (man).
(Like in german : Mann and in norwegian : man, by the way)
Oh, dear ! How can we speak on without "on" ? 

Really, there's so much of this so-called sexist words and phrases that you have to eliminate/rebuild half your language if you don't want to use them !


----------



## Hakro

natasha2000 said:


> hermano - brother
> hermana - sister
> hermanos - brothers, or brothers and sisters


Finnish makes a strange exception:

veli - brother
sisar - sister
veljekset - brothers
sisarukset - brothers and sisters

In this case (but only in this case!) the word meaning both sexes is derived from the female word.


----------



## geve

Hakro said:


> Finnish makes a strange exception:
> 
> veli - brother
> sisar - sister
> veljekset - brothers
> sisarukset - brothers and sisters
> 
> In this case (but only in this case!) the word meaning both sexes is derived from the female word.


I remember that, you had mentioned this interesting fact in a thread in Français seulement. 
"Sisarukset" is still a sexist word though - sexist towards men. We would need to invent a word independent of the words "brother" and "sister" to avoid hurting anyone's feelings.


----------



## Fernando

geve said:


> We would need to invent a word independent of the words "brother" and "sister" to avoid hurting anyone's feelings.



As a man, I can live with that. I am sure we can use our time for better uses.


----------



## Hakro

geve said:


> I remember that, you had mentioned this interesting fact in a thread in Français seulement.
> "Sisarukset" is still a sexist word though - sexist towards men. We would need to invent a word independent of the words "brother" and "sister" to avoid hurting anyone's feelings.


How could you remember it? I had forgotten!

In my family we were seven brothers and only one sister, and still we were called "sisarukset"! But it didn't hurt my feelings, I only wondered why is it so.


----------



## geve

Fernando said:


> As a man, I can live with that. I am sure we can use our time for better uses.


Yes, I'm sure of that too. But if some people are going to "fight for women's cause in language", they ought to be consistent and do it for male interests too. I didn't see anything in Lusitania's link to change "midwife" to "midperson" for instance.


----------



## cuchuflete

If there is anyone new to this thread who still needs help grasping that grammatical classifications are not biological descriptions, consider the Spanish slang term for penis:



> *picha*
> 
> * f*. malson. Miembro viril.
> 
> _Real Academia Española © Todos los derechos reservados_


and a female equivalent...



> *coño**.*
> (Del lat. _cŭnnus_).
> * 1.* *m*. malson. Parte externa del aparato genital de la hembra.



Gender in grammar is not the same as sex in anatomy.


----------



## DCPaco

cuchuflete said:


> I don't mean to sidetrack the social side of this conversation at all. I have a question about language. When, as a native English speaker, I attempted to learn Spanish and other Romance languages, I was taught that, in addition to masculine and feminine forms, there was a neuter gender form, which looked like the masculine, but included both genders. Is that a mistaken way to describe it, used only by foreigners?


 
The way I see it is as follows:  Both women and men can wear pants and other garments that seem to be to some degree gender neautral (of course there are women's pants and men's pants).  But men cannot wear skirts and dresses without it being ridiculed by many and when a man addresses himself in the feminine, it is usually received with shock, surprise, or laughter and consequently ridicule.  So, until a man can wear a dress and not be subjected to ridicule, I think the patriarchal form of having the general be masculine and the "other" (or the gender specific) be feminine will continue to be in place.

The neuter gender is then what both can be ad*dressed *by without being ridiculed.

Now with regard to the "Hola a todos"...even in the olden days you had presenters say:  Señores y Señoritas (the latter a title of presumed virtue and chastity)...also: Damas y Caballeros, which erases the issue of virtue or matrimonial status (but that's a whole other show).


----------



## optimistique

DCPaco said:


> The neuter gender is then what both can be ad*dressed *by without being ridiculed.


 
But that's not really an option either. In Dutch there can be no question of supposed sexism in the language, for all masculine and feminine forms are the same (that's why we usely refer to it as being non-neuter) as opposed to the neuter. 
In reference, the neuter is often used to refer to non-humans. So take for instance the phrase: "That is my sister". You could say that that sentence is very offending, for it suggests that your sister is an object, an 'it', and not a person (as it would be in : "She is my sister"). So isn't it better to be shared under the masculine form, than under the neuter form? At least, it is supposed you are a human at all. 

Also, if it makes the people desperate to rule out any anti-femininity sexism in language better: in Dutch for the third person plural pronoun, the feminine form is used (equal to the feminine singular), as in German (at least in the subject-form, the object-forms have got their own now, but they used to have the same as the feminine singular too). But there're no men complaining about that.


----------



## natasha2000

Outsider said:


> The reason why you normally don't notice this ambivalence is that in practice when you talk about a sibling you know exactly whom you are talking about, and so you use _hermano_ if he is a male, and _hermana_ if she is female.


But as I already explained, in plural, you refer to both female and male as hermanos, and you have to specify if it is male or female.


----------



## natasha2000

cuchuflete said:


> If there is anyone new to this thread who still needs help grasping that grammatical classifications are not biological descriptions, consider the Spanish slang term for penis:
> 
> 
> and a female equivalent...
> 
> 
> 
> Gender in grammar is not the same as sex in anatomy.


 

jejeje.. This was a shock for me when I heard it for the first time, since in Sebian/Croatian a female is femenine and male is masculine... The way it should be.  The first thought I had was "What a strange people, those Spaniards... "


----------



## karuna

In parallel to another thread "Should foreigners get involved in problems of another country", I have noticed that the usage of grammatical gender are often criticised by people who are not really experts in linguistics or even are not native speakers. 

Gender usage in Latvian is similar to Spanish. There are two gramatical genders – masculine and feminine and there is no neutral gender. It was never a problem for plural masculine forms to include both genders until some people learned about this PC stuff in English or in other languages. Also in Latvian linguistics there is special word to denote grammatical gender (_dzimte) _that is never used to refer to sex (_dzimums). _"Man" in a general sense in Latvian is _cilvēks (_a human_) _which is masculine noun. However, the legal term _"persona" _(a person) is feminine even it refers to to a group of men. 

I could say "_Sveiciens visiem un visām" (Hola a todos y todas) _instead of the standard "_Sveiciens visiem" (Hola a todos) _only in a very informal setting as a joke. 

Another example, the general term for black race in Latvian is _nēģeris. _This word has no negative connotations whatsoever. But some people started to avoid it because of English usage and replaced it with _melnādainais _(literally: black skinned) which actually is used as a derogatory term in colloquial speech. I would say that such influence from other languages is inevitable but it is hard to see it as positive.


----------



## .   1

geve said:


> We would need to invent a word independent of the words "brother" and "sister" to avoid hurting anyone's feelings.


We needn't take the trouble as we already have a perfectly good word derived from Old English meaning 'blood relative'.
Sibling.

.,,


----------



## képi

I think she meant in languages, like Spanish, where you have:
hermano : brother (sibling)
hermana : sister


----------



## Outsider

And Finnish, the other way around.


----------



## natasha2000

And Serbian/Croatian.
We have brothers and sisters. The only way to ask how many of them you have is just like that:
How many brothers and sisters do you have?
Koliko braće i sestara imaš?

One question:
Is it usual to hear the question in English:
How many siblings do you have?

Would you (all of you) as native speakers, ever say something like this (but without thinking about "political kerektness", please. Just, ask the question.)... Is it the normal way to ask?


----------



## geve

Yes, I was referring to "sisarukset" (see the post I was quoting), but since the problem with brother/sister isn't specific to Finnish, I used the English words since English is this thread's "working language".


----------



## maxiogee

The police in Ireland are known as The Guards, singular officers are Garda, plural they were Na Gardaí. 

This comes from the Irish title for rhe force An Garda Síochána - the Guardians of the Peace.

We eventually recruited woman and, in line with the practice then in England which has Police Constable and Women Police Constables, we named ours Bean Garda - women Guardian.

Some years ago it was deceed that the discriminatory prefix would be eliminated - all of them are now Garda.


----------



## gaer

> Originally Posted by gaer
> So "hijo" could refer to a girl? That's a shock to me. If you have a girl and are referring to her, would you possible use "hijo"?





Outsider said:


> If you know that the person in question is female, you must say _hija_. However, as *Athaulf* has explained, if a woman says _Me gustaría mucho tener un hijo_, she doesn't necessarily mean "I would love to have a son". She may mean "I would love to have a child". When the true gender of the child is unknown or when you are being generic, you default to the masculine.


Outsider, thank you for this explanation. I'm sure I must seem "thick as a brick", but this is a completely new concept for me. I know almost nothing about Spanish and absolutely nothing about Portugese.

I kept asking the same question simply because I got two answers. One was that "hijo" is "boy". Period. The other answer is that "hijo" is also used for "child", in the sense that you just explained. I believe you!



> Originally Posted by gaer
> What in blazes do we call a noun referring to the sex of a human being that is sometimes male only and sometimes either male or female?





Outsider said:


> Nouns are neither *male* nor *female*; they are abstractions.


Hold on a moment. I was talking about the sex (gender) of human beings. We are talking about two different things, which has been a huge problem throughout this thread.

Assigning a "gender" to a noun, which is the correct term, in English, for explaining what happens, at least in German, is generally but a matter of grammar, structure, etc. Call it what you wish. I was never suggesting, for instance, that in German a wall is female, a table is male, and a light is neither.


Outsider said:


> The noun _hijo_ is *masculine* in Spanish. This is a grammatical *label*, not a physical or psychological descriptor.


I understand, but my question went far beyond this one word in only one language.

Kind (child) is singular, neuter in German. Kinder, plural, is plural, neuter.
Person (person) is singular, feminine. Personen is plural, feminine.
Mensch (man, human, person) is masculine singular, Menschen, masculine plural

All three of these words retain their grammatical "genders" but describe both males and females.

However, my specific question was about singular nouns that are clearly masculine both grammatically and "descriptively", showing maleness, that represent both sexes while retaining the masculine structure in plural:

der Student (male student)
die Studentin (female student)
die Studenten (students, male or female)

"Die Studenten", masculine plural in gender, has traditionally been the correct word for talking about many students, male and female. There are many words like this in German. This has resulted in a "PC" battle over language that is hotly disputed. I'm taking no sides, merely describing the fact that it exists.

Gaer


----------



## Athaulf

natasha2000 said:


> [about certain Spanish vulgarities]
> jejeje.. This was a shock for me when I heard it for the first time, since in Sebian/Croatian a female is femenine and male is masculine... The way it should be.  The first thought I had was "What a strange people, those Spaniards... "





Croatian has at least two vulgar synonyms for the male sex organ that are of feminine gender, and I've heard at least one of them used by Serbians too. They don't have the full expressive power of the principal term, which happens to be masculine -- and which is usually one of the very first Croatian words that foreigners learn  by immersion  --  but they're widely used nevertheless. I can also think of a masculine synonym for the female counterpart, although that one is not used very widely. Medical terms for various organs in the male and female reproductive systems often also don't match their gender with the sex to which they refer. 

From your deletion of the Spanish terms above, I infer that you'd be uncomfortable with explicit discussion of these terms, so I'll spell them out below in ROT13 (you can decipher them easily by using rot13.com). 

xhenp = xvgn, xnen
cvčxn, cvmqn = zhs


----------



## cuchuflete

Athaulf said:


> From your deletion of the Spanish terms above, I infer that.....



Please don't attribute such squeamishness to a forera.  The vB software deletes quotes within quotes.  It's just the mechanics of the forum software that suppressed the words.


----------



## Athaulf

gaer said:


> However, my specific question was about singular nouns that are clearly masculine both grammatically and "descriptively", showing maleness, that represent both sexes while retaining the masculine structure in plural:
> 
> der Student (male student)
> die Studentin (female student)
> die Studenten (students, male or female)



More precisely, _die Studenten_ = an all-male or mixed group of students. For an all-female group of students, you'd say _die Studentinnen_. Completely analogous to the forms of _hijo_/_hija_ in Spanish.



gaer said:


> "Die Studenten", masculine plural in gender, has traditionally been the correct word for talking about many students, male and female. There are many words like this in German. This has resulted in a "PC" battle over language that is hotly disputed. I'm taking no sides, merely describing the fact that it exists.



But _Student_ in German is analogous to _hijo_ in Spanish in its ambiguity even in singular. Imagine, for example, that you're in a classroom that isn't filled to capacity and you want to say "There is room for one more student here." You'd say _"es gibt Platz für noch einen Student hier_,_"_ even though the student who will occupy it might well be female. (Again, I hope that my very rusty German isn't too off. )


----------



## gaer

Athaulf said:


> The whole thread has been permeated by misunderstandings of this point, even by people who are obviously familiar with languages in which gender is important gramatically, so I may have gotten a bit carried away trying to repeat it for the N-th time.


I understand. There are two problems. First, "gender" is commonly used, in English, to describe how grammar works in other languages. Referring to nouns as masculine, feminine and neuter is traditional in English.

At the same time, we have an ongoing battle about the use of the words "gender" and "sex" to "describe maleness" and "femaleness" in a biological sense.

The whole subject becomes even more comfusing when the term "neuter" is introduced when languages being discussed have only masculine and feminine "genders", grammatically. German has three "genders". I don't know how many other languages are like German.


> What made me misunderstand you was a sentence that sounded as if you were repeating the error of some previous posters, who seemed to believe that the neuter gender has something to do with the word being sex-neutral in its meaning. Again, I'm sorry if that wasn't what you meant.


No, I didn't. 


> However, I'm not sure if you are entirely correct about the singular of Spanish nouns such as hijo being male-specific. For example, if you said "quieren tener un hijo," I think it would be understood as "they want to have a child," rather than specifically as "they want to have a son."


That's been confirmed by others who know Spanish!


> In fact, I'm not sure if there are any examples of words (in any language with which I'm familiar) that are used really exclusively for males in singular.


It most definitely happens in German, and it causes the same problem that was the beginning of this thread. Masculine plural forms (gender, grammar) are used by default to mean people of both sexes/genders (biologically). 

Gaer


----------



## natasha2000

Athaulf said:


> From your deletion of the Spanish terms above, I infer that you'd be uncomfortable with explicit discussion of these terms, so I'll spell them out below in ROT13 (you can decipher them easily by using rot13.com).
> 
> xhenp = xvgn, xnen
> cvčxn, cvmqn = zhs


 
(Delition ?? I never deleted anything in my post. Maybe UI have chaged something, but deleted, noooo...)
No, Athaulf, I am not uncomfortable at all! I am a big girl, and my ears(eyes) won't melt! You should see me in Spanish forum, jejeje..
Just say it, I am not good at puzzles. The only name I can think of that has the opposite gener is "kita" i "piša", but the first one is not so strong, and the second one is used onlz for children, and I am sure a grown up man wouldn't be pleased to hear someone calling his "thingy" like this ... I suppose these are not the words you mention, since mz words have 4 letters and your words have five each one. I am curious to know about female names that have male gender.


----------



## natasha2000

gaer said:


> I kept asking the same question simply because I got two answers. One was that "hijo" is "boy". Period. The other answer is that "hijo" is also used for "child", in the sense that you just explained. I believe you!


 
A ver....

HIJO does not mean BOY. It means SON. 
HIJA means DAUGHTER.

HIJOS - CHILDREN

But, as Outsider pointed out:
Me gustaría tener un hijo.
I would like to have a child.

In this sentence, hijo, means just CHILD. It does not mean male or female. I don't give a damn about sex. I just want to have a child!

NIÑO means BOY.
NIÑA means GIRL.

But, we also can use NIÑO as CHILD.
Me gustaría tener un niño.
Me gustaría tener un hijo.
I would like to have a child. (I am not specifying the sex, I just want a baby).

Tengo tres hijos.
Tengo tres niños.
I have three children. (I am not saying their sex, just that they are mine.)


----------



## Outsider

gaer said:


> Hold on a moment. I was talking about the sex (gender) of human beings. We are talking about two different things, which has been a huge problem throughout this thread.
> 
> Assigning a "gender" to a noun, which is the correct term, in English, for explaining what happens, at least in German, is generally but a matter of grammar, structure, etc. Call it what you wish. I was never suggesting, for instance, that in German a wall is female, a table is male, and a light is neither.


You're right, I did misread you. My apologies. 

However, my reply to your question "What in blazes do we call a noun referring to the sex of a human being that is sometimes male only and sometimes either male or female?" stands. We call such a noun "masculine", because most of the time it refers to a male. But not always. (That's why we say "masculine", not "male".)



gaer said:


> I understand, but my question went far beyond this one word in only one language.
> 
> Kind (child) is singular, neuter in German. Kinder, plural, is plural, neuter.
> Person (person) is singular, feminine. Personen is plural, feminine.
> Mensch (man, human, person) is masculine singular, Menschen, masculine plural
> 
> All three of these words retain their grammatical "genders" but describe both males and females.


I think such words are called "epicene", by the way. 

To be completely clear about the examples I've used:



			
				Athaulf said:
			
		

> However, I'm not sure if you are entirely correct about the singular of Spanish nouns such as hijo being male-specific. For example, if you said "quieren tener un hijo," I think it would be understood as "they want to have a child," rather than specifically as "they want to have a son."


In that sentence, the word _hijo_ can mean _either_ "child" or "son". It's ambiguous. Whether the speaker specifically means "boys" or not has to be determined from context or additional information.


----------



## gaer

By now I assume that you know that only one level of quotes is kept, and that's what makes it so difficult to follow the logic of all that has gone before. 


Athaulf said:


> More precisely, die Studenten = an all-male or mixed group of students. For an all-female group of students, you'd say die Studentinnen. Completely analogous to the forms of hijo/hija in Spanish.


It seems to be the same "ball of wax". 


> But Student in German is analogous to hijo in Spanish in its ambiguity even in singular. Imagine, for example, that you're in a classroom that isn't filled to capacity and you want to say "There is room for one more student here." You'd say "es gibt Platz für noch einen Student hier," even though the student who will occupy it might well be female. (Again, I hope that my very rusty German isn't too off.)


I never thought about it, but you have a good point. "Wir suchen einen Studenten…"

"We're looking for a student…"

In this sense the meaning is probably "Wir suchen einen Studenten oder Studentin…" 

"We're looking for a male student or a female student…" 

And that DOES bring us right back on topic!

Gaer


----------



## Athaulf

natasha2000 said:


> (Delition ?? I never deleted anything in my post. Maybe UI have chaged something, but deleted, noooo...)
> No, Athaulf, I am not uncomfortable at all! I am a big girl, and my ears(eyes) won't melt! You should see me in Spanish forum, jejeje..



Someone else has already pointed out that the forum software automatically deletes nested quotations; I mistook this process for your intentional deletion. 

And as a note for the speakers of other languages, the words in question are indeed very bad -- although in Croatia and Serbia they are used much more intensively (and creatively ) than any swearwords in English-speaking countries. Personally, I use them all the time with my friends (especially male friends), but I'm normally reluctant to use them in front of anyone who is more than, say, 4-5 years my senior, especially ladies. But since you're interested...



> Just say it, I am not good at puzzles. The only name I can think of that has the opposite gener is "kita" i "piša", but the first one is not so strong, and the second one is used onlz for children, and I am sure a grown up man wouldn't be pleased to hear someone calling his "thingy" like this ...
> I suppose these are not the words you mention, since mz words have 4 letters and your words have five each one. I am curious to know about female names that have male gender.


I had in mind "kita" and "kara," both of which are feminine nouns for the male sex organ.  They are used very frequently in Croatia, and I've heard "kita" from Bosnian and Serbian speakers many times as well. They're not as vulgar as "kurac," but still highly vulgar -- you'd normally get into trouble for saying them in front of your parents or teachers. Also, they're usually used to refer to the organ itself, whereas "kurac" is, besides its literal meaning, probably the most flexible abstract noun in the Croatian language.  

On the other hand, sometimes you'll hear the masculine noun "muf" as a vulgar synonym for female genitals  in Croatia, but it's nowhere as frequent as the words above.


----------



## Athaulf

gaer said:


> I never thought about it, but you have a good point. "Wir suchen einen Student*en*…"  [emph. mine]



Oops.. my German is definitely getting rusty! I was often forgetting the -en suffix for animate nouns even in high school, but nowadays it seems to have completely evaporated from my head.


----------



## natasha2000

Athaulf said:


> ...whereas "kurac" is, besides its literal meaning, probably the most flexible abstract noun in the Croatian language.


Of course, in Serbian too... although I never understood why someone can be stupid as a kurac... 

You're right. I forgot all those words, very common in Serbian, too, yet they're female gender.



Athaulf said:


> On the other hand, sometimes you'll hear the masculine noun "muf" as a vulgar synonym for female genitals in Croatia, but it's nowhere as frequent as the words above


 
This is, although rare, as you say, exclusively Croatian word. I have never, never heard for this. Besides, "muf" has also its normal meaning, like "bollo" or "patata" in Spanish, and it can be used normally if the context is right.


----------



## Hakro

It came to my mind only now that in Swedish they have a word meaning "brothers and sisters" that is derived in a somehow similar way as in Finnish:

Broder = brother
Syster = sister
Syskon = brothers and sisters

Possibly it's the same in Danish and Norwegian (?).


----------



## Athaulf

geve said:


> Yes, I'm sure of that too. But if some people are going to "fight for women's cause in language", they ought to be consistent and do it for male interests too.



Just imagine all those poor men across the world who are having their masculinity brutally denied on a daily basis by being classified as _Personen_, _personas_, _pessoas_, _osobe_, _ličnosti_/_личности_, _personnes_, _personae_ and what not!


----------



## gaer

Outsider said:


> However, my reply to your question "What in blazes do we call a noun referring to the sex of a *human being that is sometimes male only and sometimes either male or female?*" stands. We call such a noun "masculine", because most of the time it refers to a male. But not always. (That's why we say "masculine", not "male".)


That whole thing was about human beings. A noun REFERRING sometimes to a *person who is clearly male*, other times to a *person who may be either male or female*. 

In other words, the noun remains masculine in gender, but the sex/gender of the person *represented* by the noun.


> I think such words are called "epicene", by the way.


That's a new word for me!

That would work for such words as "person" and "child", in English. Would it work for words in other languages when the gender of the noun is specific although the meaning is not?


> To be completely clear about the examples I've used:
> 
> In that sentence, the word _hijo_ can mean _either_ "child" or "son". It's ambiguous. Whether the speaker specifically means "boys" or not has to be determined from context or additional information.


I finally got it. 

Gaer


----------



## Outsider

Well, since the conversation has taken this path (I do hope we're not too off topic yet ), I might as well add another example. In Portuguese, most slang terms for the female genitals are feminine, and most slang words for the male genitals are... also feminine (though with one ubiquitous exception). 

In this respect, we are already thoroughly feminist.


----------



## Outsider

Athaulf said:


> Just imagine all those poor men across the world who are having their masculinity brutally denied on a daily basis by being classified as _Personen_, _personas_, _pessoas_, _osobe_...


In fairness to Lusitania and other supporters of more gender-inclusive language, they do seem to be right in that most of the time it's the masculine that is the default (even though there are a few scattered exceptions).


----------



## KaRiNe_Fr

Hakro said:


> It came to my mind only now that in Swedish they have a word meaning "brothers and sisters" that is derived in a somehow similar way as in Finnish:
> 
> Broder = brother
> Syster = sister
> Syskon = brothers and sisters
> 
> Possibly it's the same in Danish and Norwegian (?).


Actually, I find this example outstanding (along with the Finnish "sisarukset"). Is it a characteristic of northern countries i.e. less -or non?- macho countries?


----------



## Athaulf

gaer said:


> That whole thing was about human beings. A noun REFERRING sometimes to a *person who is clearly male*, other times to a *person who may be either male or female*.



Since you seem to be fascinated by the topic, here's a nice Croatian word for you: _sluga_. It means a "male servant" (a female one would be _sluškinja_ or _služavka_). "Despite" its meaning, its declension goes strictly by the rules for feminine nouns, in both singular and plural. 

Now, what's especially interesting, is that when you use _sluga_ with some corresponding adjectives and verbs in singular, you have to use their singular masculine form. However, when you use them with its plural _sluge_, you have to use the feminine plural form! So you'd have to say, for example:

_mo*j* vjern*i*__ slug*a*_  = my (sing. masc.) faithful (sing. masc.) servant (sing. fem.)
_ mo*je* vjern*e* slug*e*_ = my (plur. fem.) faithful (plur. fem.) servants (plur. fem.)

I wonder if I could publish a paper in "gender studies" arguing that this system must have been put in place by sadistic feudal overlords, who wanted to additionally torture their servants by butchering their gender identity this way. 

Oh, and since I'm already discussing Croatian, I'd love to hear an explanation of "gender theorists" why the Croatian slang word _mrga_, meaning an extremely strong and muscular man, is -- you guessed it -- feminine.


----------



## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> In fairness to Lusitania and other supporters of more gender-inclusive language, they do seem to be right in that most of the time it's the masculine that is the default (even though there are a few scattered exceptions).



Yes, but the theories that this is a consequence of some supposed patriarchal oppression, either in the past or nowadays, are sheer crackpottery. In reality, it's just an Indo-European quirk of grammar that developed due to (pre)historical accident. 

The true story -- to the extent that it can be reconstructed -- is that the proto-IE language initially had only two genders that had no correlation with sex, but instead roughly corresponded to nouns denoting animate and inanimate objects. The feminine gender developed only later, and came to be strongly correlated with nouns denoting female humans and animals through a process that's still unclear. Thus, the universality of the masculine gender is a consequence of the fact that it developed from the original "animate" gender, which was the only one used to denote humans in the very ancient (nobody even knows how ancient) past. 

And the final nail in the coffin of the "patriarchy through language" theories should be a common sense observation of genders in non-IE languages. Most non-IE languages don't even have genders correlated with biological sex, if they have any at all. This includes Hungarian and Basque, spoken by peoples that share the same old nasty patriarchal traditions of Europe. Oh, and purely gender-free languages have been spoken for centuries in those bastions of women's liberation called Turkey and Iran -- the latter having the only IE language whose speakers have actually dropped the grammatical genders through a spontaneous process!

_Sapienti sat._


----------



## Athaulf

natasha2000 said:


> This [muf] is, although rare, as you say, exclusively Croatian word. I have never, never heard for this. Besides, "muf" has also its normal meaning, like "bollo" or "patata" in Spanish, and it can be used normally if the context is right.



Well, _kita_ can also mean a bouquet of flowers, and _kara_ can mean (in Northern Croatia) diamonds in a pack of cards.  The former meaning, however, is unsurprisingly becoming rare among the younger generations.


----------



## Athaulf

optimistique said:


> In reference, the neuter is often used to refer to non-humans. So take for instance the phrase: "That is my sister". You could say that that sentence is very offending, for it suggests that your sister is an object, an 'it', and not a person (as it would be in : "She is my sister"). So isn't it better to be shared under the masculine form, than under the neuter form? At least, it is supposed you are a human at all.



I don't know about Dutch, but in many languages that make extensive use of neuter, there are no such connotations to neuter whatsoever. To take the example of those with which I'm most familiar, that are many neuter nouns in Croatian and Serbian that are used to refer to people in cordial, approving, and affectionate ways.


----------



## Outsider

But would you use a neuter demonstrative to talk about a person?


----------



## Vin Raven

Athaulf said:


> On the other hand, sometimes you'll hear the masculine noun "muf" as a vulgar synonym for female genitals  in Croatia, but it's nowhere as frequent as the words above.



In english "muff" is used to mean female genitals as well, though it's becoming less frequent since ladies don't use furry muffs as often to keep their hands warm and they tend to be less furry themselves these days too. 
(That and "muff" is more commonly used to mean "to handle clumsily", something one should never do to with female genitals).  


Oh, and on subject, "Actor" was always a genderless term until some silly 18th century people decided that they'd add the word "actress" to the English language.


----------



## ireney

Well, child in Greek is neuter. Girl is neuter. Boy too.  Most of the diminutives we use to call our children, loved ones etc are also in neuter too. There's a male, a female and a neuter for the denoting brother/sister.  We make quite heavy use of the neuter but we'd still be in a world of trouble if we tried to take gender out of our language -plus we have those female and neuter nouns and adjectives that take male endings; it's a mess I tell you.


----------



## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> But would you use a neuter demonstrative to talk about a person?



Yes, definitely, even if you're pointing out someone described by a M or F noun. For example:_

"ovo je moj brat" = _"this (N) is my brother (M)"


----------



## Outsider

That's very curious, because it's quite impossible to do that in Spanish or Portuguese. (There is a trace of the neuter in the Spanish and Portuguese demonstratives, as you may already know.)

Éste es mi hermano. "This (m.) is my brother." 
Ésta es mi hermana. "This (f.) is my sister." 
Esto es mi hermano. "This (n.) is my brother."    

The neuter demonstratives are strictly for "things" and "stuff", never people, unless you're trying to be funny, or insulting.


----------



## Vin Raven

Outsider said:


> That's very curious, because it's quite impossible to do that in Spanish or Portuguese. (There is a trace of the neuter in the Spanish and Portuguese demonstratives, as you may already know.)
> 
> Éste es mi hermano. "This (m.) is my brother."
> Ésta es mi hermana. "This (f.) is my sister."
> Esto es mi hermano. "This (n.) is my brother."
> 
> The neuter demonstratives are strictly for "things" and "stuff", never people, unless you're trying to be funny, or insulting.



Well...
In Portuguese you could sort of say:

Isto é meu irmão. "This (m.) is my brother." 
Isto é  minha irmã. "This (f.) is my sister."


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## Outsider

I can imagine saying that, for instance, if I were showing someone some photos of my brother and my sister. But my interpretation is that the neuter demonstrative _isto_ is accepted in that case because it's understood that I'm referring to the photos, not to the people themselves. At least, this is how I interpret it.



Vin Raven said:


> Isto é meu irmão. "This (m.) (n.) is my brother."
> Isto é  minha irmã. "This (f.) (n.) is my sister."


Neuter is neuter is neuter.


----------



## karuna

I remembered one funny fact about gender in Latvian. Although noun deminutives in Latvian usually don't change the gender of the original word, the deminutives of female names sometimes are of the masculine gender. It just increases the cuteness and doesn't imply any masculineness whatsoever. For example: _Maija (f.) – Maijēns, Maijuks, Maijucis (m.)._


----------



## Flaminius

Japanese has no grammatical gender but gender consciousness in society is affecting the language.

Until very recently (maybe 15 or so years ago), the pronoun for the third person plural was _karera_ (kare [he] + ra [plural suffix]).  One can now read newspapers and spot _karera kanojora_ (kanojo [she] + ra) juxtaposed to "make the reference inclusive."  _Kanojora_ has been, and still is, used to mean a group of people consisting of women exclusively.

The word _kare_ was added to Japanese in the late 19th century in order to translate European third person pronouns.  In the beginning it was used both for a man and a woman.  How funny that we descended from gender-inclusiveness.


----------



## Brioche

Vin Raven said:


> Oh, and on subject, "Actor" was always a genderless term until some silly 18th century people decided that they'd add the word "actress" to the English language.


 
That may have something to do with the fact that women did not act on the stage.

If you had seen Romeo and Juliet, or Antony and Cleopatra in the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare's time, the roles of Juliet and Cleopatra would have been played by boys.


----------



## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> That's very curious, because it's quite impossible to do that in Spanish or Portuguese. (There is a trace of the neuter in the Spanish and Portuguese demonstratives, as you may already know.)
> 
> Éste es mi hermano. "This (m.) is my brother."
> Ésta es mi hermana. "This (f.) is my sister."
> Esto es mi hermano. "This (n.) is my brother."
> 
> The neuter demonstratives are strictly for "things" and "stuff", never people, unless you're trying to be funny, or insulting.



Yes, this is in fact something where I'll often make a mistake in Spanish because of my Croatian intuition. Croatian has demonstrative pronouns _ovo_/_to_/_ono_ that correspond very nicely to the Spanish _esto_/_eso_/_aquello_, especially because both languages feature all three genders in this case. But in Croatian sentences that use the above pattern, you always use the neuter form of the demonstrative pronoun. The pronoun will agree with the noun only if it precedes it like an adjective, _e.g. ést*e *hombre= ov*aj* čovjek_; _é__st*a* mujer_ _= ov*a* žena_. But _ést*a* es mi hermana = ov*o* je moja sestra. 

_(I'm not sure if the common feminine and neuter suffixes, which you've probably noticed, are an accident or a consequence of some deep-rooted ancient Indo-European connection. The feminine is most likely the latter.)


----------



## Brioche

geve said:


> Yes, I'm sure of that too. But if some people are going to "fight for women's cause in language", they ought to be consistent and do it for male interests too. I didn't see anything in Lusitania's link to change "midwife" to "midperson" for instance.


 
The "wife" in midwife is the "wife" [Old English = female person] giving birth.

The midwife is the person who is "with the woman".


----------



## Athaulf

karuna said:


> I remembered one funny fact about gender in Latvian. Although noun deminutives in Latvian usually don't change the gender of the original word, the deminutives of female names sometimes are of the masculine gender. It just increases the cuteness and doesn't imply any masculineness whatsoever. For example: _Maija (f.) – Maijēns, Maijuks, Maijucis (m.)._



Heh heh... in Croatian and Serbian, we have an even better situation, where augmentatives of masculine nouns are usually feminine!  

Such augmentatives are commonly used either to add the meaning of physical greatness, or to add extreme pejorative or eulogistic meanings (which usually depends on whether the noun has positive or negative connotations to start with).

Thus _ljudina,_ the augmentative of "man" -- used to denote a very big man or, figuratively, a man of grand personality -- is feminine. Or, while _pijanac_, meaning _drunkard_, is masculine, its augmentative _pijandura_, meaning a really bad drunkard, is feminine. As an opposite example, _junak_ is a masculine noun for _hero_, and its feminine augmentative _junačina _would be used when talking about a truly extraordinary hero. 

I would really like to see a feminist language theorist trying to make some sense out of this.


----------



## Athaulf

natasha2000 said:


> I don't know about Croatian, but the recent discovery of PREDUZIMAČICA, PREVODITELJKA, BORKINJA (od borac, naravno), PSIHOLOŠKINJA (od psiholog) ETC in Serbian made my hair go up!



Oh, so in Serbia, the language re-engineering forces are also alive and kicking, though driven by ideology quite different from that which motivates such forces in Croatia! 

In Croatian, I haven't noticed similar trends, but then, I've been living outside of Croatia for the past few years. For some of the terms above, Croatian actually has masculine/feminine pairs that sound quite natural, e.g. _poduzetnik_/_poduzetnica _or _prevoditelj_/_prevoditeljica_. I don't really know how these latter words sound to a Serbian ear, but they sound quite OK to me. Last time I checked, they were normally used according to the already discussed _hijo_/_hija_ pattern -- except that it wouldn't sound strange if a woman used a masculine term for herself, or if the masculine term was used for an individual woman.


----------



## Athaulf

KaRiNe_Fr said:


> Actually, I find this example outstanding (along with the Finnish "sisarukset"). Is it a characteristic of northern countries i.e. less -or non?- macho countries?



I certainly wouldn't characterize the culture of the part of the world that I come from as non-macho -- and the augmentative (and other) nouns that we use to express extremes of virility are virtually all feminine (more details in my post above). 

In other words, if you're looking for connections between grammatical genders and culture, you're wasting your time.


----------



## gaer

natasha2000 said:


> A ver....
> 
> HIJO does not mean BOY. It means SON.
> HIJA means DAUGHTER.


This is embarrassing because I actually know that. I think I know perhaps 50 words in Spanish, and that is one.


----------



## Athaulf

geve said:


> _Assis_ in Outsider's example is the past participle of the verb "asseoir", and as such, a part of the _passé composé_, along with the auxiliary. If the auxiliary is _avoir_, the past participle doesn't agree (gender or plural); in the fewer cases where the auxiliary is _être_, the past participle does agree.
> 
> So in Serbian, it always agree with the subject?



Then this example from French is indeed a very good analogy.

In Serbian and Croatian, the perfect tense is formed from the present of the auxiliary verb _biti_ (otherwise meaning _to be_) and the past active participle of the verb, whose suffix has to agree with the gender and number of the subject. This holds for all verbs without exception, and the forms of the participle are always different for each gender.


----------



## natasha2000

Athaulf said:


> Oh, so in Serbia, the language re-engineering forces are also alive and kicking, though driven by ideology quite different from that which motivates such forces in Croatia!


You see, we are all feminist movement now!  I knew about this recently, too. Since I don't live either for quite while in my country, it was via other forum in Serbian language I participate. If yo ask me, it's language harrassment.



Athaulf said:


> In Croatian, I haven't noticed similar trends, but then, I've been living outside of Croatia for the past few years. For some of the terms above, Croatian actually has masculine/feminine pairs that sound quite natural, e.g. _poduzetnik_/_poduzetnica _or _prevoditelj_/_prevoditeljica_. I don't really know how these latter words sound to a Serbian ear, but they sound quite OK to me. Last time I checked, they were normally used according to the already discussed _hijo_/_hija_ pattern -- except that it wouldn't sound strange if a woman used a masculine term for herself, or if the masculine term was used for an individual woman


 
Yes, I know about that. I think Croatian has been always let's say "more feminist" than Serbian. We are still good old "machist" ...
Now seriously. prevoditeljica or prevoditeljka sound awful to Serbian ear. Rektorka, direktorka, pravnica, doktorka, advokatica etc. sound natural but in colloquial language, if I were a manager or a University dean, I would never officialy introduce myself as a Direktorka or Rektorka, But Direktor and Rektor, or Pravnik. Advokat, Doktor etc.

What about borkinja? This just... Isn't right. I don't see it as amale/female thing. It is just a name of profession and that's it. 
The latest stupidity I heard is medicinski brat, because if there is a medicinska sestra, than it must be medicinski brat. For others, medicinska sestra means nurse, but the literally, the words that used are "medical sister". Now medical brother sounds stupid, stupid, stupid! But there is a tendency to call males like this. I just don't know what's wrong with the already existing word that is completely accepted and has been used for a long time - bolničar. There is also a female variant - bolničarka.


----------



## Zoowärter

I am starting to wonder; somewhere above someone stated correctly that the English word "gender" replaced the word "sex" (in a social sense). In German there is a third word ("Geschlecht") which now means boilogical sex, yet a couple hundred years ago meant "family"...
Is there a simiar context in other languages (referring to family)??? Apparently gender correct terms are an issue at the least for discussion in most languages.


----------



## Hakro

Zoowärter said:


> I am starting to wonder; somewhere above someone stated correctly that the English word "gender" replaced the word "sex" (in a social sense). In German there is a third word ("Geschlecht") which now means boilogical sex, yet a couple hundred years ago meant "family"...
> Is there a simiar context in other languages (referring to family)??? Apparently gender correct terms are an issue at the least for discussion in most languages.


In Finnish we use the word _suku_ (= Geschlecht, family) for grammatical gender, but also the word for sex, _sukupuoli_, is derived from the same word. ("puoli" = literally half, side, part)


----------



## Zoowärter

And which word or phrase would be used for "gender" in the social sense, ie. "gender studies"?


----------



## geve

Zoowärter said:


> I am starting to wonder; somewhere above someone stated correctly that the English word "gender" replaced the word "sex" (in a social sense). In German there is a third word ("Geschlecht") which now means boilogical sex, yet a couple hundred years ago meant "family"...
> Is there a simiar context in other languages (referring to family)??? Apparently gender correct terms are an issue at the least for discussion in most languages.


I don't think that in French the word "genre" (gender of words) is very common to refer to people's sex... yet.

They couldn't replace "sexe" by "genre" in administrative papers anyway, since "genre" also means more broadly "type/sort/kind". Hmm, what type am I? Too vast a question, and highly politically incorrect!... One could just fill "humain" (le genre humain = the humankind) 
Is "gender" in English actually used on paperwork?


----------



## Hakro

Zoowärter said:


> And which word or phrase would be used for "gender" in the social sense, ie. "gender studies"?


We use the word _sukupuoli_, i.e. sex.


----------



## Athaulf

geve said:


> I don't think that in French the word "genre" (gender of words) is very common to refer to people's sex... yet.
> 
> They couldn't replace "sexe" by "genre" in administrative papers anyway, since "genre" also means more broadly "type/sort/kind". Hmm, what type am I? Too vast a question, and highly politically incorrect!... One could just fill "humain" (le genre humain = the humankind)



Using _genre_ for "sex" would sound like a hilarious piece of surrealist humor to me, but that's because in my native language, _genre_ exists as a loanword (spelled _žanr_) that can mean only a genre in film or literature.  

But from what I've seen, the unfortunate phenomenon of sex/gender confusion seems to be spreading from English to many other languages rapidly. 

In Croatian, the word _rod _is used to denote grammatical gender. It can also mean "genus" in biology and, somewhat archaically, something like a "family" or "tribe." However, I've already noticed some PC-eager folks using it instead of _spol_, which is the proper word for biological sex. 



> Is "gender" in English actually used on paperwork?


Yes, it's increasingly replacing "sex" on various forms.

The funny thing is that various uptight conservative types, who otherwise fervently object to any PC-driven innovations, probably support this one because it relieves them from having to look at the dirty S-word on formal documents.


----------



## Lilla My

Hakro said:


> It came to my mind only now that in Swedish they have a word meaning "brothers and sisters" that is derived in a somehow similar way as in Finnish:
> 
> Broder = brother
> Syster = sister
> Syskon = brothers and sisters
> 
> Possibly it's the same in Danish and Norwegian (?).



Yes, it is ! In Norwegian : 
bror = brother
søster = sister
søsken = brothers and sisters

In danish, I'm not sure, but I think it also exists.


----------



## !netko!

Athaulf said:


> In Croatian, the word _rod _is used to denote grammatical gender. It can also mean "genus" in biology and, somewhat archaically, something like a "family" or "tribe." However, I've already noticed some PC-eager folks using it instead of _spol_, which is the proper word for biological sex.


 
Actually, in Croatian, "rod" also means non-grammatical "gender". For example, in Croatian a transgender person is called "transrodna osoba" (in Croatian this expression sounds terrible, but it seems to be valid). Of course, it's wrong to use "rod" meaning "spol".


Anyway, I think most languages are inherently sexist. I'm not referring to grammatical gender, I'm perfectly aware it has no real connection to human gender. I'm referring to the usage of male forms of words (verbs, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, you name it) meaning both male or female. 

Also, fixed expressions. For example in Croatian "bratska ljubav" stands for "sibling affection", but literally means "brotherly affection"). So, what a sister and a brother, or even ten sisters and a single brother, feel for each other is "brotherly affection". Worse, "siblings" is actually translated as "braća"(brothers), so it's correct to say that ten sisters and a brother are brothers (meaning "siblings"). I know in some languages there are similar examples "at the expense" of men, but I can't really remember any in Croatian. 

I'm not happy about such things, but I accept them as a normal part of language. They reflect centuries of oppression of women, yes. But they are also impossible to change. To make my native language "politically correct" you'd have to destroy it. Which is, obviously, something I definitely don't want to happen. But , where steps in the right direction can be undertaken, such as putting both the female and male forms of words for occupations on documents, I'm definitely in favor.

Of the languages I've studied English is the least sexist. It's not perfect, but compared to Croatian, it's just heavenly. Of course, that doesn't reflect more of an egalitarian outlook, just a different evolution of grammar and vocabulary. But due to that, in English the somewhat touchy subject of using male forms while actually talking about both men and women is practically non-existent. That's quite handy. 

For that reason, I don't like words like "actress", "empress" and such. They imply all the other words in English refer to males and are simply in lack of a female form. Without -ess words, all the words in English could be thought of as neutral. 

Also, I know that as a non-native speaker I really don't have a say in this, but why are so many people against replacing "he or she" with "they" and "his or her". It seems to simplify matters. And, probably due to being taught to do so as a child, I always use "they" and "their" and it sounds completely natural to me. Does it really sound so fake to native ears?


----------



## natasha2000

!netko! said:


> Also, fixed expressions. For example in Croatian "bratska ljubav" stands for "sibling affection", but literally means "brotherly affection"). So, what a sister and a brother, or even ten sisters and a single brother, feel for each other is "brotherly affection". Worse, "siblings" is actually translated as "braća"(brothers), so it's correct to say that ten sisters and a brother are brothers (meaning "siblings"). I know in some languages there are similar examples "at the expense" of men, but I can't really remember any in Croatian.


 
Interesting. In Serbian we don't do that. We just say brothers and sisters.

And we also make difference between love of a brother and a sister, because they're not the same. As it comes from a woman, sister's love towards a brother is completely unselfish and more sacrifying than the one that comes from the brother towards sister. Maybe many of you wouldn't agree, but this is what is considered in Serbia... Usualy, people add as a proof: Have you ever heard that a sister killed a brother? No? And brother that killed his own sister?


----------



## David

I can take "everyone is entitled to his own opinion," or tolerate, for reasons of p.c.,  "everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion," or "all people are entitled to their own opinions," but I  H A T E "Each person gave their opinion," "Each student should invite their mother to the Mother's Day party." Makes no bleedin' sense.


----------



## !netko!

@ natasha:
Well, of course you can say "brothers and sisters" in Croatian, actually, most young people will say that. But it's nothing unusual to use "brothers" meaning siblings. You really don't have that in Serbian?

@David:
I was actually really surprised when I first heard that "they" wasn't the norm in such cases. It's completely engraved in my head. Also, I just figured out that probably it's partly because in Croatian, you can't say: "everyone is entitled to his own opinion". Nor can you say: "Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion". Instead of "his" or "her" we use the possesive-reflexive pronoun, which is gender non-specific. So in a way, "everyone is entitled to their own opinion"  sounds best to me because of my native language.


----------



## Namakemono

I haven't read all the posts in this lengthy thread, but I would like to say a few things about Spanish language and sex. I hope nobody beat me to it.First of all, the "masculino genérico" goes all the way back to ancient Rome, and is used for the sake of language economy, not discrimination. This use of masculine also applies to objects, not only people.Some Spanish groups refuse to accept it and bring forth laughable propositions, such as adding an a at the end of every substantive they perceive as sexist (like "presidente"). They fail to realize that words ending in -nte have always been used for masculine and feminine. Also, why don't they want to add os at the end of words like "pianista" or "psiquiatra". Aren't those words sexist as well?


----------



## Outsider

My initial reaction to the use of "gender" for "sex" in English was also to shake my head thinking "How Victorian!" But, as I've learned a bit more about gender studies, I think it makes perfect sense, in English and in other languages.

The central goal of gender studies is to study sexuality (or more properly sexual identity) as a _socially constructed and conditioned_ phenomenon. So I understand why those who study this preferred to coin a new term. Calling it "sex studies" would tend to give the wrong idea.


----------



## Victoria32

Lusitania said:


> Hello to all of you, Ladies and Gentlemen,
> 
> I receive a PM from one of the foreros saying that I should avoid saying "Olá a todos e a todas" making the distinction between genders as the norm has always been the Masculino Plural and that is the correct way of doing it. I replied saying that I didn't felt included and I didn't agree to which he replied that I was ignorant regarding Languages facts.
> 
> I decided to put a thread on the Portuguese forum to have the opinion of other portuguese speaking people and it seems that they mostly agree with him.
> So I'm bringing the issue to a broader audience and hopefully get more views from other countries.
> 
> Should/do women feel included in this male norm?
> 
> Do you think that we should move further to non-sexist languages or should we just leave it as it is because it has always been like that?
> 
> Many thanks


Hello Lusitania, and thank you for raising this. I have *never* felt included by the male norm. My first experience of it was as a 10 year old writing to my mother's aunt and uncle (we didn't have any grandparents). My Mum told me to address the envelope "Mr & Mrs (His Name) Fraser" and I was quite astounded that Auntie Molly didn't get her own name - but Mum told me that That Was the Rule.
Fast forward - many years later - generic _*he*_ still gets to me,  mostly when I hear it on American TV (and 80% of TV we have in New Zealand is American.. which is why NZ children use American vocabulary, grammar and so help me, accents.) 

But to see an American Mom on a TV show picking up an animal of unknown gender and call it 'he', and on one occasion (I swear it's true) to refer to a cow in a field, not a bull - as he, give me a break!

In the 1980s, I used to insist on being called a woman (not a girl or a lady) and on those around me greeting mixed groups as  "men  and women" or "girls and guys" (not just "Hi, guys" ) but I have largely given up - only my sons ever listened to me, and they were kids then.

(Once, as an experiment, I went around University greeting mixed groups with "Hello, girls" and without fail, the males went postal on me, even males who were one individual in  a group of 7 people!.) 

Vicky


----------



## natasha2000

!netko! said:


> @ natasha:
> Well, of course you can say "brothers and sisters" in Croatian, actually, most young people will say that. But it's nothing unusual to use "brothers" meaning siblings. You really don't have that in Serbian?


 
As far as I know, we don't. I cannot guarantee, because I cannot possibly know how people speak in all parts of Serbia, but I haven't heard until now that someone says: Imam petoro braće. Dva muška i dva ženska ? (Or how would you say this, anyway?)
*Translation: I have five borthers. Three male and two female???*

First of all, if you want to ask someone about his/her siblings, you will always ask:
Imaš li braće i/ili sestara? Imaš li brata ili sestru?
*Do you have anz brothers or sisters?*
To which the answer will always be: 
Imam. Dva brata i jednu sestru.
*(Yes, I do. Two brothers and one sister)*
Or: Imam. Jednog brata.
*Yes, I do. One brother.*
Or: Imam jednu sestru.
*Yes, Ia do. I have one sister.*
To me it sounds vierd to say *braća* for both brothers and sisters together.


----------



## !netko!

It sounds weird to me too. And absurd also. And, as I said, most (all?) young people, including me, would say "brothers and sisters". But, yes, often you'll still hear sentences similar to the one from your post (although in the specific case you mention, it would be really be over the top to say it in that way). And, as far as I know, such sentences are correct. Thankfully, that way of speaking seems to be dieing out...


----------



## .   1

David said:


> I can take "everyone is entitled to his own opinion," or tolerate, for reasons of p.c., "everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion," or "all people are entitled to their own opinions," but I H A T E "Each person gave their opinion," "Each student should invite their mother to the Mother's Day party." Makes no bleedin' sense.


Why does it make no bleedin'sense?
*Each student should invite their mother to the Mothers' Day party.*
I just can not see how you can make that sentence more elegant.  It is clear, concise and conveys information with no chance of ambiguity and seems to me to make perfect sense.

.,,


----------



## danielfranco

I suppose it doesn't make much sense if one uses the "each" to mean "just one guy/girl/Martian at a time", instead of trying to mean "all of them together, piled up like fire logs", or something....
Each student (one by one) should invite his momma, and all students should invite theirs.
I guess...


----------



## .   1

danielfranco said:


> I suppose it doesn't make much sense if one uses the "each" to mean "just one guy/girl/Martian at a time", instead of trying to mean "all of them together, piled up like fire logs", or something....
> Each student (one by one) should invite his momma, and all students should invite theirs.
> I guess...


Gee you'd have to be trying hard to misunderstand in that direction and even so the resultant message is still the same; boys and girls together should all or each invite each of their respective mothers.  There is still no possibility of exclusion as could be the case when using the male only pronoun and to employ both male and female pronouns when there are only two genders sounds redundant.
Their is a perfectly understandable and widely accepted unisex pronoun.

.,,


----------



## gaer

Zoowärter said:


> I am starting to wonder; somewhere above someone stated correctly that the English word "gender" replaced the word "sex" (in a social sense).


Many people have tried to make this so, but it has not been completely succsessful.

For instance, "the fairer sex" (referring to women) is not likely to change to "the fairer gender".


----------



## cuchuflete

Has anyone come across a gender transmitted disease?


----------



## gaer

cuchuflete said:


> Has anyone come across a gender transmitted disease?


How about: The battle of the genders.


----------



## .   1

cuchuflete said:


> Has anyone come across a gender transmitted disease?


Love can be inter gender or intra gender disease depending on your bent.

.,,


----------



## Athaulf

!netko! said:


> Actually, in Croatian, "rod" also means non-grammatical "gender". For example, in Croatian a transgender person is called "transrodna osoba" (in Croatian this expression sounds terrible, but it seems to be valid). Of course, it's wrong to use "rod" meaning "spol".


 
I'm pretty sure that's a recent novelty that came about as a calque of the English "gender" in such contexts. I have yet to hear anyone inquiring about the "rod" of a person in real life. And I've never heard the adjective "transrodni" (which really sounds ugly as hell). For this notion, "transseksualni"/"transseksualac" is normally used.



> Anyway, I think most languages are inherently sexist. I'm not referring to grammatical gender, I'm perfectly aware it has no real connection to human gender. I'm referring to the usage of male forms of words (verbs, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, you name it) meaning both male or female.
> [...]
> I'm not happy about such things, but I accept them as a normal part of language. They reflect centuries of oppression of women, yes.


"Most languages"?! Even if you were familiar with _all _the Indo-European languages, it would still expose you to only a single-digit percentage of all the world's languages -- most of which have nothing comparable to the IE concept of grammatical gender. You can hear one such language if you just cross Drava, even though people speaking it are certainly no less sexist than their neighbors.  

Furthermore, I have already written several posts in this thread explaining why the theories linking the universality of the masculine gender in IE languages with sexist oppression are naive and wrong. You might want to check them out:
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?p=1972886#post1972886
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?p=1967164#post1967164
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?p=1966332#post1966332

And from a "gender" perspective, I'd like to hear what you have to say about this phenomenon in our language?


----------



## Lusitania

cuchuflete said:


> Has anyone come across a gender transmitted disease?


 

Yes, Machismo


----------



## Lusitania

Namakemono said:


> I haven't read all the posts in this lengthy thread, but I would like to say a few things about Spanish language and sex. I hope nobody beat me to it.First of all, the "masculino genérico" goes all the way back to ancient Rome, and is used for the sake of language economy, not discrimination. This use of masculine also applies to objects, not only people.Some Spanish groups refuse to accept it and bring forth laughable propositions, such as adding an a at the end of every substantive they perceive as sexist (like "presidente"). They fail to realize that words ending in -nte have always been used for masculine and feminine. Also, why don't they want to add os at the end of words like "pianista" or "psiquiatra". Aren't those words sexist as well?


 

Like recepcionista, secretária, enfermeira, doméstica. It's not like changing them all. But also reflect on why some of them are feminine. Other can be be changed. But my initial post was basically was basically because greeting people "Hola a todos y a todas" made someone send me a PM telling me no to do it as it was wrong and I asked why as I didn't felt included in the Male Plural and he called me ignorant.

I have the right to your own ideas, I should also questioned them and try to learn from others. Still, here, besides women invisibility throughout history and male domination in general. I still can't see why are some people so bothered when it comes to include women and look at languages on a gender perspective. (and I don't mean you specifically)

Should I just say Hola a todas? How would you feel if it was the other way around?


----------



## Lusitania

David said:


> I can take "everyone is entitled to his own opinion," or tolerate, for reasons of p.c., "everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion," or "all people are entitled to their own opinions," but I H A T E "Each person gave their opinion," "Each student should invite their mother to the Mother's Day party." Makes no bleedin' sense.


 

I think you are mixing up things. Everyone and all should be ok. What I mean is Mankind vs Human Kind and other examples like these.


----------



## Outsider

Lusitania said:


> I still can't see why are some people so bothered when it comes to include women and look at languages on a gender perspective.


I don't see anyone objecting to the inclusion of women. What several people have noted is that expressions such as "Olá a todos" already include women. You simply refuse to acknowledge that they do.


----------



## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> My initial reaction to the use of "gender" for "sex" in English was also to shake my head thinking "How Victorian!" But, as I've learned a bit more about gender studies, I think it makes perfect sense, in English and in other languages.
> 
> The central goal of gender studies is to study sexuality (or more properly sexual identity) as a _socially constructed and conditioned_ phenomenon. So I understand why those who study this preferred to coin a new term. Calling it "sex studies" would tend to give the wrong idea.


 

I'm glad that you got something out of it. Hopefully you aren't being ironic or pedante as you enjoy being sometimes. 
Gender studies is not aiming on sexuality only. It's like understanding the world around you in a different perspective. There other areas also into sexual identities. 
Its origin is not that recent.

Sex and Gender are different concepts, sex is studied by biologists and other fields of expertises, although they might also see it in a Gender perspective. Some already do.


----------



## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> I don't see anyone objecting to the inclusion of women. What several people have noted is that expressions such as "Olá a todos" already include women. You simply refuse to acknowledge that they do.


 
I regret to have spend so much time in writing you the previous post.

Probably you also failed to see people that don't feel included in the Male Plural. Usually I try to avoid to reply to these kind of threads as I know that it's useless. This time I really wanted to do it, usually I don't, because I know that most of the people who think like you will come forward, others just let it go to avoid it as they find it useless to explain such issues to people that resist change.


----------



## Athaulf

Lusitania said:


> LI still can't see why are some people so bothered when it comes to include women and look at languages on a gender perspective.



Because this "gender perspective" reflects, to be blunt,  ignorance about the language and its history, rather than some novel insights into them. 

It is a pain to change one's normal ways of expressing oneself in the name of ill-substantiated ideology. I also don't like being proclaimed a sexist, oppressor, and whatnot just because my language has its particular quirks of grammar for which some people have invented ideological significance out of thin air.

That's why.


----------



## Namakemono

Lusitania said:


> Should I just say Hola a todas? How would you feel if it was the other way around?


 
This proves that you identify gender with sex. If there was a generic use of feminine plural, I would use it. However, masculine plural has always been the neutral form, so if you say "hola a todas", you're treating the men in the group with disdain, and if you say "hola a todos y a todas" you are either stressing the presence of women for some reason or just being redundant. Besides, remember you also apply this to objects. It's not very "practical" to say "Las ventanas y los espejos están rotos y rotas." And don't get me started with the generic @...


----------



## Outsider

Lusitania said:


> I regret to have spend so much time in writing you the previous post.


That's a shame. I, for one, don't regret a single word I've written, or I wouldn't be here anymore.



Lusitania said:


> Probably you also failed to see people that don't feel included in the Male Plural.


I saw it, but I also saw that most people -- most women, in this case -- do not make half as much of a deal out of this issue as you seem to do.



Lusitania said:


> Usually I try to avoid to reply to these kind of threads as I know that it's useless.


You probably meant "posts", not "threads", since this thread was started by yourself.

I always thought that the purpose of discussion forums was... to discuss. But that's impossible when one of the sides in the debate (you) doesn't even wish to listen.

It became clear to me very early on in this (and the previous) thread that you are not willing to listen to any different opinions. You have already made up your mind on this issue, and that's the gospel. Good for you. But then why start a thread about this issue, when you don't care what other people think about it?

Or, if you do care about other people's opinions, you should have known that not all opinions were going to be the same as yours, when you asked for them. 



Lusitania said:


> This time I really wanted to do it, usually I don't, because I know that most of the people who think like you will come forward, others just let it go to avoid it as they find it useless to explain such issues to people that resist change.


Everyone is free to come forward and express their opinions on this matter. I have no ability to censor what people post here.

It sure looks like what you're saying there is something like "I'd love to discuss this topic -- but only with people who'll agree with me".


----------



## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> If those remarks have any relation to the post of mine you quoted, I fail to see it.
> 
> Saying "todos e todas" has absolutely zero to do with respecting / not respecting differences, in my opinion.


 

Then why are you opposing so much to the fact? Is it because it's a difference? So you oppose to including the femine as well as you oppose to others having a different opinion.

You are not respecting any differences in my opinion.


----------



## Athaulf

Lusitania said:


> Probably you also failed to see people that don't feel included in the Male Plural. Usually I try to avoid to reply to these kind of threads as I know that it's useless. This time I really wanted to do it, usually I don't, because I know that most of the people who think like you will come forward, others just let it go to avoid it as they find it useless to explain such issues to people that resist change.



But people have felt themselves included in the _masculine_ (not _male_!) plural ever since the prehistoric days when the common ancestor of your and my language didn't even include the feminine gender. It is only in recent times that some people started inventing some supposed deep ideological significance for this  grammatical peculiarity of Indo-European languages. 

In this thread, I have already produced multiple posts explaining why this "gender perspective" rests on outright false theories, and so far you haven't bothered to reply to any  of those arguments.


----------



## Lusitania

maxiogee said:


> I think your correspondent has shown that it is he who is ignorant of "languages facts".
> If the masculine plural is the 'correct' way, maybe he needs to ask why it is so, and are people happy with it being the 'correct' way


.

Thanks Max, I never felt ignorant, but I felt it has a lack of respect.



> By all means, do whatever you wish to do, or feel the need to do, in order to feel included - but most importantly, do whatever you need to do to feel comfortable when using your own language. That is how languages survive. Sticking to 'the correct way' is a surefire way to kill something which only needs a few small adjustments


 
It's already happening around here I think there is no way to stop it. Even if lots of people disagree.


----------



## cuchuflete

I accept the necessity of change, especially in attempting to combat something as pernicious as sexism.  

I haven't yet seen anything in this thread that persuades me that selective "adjustments" to grammar and orthography, often neglecting logic, are especially useful.

If a change from a grammatically masculine gender form to
a true--and sometimes invented--neutral form will really help overcome sexism in society, I would support it, not just grudgingly accept it.  

But who does the deciding?  If it makes linguistic and social sense to change Olá a todos to something else, by all means go for it.  But what about pessoa?  Is that a word that also has a link between grammatical gender and human society, including sex?  If it does, then it too would need a true neuter form or a masculine equivalent.

Simple propositions such as "Let's make language gender neutral" are fine, until one attempts a logical and rigorous implementation that suits an entire society and an entire language.  

What have I learned from this entire thread?

1—From the point of a student of language, there is a clear separation between grammatical gender and human biology.
2—Some people will dismiss the entire possibility of a relationship between grammatical gender and social behaviour. (Wrong to do so, in my opinion.)
3—Some people will impose more of a link between grammatical gender and human sex than is really there.  This is also wrong, in my opinion.  Doing so creates a firm belief that there is such a link.  It's a kind of self-perpetuating prophecy.   It also, conveniently, points to an obvious solution.  Change the language to suit the oppressed, but don't worry about the parallel irregularities that discriminate against the already empowered.

Here is an example:  





> Probably you also failed to see people that don't feel included in the Male Plural.



Sorry, but that is a faulty statement.  I do see that there are people who don't feel included, and do feel acutely excluded, in the grammatically _masculine_ plural. In English, there is no such thing as a _Male_ Plural in language, while there obviously is such a thing in biology and in society. I won't attempt a comment about these constructions in any other language.


----------



## Lusitania

cuchuflete said:


> Assuming that we want to take any perceived sexism out of language, shall we create a masculine version of _pessoas_?
> 
> Any suggestions for a non-exclusionary form of pessoas jurídicas and pessoas físicas? The latter has homens and mulheres, but what about the legal entities?


 
We could also try to change History to Herstoy or Mankind into Womankind.
There are so many words in the Male Plural and you keep scratching for the opposite.
Of course it's meant both ways and of course there might things that can't be changed and we won't be looking for alternative words. But if there is a possibility why can't we try to be inclusive? Is it that hard?


----------



## Lusitania

Fernando said:


> If I want to insult someone, I will say he (m.) is an animal (m.), a pig (m.), a male-goat (m.).
> 
> Yeah, the language is sexist, in favor of who?
> 
> PS, at least in Spanish you have Humanidad (Mankind) is a femenine word.


 

I'm sorry for cursing here. But do you have a masculine for Puta that it could be as insulting?


----------



## cuchuflete

You do like to be stubborn.  Your right and privilege, but I remind you again that in English, there is no such thing as Male Plural.  There is a grammatical designation, masculine plural.

"We could also try to change Hittory to Herstoy" and thereby demonstrate what?  Total ignorance of the etymology of the word history, which has nothing to do with the possessive masculine pronoun.   

I don't keep "scratching for" anything.  Why don't you stop wasting your time and everyone else's characterizing questions, and just offer a rational answer, if you have one.

Pessoa is feminine, (or would prefer to call it Female?) and by your own demonstrated logic it is an exclusionary word, as such.  What is your proposed inclusive change?

"If there is a possibility why can't we try to be inclusive?"
Sure, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Selective linguistic reform is fine, but I would be a little more careful about who is doing the selections.


----------



## cuchuflete

Lusitania said:


> I'm sorry for cursing here. But do you have a masculine for Puta that it could be as insulting?



What about the Male offspring, h/f de p?

It's inclusive, with a masculine noun and a feminine noun.


----------



## Outsider

Lusitania said:


> Then why are you opposing so much to the fact?


First of all, I really don't oppose the changes you're defending all that much, in real life. I have more serious things to oppose.

But, like Athaulf, I find it a nuisance and even a bit insulting to be expected to change a few harmless linguistic habits I have just because some people far away have decided they are sexist, quite regardless of myself or of any objective facts.

Also, as an unconditional supporter of gender equality, it pains me to see obviously intelligent, dilligent women such as yourself waste themselves away in pointless fights with windmills such as these, when there are so many other, _real_ problems to solve out there. 

Not only is that a waste, but it cheapens your other, legitimate struggles in the eyes of the public. 



Lusitania said:


> You aren't respecting differences in my opinion.


Respecting is not the same as accepting, Lusitania. I respect your different opinion; but don't expect me to agree with it.

*Cuchuflete* has just summed up brilliantly my basic point of view:  



cuchuflete said:


> 3—Some people will impose more of a link between grammatical gender and human sex than is really there.  This is also wrong, in my opinion.  Doing so creates a firm belief that there is such a link.  It's a kind of self-perpetuating prophecy.   _It also, conveniently, points to an obvious solution.  Change the language to suit the oppressed, but don't worry about the parallel irregularities that discriminate against the already empowered._





Lusitania said:


> We could also try to change History to Herstoy [...]


You were using a figure of speech there, weren't you?


----------



## Lusitania

geve said:


> Yes, I'm sure of that too. But if some people are going to "fight for women's cause in language", they ought to be consistent and do it for male interests too. I didn't see anything in Lusitania's link to change "midwife" to "midperson" for instance.


 

It's not my link and surely I didn't brought a dictionary here to put all the words that I think that should be changed.

Probably you should read how I started the thread. 
My questions were:

1. Should/do women feel included in this male norm?

2. Do you think that we should move further to non-sexist languages or should we just leave it as it is because it has always been like that?

I disagree (as people have the right to disagree)

1. I don't feel included in the Male Plural. 

2. I think we should move further and try to change what we can.


----------



## Lusitania

DCPaco said:


> The way I see it is as follows: Both women and men can wear pants and other garments that seem to be to some degree gender neautral (of course there are women's pants and men's pants). But men cannot wear skirts and dresses without it being ridiculed by many and when a man addresses himself in the feminine, it is usually received with shock, surprise, or laughter and consequently ridicule. So, until a man can wear a dress and not be subjected to ridicule, I think the patriarchal form of having the general be masculine and the "other" (or the gender specific) be feminine will continue to be in place.
> 
> The neuter gender is then what both can be ad*dressed *by without being ridiculed.
> 
> Now with regard to the "Hola a todos"...even in the olden days you had presenters say: Señores y Señoritas (the latter a title of presumed virtue and chastity)...also: Damas y Caballeros, which erases the issue of virtue or matrimonial status (but that's a whole other show).


 

Yes sometings aren't news at all, the problem is that it was brought out in the open as something.

I fully agree that both can be addressed without being ridiculed.


----------



## Outsider

Lusitania said:


> 1. I don't feel included in the Male Plural.


"Masculine" is the correct term. Calling it "the male" just gives the impression that you don't know much about grammar, which won't help further your cause.


----------



## Lusitania

cuchuflete said:


> If there is anyone new to this thread who still needs help grasping that grammatical classifications are not biological descriptions, consider the Spanish slang term for penis:
> 
> 
> and a female equivalent...
> 
> 
> 
> Gender in grammar is not the same as sex in anatomy.


 

Surely you can find more words for penis and vagina in spanish with both femine and masculine words.


----------



## Lusitania

natasha2000 said:


> Well, mirx, thank you. I am a sexist and I am female, too. Strange.. Never thought of myself in this way... And only because I don't mind being called translator and not translatoresssssss........


 

Don't worry, I wont be call a lawyerness either. That was not the point. It's not weird to be a female and sexist. See as pointed out before.


----------



## Lusitania

maxiogee said:


> The police in Ireland are known as The Guards, singular officers are Garda, plural they were Na Gardaí.
> 
> This comes from the Irish title for rhe force An Garda Síochána - the Guardians of the Peace.
> 
> We eventually recruited woman and, in line with the practice then in England which has Police Constable and Women Police Constables, we named ours Bean Garda - women Guardian.
> 
> Some years ago it was deceed that the discriminatory prefix would be eliminated - all of them are now Garda.


 

The same in Portugal we don't say Mulher Polícia anymore, they are Guardas and Militares and Policias, now there has been some discussion when it comes to higher ranks. As most of them are male words. Still for now there are few women in the military. There are already some studies on that.


----------



## Outsider

Luckily, most military ranks work for both genders in Portuguese. One exception, as yet unsolved, is _soldado(/a?)_ (private).


----------



## karuna

The Latvian language is quite democratic with professions, they all have respective masculine and feminine forms (a doctor: _ārsts, ārste)_. Also women's surnames are always 'feminized' in Latvian language. It was not that it happened naturally but leading linguists a century ago introduced this system as they considered it more appropriate for Latvian language despite the prevailing European tradition to use the same form of one's surname – identical for men and women.

But I guess that it is not possible satisfy everybody and in fact some women have protested that they are obliged to accept the surname that is different from her husband's or father's surname. The difference is only in the case ending (_Kārkliņš v. Kārkliņa_) and the change is no more different than spelling the word in the genitive case instead of the nominative when it is required by the grammar. 

One such case was even brought to the European Court of Human Rights ("Mencena v. Latvia") but it decided that the state can require to use the grammatically proper surname form in identity documents.


----------



## Lusitania

Athaulf said:


> Um... yes, but this doesn't have exactly the same meaning. You can refer to a group of two men and a woman as _ellos_, but not as _ellos y ellas_ (who would be _ellas_?). Similarly, you can refer to someone's two sons and a daughter as _sus hijos_, but not really _sus hijos y hijas_.
> 
> You could of course complicate things to the bitter end and prescribe the accurate usage of _ellos y ella_, _él y ellas_, and all other possible options, but I sure wouldn't want to have to bother with it because someone feels offended by a little _o_ in _ellos_ and _hijos_.
> 
> So either way, we're still without an expression for a mixed company that would be valid regardless of whether both se genders are represented in it by more than one specimen.


 

Well, I'm currently working with a group of 3 women and one men. I always refer to them as ellas y ello or vice versa. I'm sure he would be annoyed with the little a in ellas.



> On a related note, I'm surprised that nobody has yet (to my knowledge) felt offended by the fact that in constructs such as "he or she," the masculine form takes precedence more than 90% of the time.


 
There are so many things still to aknowledge. We've been walking in cycles.


----------



## Lusitania

gaer said:


> der Student (male student)
> die Studentin (female student)
> die Studenten (students, male or female)
> 
> "Die Studenten", masculine plural in gender, has traditionally been the correct word for talking about many students, male and female. There are many words like this in German. This has resulted in a "PC" battle over language that is hotly disputed. I'm taking no sides, merely describing the fact that it exists.
> 
> Gaer


 
In Portuguese we now say Os Estudantes e as Estudantes but it's more commonly used As alunas e os Alunos, or if it's for a training os formandos e as formandas. Os professores e as professoras.


----------



## cuchuflete

Lusitania said:


> Surely you can find more words for penis and vagina in spanish with both femine and masculine words.



Surely I can. Surely you can too, which proves my statement:



> Gender in grammar is not the same as sex in anatomy.



Why do you dispute this, even in a case so simplistic as sexual organs, which have both masc. and fem. names for both the Male and the Female organs?


For your history and herstory collection:
hysterectomy, when performed by a male gynecologist,
hersterectomy, when performed by a female gynecologist.

Fighting sexism is a good cause.  Trying to do so through the continued use of non-existent terms such as Male Plural is self-defeating.


----------



## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> Well, since the conversation has taken this path (I do hope we're not too off topic yet ), I might as well add another example. In Portuguese, most slang terms for the female genitals are feminine, and most slang words for the male genitals are... also feminine (though with one ubiquitous exception).
> 
> In this respect, we are already thoroughly feminist.


 
Feminism or feminisms or being a feminist it's a different concept. It's about equality and not all movements mean women wining over men. Off course, Femist has a very bad conotation, but that's also a huge history/story.


----------



## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> In fairness to Lusitania and other supporters of more gender-inclusive language, they do seem to be right in that most of the time it's the masculine that is the default (even though there are a few scattered exceptions).


 

I fully agree on this level with you. So we do agree on something.


----------



## Lusitania

Brioche said:


> The "wife" in midwife is the "wife" [Old English = female person] giving birth.
> 
> The midwife is the person who is "with the woman".


 

In Portuguese is parteira, enfermeira parteira. There was never the use of the masculine as men were doctors and women were nurses/enfermeiras. It was beneath a men to be a nurse and so still today in Portugal when you see a man and woman in an Hospital you assume that he is a doctor and she is a nurse. Sometimes it's the other way around.
Nursing and midwives were professions that were handled mainly by women. 

Another example is Ombusman, some organisations decided already to change it to Ombusperson but the EU still has the same EURO-Ombusman word accordingly with the its Finnish definition.
So, many words might keep their original meaning due to it's origin.


----------



## Athaulf

Lusitania said:


> Well, I'm currently working with a group of 3 women and one men. I always refer to them as ellas y ello or vice versa. I'm sure he would be annoyed with the little a in ellas.



Which leaves us having to consider _six _different possibilities, depending on the exact composition of the group being referred to. Way too much complication just because some people decided to be "offended" by the fact that _ellos_ is a word that happens to cover the meanings of five out of those six cases -- which is the case, to repeat myself for the N-th time, due to a historical accident, not some sexist conspiracy. Do you really expect people to think through all the six possibilities in their everyday speech every time they use the 3rd person plural?


----------



## Lusitania

Victoria32 said:


> Hello Lusitania, and thank you for raising this. I have *never* felt included by the male norm. My first experience of it was as a 10 year old writing to my mother's aunt and uncle (we didn't have any grandparents). My Mum told me to address the envelope "Mr & Mrs (His Name) Fraser" and I was quite astounded that Auntie Molly didn't get her own name - but Mum told me that That Was the Rule.
> Fast forward - many years later - generic _*he*_ still gets to me, mostly when I hear it on American TV (and 80% of TV we have in New Zealand is American.. which is why NZ children use American vocabulary, grammar and so help me, accents.)
> 
> But to see an American Mom on a TV show picking up an animal of unknown gender and call it 'he', and on one occasion (I swear it's true) to refer to a cow in a field, not a bull - as he, give me a break!
> 
> In the 1980s, I used to insist on being called a woman (not a girl or a lady) and on those around me greeting mixed groups as "men and women" or "girls and guys" (not just "Hi, guys" ) but I have largely given up - only my sons ever listened to me, and they were kids then.
> 
> (Once, as an experiment, I went around University greeting mixed groups with "Hello, girls" and without fail, the males went postal on me, even males who were one individual in a group of 7 people!.)
> 
> Vicky


 

You are very welcome Vicky. The problem is that it turns out to be exhausting walking in circles because we do speak the same Language but we are talking about different issues and on different perspectives.

Many thanks


----------



## Lusitania

Namakemono said:


> This proves that you identify gender with sex.


This means that both my sex (I could be transgender you know) and gender are feminine and I do not wish to be included in a Male rule.




> If there was a generic use of feminine plural, I would use it. However, masculine plural has always been the neutral form, so if you say "hola a todas", you're treating the men in the group with disdain, and if you say "hola a todos y a todas" you are either stressing the presence of women for some reason or just being redundant.


 
You would use, but men would feel treated with disdain?? 
No, I'm not being redundant, I'm being polite.



> Besides, remember you also apply this to objects. It's not very "practical" to say "Las ventanas y los espejos están rotos y rotas." And don't get me started with the generic @...


 
I dislike the generic @. It's not very practical talking to windows and mirrors, but it could be a way to practise.


----------



## Lusitania

Athaulf said:


> Because this "gender perspective" reflects, to be blunt, ignorance about the language and its history, rather than some novel insights into them.


 
Isn't it the same for the history of the other half of humanity? To be blunt and ignorant about women and history?
The languages have always changed, so what?



> It is a pain to change one's normal ways of expressing oneself in the name of ill-substantiated ideology. I also don't like being proclaimed a sexist, oppressor, and whatnot just because my language has its particular quirks of grammar for which some people have invented ideological significance out of thin air.


 
I don't like to be called an ignorant for having a different opinion. I haven't studied your language, it seems you haven't studied mine either, but you assume from the begining that it can't change, why?


----------



## Vin Raven

Lusitania said:


> Well, I'm currently working with a group of 3 women and one men. I always refer to them as ellas y ello or vice versa. I'm sure he would be annoyed with the little a in ellas.



In most places in American English, you'd normally refer to the group as guys, and even if a guy wasn't present, most women would commonly say to a group of other women, "_What do you guys want to do?_"

Which as far as I'm concerned is a perfect example of _guy _being a singular male but _guys _being an inclusive term for both male and female plural, just like how a female army sergeant may yell at her all female squad to "_Get a move on men!_" with no sexual connotations whatsoever.

Trying to create silly new terms for non-gendered plurals is linguistically artificial and I wish a great and abject failure to any misguided PC types who push for such an agenda.


----------



## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> That's a shame. I, for one, don't regret a single word I've written, or I wouldn't be here anymore.


 
I wish you would, although I believe everyone is intitled to their own opinion, I'm very sorry about the irony, the ridicule and also the arrogance that somehow I had to give in to what I'm suposed to think.



> I saw it, but I also saw that most people -- most women, in this case -- do not make half as much of a deal out of this issue as you seem to do.


 
Go back and count the women, go back and count how many times they talked. Also see that the ones who did not feel included barely spoke more than once. The environment here was clearly hostile for women expressing their feeling about not feeling included.
Another issue is that just by being a woman it doesn't mean that you care about the way you should be address. Some don't even care about the way they are treated.



> You probably meant "posts", not "threads", since this thread was started by yourself.


 
Many thanks, but maybe you should avoid correcting people that often, some of them don't mind making mistakes.



> I always thought that the purpose of discussion forums was... to discuss. But that's impossible when one of the sides in the debate (you) doesn't even wish to listen.


 
I'm reading every post and replying providing my ideas, experience and reflections on it. 
Now why are some people so angry because I refuse to think like them?



> It became clear to me very early on in this (and the previous) thread that you are not willing to listen to any different opinions. You have already made up your mind on this issue, and that's the gospel. Good for you. But then why start a thread about this issue, when you don't care what other people think about it?


 
It's true that I had already made my own mind. I've read a lot on this and it was part of my Master. However, I do think that I've listened to different opinions and tried to provide my opinion.
I started the thread because I was really hoping that it could be more constructive and never expectd this much hostility towards an issue that is no longer and issue in many countries and it's taken as a progress.



> Or, if you do care about other people's opinions, you should have known that not all opinions were going to be the same as yours, when you asked for them.


 
Surely, I knew that you'd come from the Portuguese forum to this one, stalking me 'till the very end. You can't talk to me about respecting others opinion after the way you treated my own.



> Everyone is free to come forward and express their opinions on this matter. I have no ability to censor what people post here.


 
You don't have too, you just make them feel uncomfortable, wheter through irony or ridicule. If I hadn't started the thread I would have left as well.



> It sure looks like what you're saying there is something like "I'd love to discuss this topic -- but only with people who'll agree with me"


 

Take a deep breath, you probably meant yourself.


----------



## Lusitania

Athaulf said:


> Which leaves us having to consider _six _different possibilities, depending on the exact composition of the group being referred to. Way too much complication just because some people decided to be "offended" by the fact that _ellos_ is a word that happens to cover the meanings of five out of those six cases -- which is the case, to repeat myself for the N-th time, due to a historical accident, not some sexist conspiracy. Do you really expect people to think through all the six possibilities in their everyday speech every time they use the 3rd person plural?


 

They do, where I work they do, most of the people I know they try. It's not easy but after a while you get used to it.


----------



## Lusitania

Athaulf said:


> But people have felt themselves included in the _masculine_ (not _male_!) plural ever since the prehistoric days when the common ancestor of your and my language didn't even include the feminine gender. It is only in recent times that some people started inventing some supposed deep ideological significance for this grammatical peculiarity of Indo-European languages.


 
35 years ago in my country women could be murdered by man in cases of adultery. The divorce was forbidden. Women could only work if the husband allwed them to. I don't think that would be an issue by then that would even cross their minds.



> In this thread, I have already produced multiple posts explaining why this "gender perspective" rests on outright false theories, and so far you haven't bothered to reply to any of those arguments


 
I'm trying to avoid provocations, that's all. If you want to make it serious, there is common sense and scientific knowledge. On what (scientific) grounds do you stand to make such affirmations?

I believe that when you mean "outright false theories" do you mean Deconstruction ?


----------



## Lusitania

Athaulf said:


> Which leaves us having to consider _six _different possibilities, depending on the exact composition of the group being referred to. Way too much complication just because some people decided to be "offended" by the fact that _ellos_ is a word that happens to cover the meanings of five out of those six cases -- which is the case, to repeat myself for the N-th time, due to a historical accident, not some sexist conspiracy. Do you really expect people to think through all the six possibilities in their everyday speech every time they use the 3rd person plural?


 

It's not some people... there are treaties on this. Go to the Un website and search for sexism or sexist and language. It's worldwide.


----------



## .   1

Lusitania said:


> Go back and count the women, go back and count how many times they talked. Also see that the ones who did not feel included barely spoke more than once. The environment here was clearly hostile for women expressing their feeling about not feeling included.
> Another issue is that just by being a woman it doesn't mean that you care about the way you should be address. Some don't even care about the way they are treated.


The issue is slightly larger than you indicate.  I feel uncomfortable addressing a group and being required to use a masculine pronoun or a combination of a masculine pronoun and a feminine pronoun.
If I use only the masculine pronoun I risk misinterpretation.
If I use both pronouns I feel clumsy.
If I use a neuter I feel elegant.
Policeman easily becomes police officer.
A Chief Executive Officer has already addressed the situation.
Our language will evolve with our society.  A male nurse was once an object of derision because nurses were traditionally female but as society changed so has acceptance of the word and most blokes who are nurses simply refer to themselves as a nurse.
We had policemen and firemen because only blokes were policemen and firemen but times change and we now have Firefighters and police officers.
This discussion would have been pointless 30 years ago and so illustrates the leaps we have taken in one generation.

.,,


----------



## Lusitania

cuchuflete said:


> I haven't yet seen anything in this thread that persuades me that selective "adjustments" to grammar and orthography, often neglecting logic, are especially useful.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The idea was not to persuade people but to express an opinion on a couple of issues. Maybe you should look for something on this here for example. In Portugal there is a very good book "O Falso neutro" by Maria Isabel Barreno but probably it's only available in Portuguese.
> Also, didn't you made an effort to read the links I provided?
> http://www.uce.ac.uk/crq/individual-pubs/juliane/handout-bristol.pdf
> 
> 
> 
> If a change from a grammatically masculine gender form to
> a true--and sometimes invented--neutral form will really help overcome sexism in society, I would support it, not just grudgingly accept it.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> 
> It's not a matter of you supporting or not. It's ongoing, go to the Eu and the UN websites, your countries have signed treaties on non-sexist language. It will happen.
> But who does the deciding? If it makes linguistic and social sense to change Olá a todos to something else, by all means go for it. But what about pessoa? Is that a word that also has a link between grammatical gender and human society, including sex? If it does, then it too would need a true neuter form or a masculine equivalent.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Simple propositions such as "Let's make language gender neutral" are fine, until one attempts a logical and rigorous implementation that suits an entire society and an entire language.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> It's like when a society decides that smoking is no longer trendy or that abolishing slavery is wrong. Not many people agreed in the begining but it changed. Languages have always changed.
Click to expand...


----------



## itxaro.

In Basque language (euskara) we are "remarkably gender-free. Most nouns have no gender or there are different words for males and females (ama, "mother"; aita, "father"; aita-ama, "father and mother"; guraso, "parent")". Sorry my English isn't so good to explain better but you can find this information and other interesting ones on the Wikipedia article about _Gender-neutral language in non-Indo-European languages._


----------



## Athaulf

[The quotes below are mixed from two different posts, to which I'm writing a single reply.]



Lusitania said:


> Isn't it the same for the history of the other half of humanity? To be blunt and ignorant about women and history?
> The languages have always changed, so what?



Languages have of course always changed, and are changing spontaneously through everyday use.  However, language change by dictate from above motivated by (at best dubious) ideological reasons is another thing altogether. I admit that I'm probably irritated by this kind of thing more than most, since my own language was a victim of such engineering  in recent history (which was however motivated by quite different ideological reasons).



Lusitania said:


> 35 years ago in my country women could be murdered by man in cases of adultery. The divorce was forbidden. Women could only work if the husband allwed them to. I don't think that would be an issue by then that would even cross their minds.



You are substituting rational argument by emotional rhetoric. The issue that we are discussing is not whether and to what extent women were (or still are) mistreated in your country or elsewhere. 

The issue that we are discussing is a grammatical peculiarity of Indo-European languages -- namely that they use masculine nouns and pronouns to refer to mixed-sex groups of people. You claim that this grammatical rule is somehow connected to sexism and oppression of women, while I argue that it's just an accidental quirk of grammar, which doesn't represent any greater "problem" than, say, the illogicality of double negatives in Spanish or Croatian. 



> I don't like to be called an ignorant for having a different opinion. I haven't studied your language, it seems you haven't studied mine either, but you assume from the begining that it can't change, why?
> [...]
> I'm trying to avoid provocations, that's all. If you want to make it serious, there is common sense and scientific knowledge. On what (scientific) grounds do you stand to make such affirmations? I believe that when you mean "outright false theories" do you mean Deconstruction?


By "outright false theories" I mean the claims that the universality of the masculine gender in Indo-European languages is somehow connected to sexism. In these posts, I have already explained at length why I find it absurd to postulate such a connection:
http://forum.wordreference.com/showt...86#post1972886
http://forum.wordreference.com/showt...64#post1967164
http://forum.wordreference.com/showt...32#post1966332


Here is a brief summary of the arguments I have offered so far, and which you have failed to address at all:

(1) There is no worldwide or historical correlation whatsoever between the level of sexism in different cultures and the level of "sexist language" in their languages. If anything, the correlation might actually happen to be negative.

(2) What is known from the historical linguistics about the development of grammatical genders in Indo-European languages shows how the universality of the masculine gender could have arisen without being caused by any sort of sexism.

(3) In various Indo-European languages, there are plenty of examples that make it plainly absurd to postulate any universal link between the gender of various nouns and the social status, roles and perceptions of the male and female sex. See my posts with the examples from Croatian for plenty of such examples.

(4) The all-pervasiveness of grammatical gender in various Slavic languages, far greater than even in Romance languages, makes it plain impossible to achieve any sort of "gender-neutrality" in them. Thus, from your theories it follows that we Slavs are an irreparable bunch of sexist brutes, which is rather insulting if really meant seriously.


----------



## Lusitania

cuchuflete said:


> What have I learned from this entire thread?
> 
> 1—From the point of a student of language, there is a clear separation between grammatical gender and human biology.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Human biology or sex defines us on the matter of being a man or a woman. The diferences are natural.
> Gender is a social construction and its diferences have its origin on culture.Here you could read Margaret Mead and Simone Beauvoir ("Nobody is born a woman but becomes one"). Oakley later in 1972 mentioned this process of genderind as an internalisation of the gender differences. So cathegories as Man and Woman would have to be seen in light of other variables: culture, sexual orientation, colour, social status, etnicity.
> Joan Scott is a good author to read as well. Gender could be the social differences based in sex.
> Gender is a critic to diferencialism that exists in Sex and it's idea of superiority man. Gender breaksdown common sense and social divisions by trying to be more inclusive. A good reading should be the Shulamith Firestone "The dialectics of sex"
Click to expand...


----------



## Lusitania

cuchuflete said:


> 2—Some people will dismiss the entire possibility of a relationship between grammatical gender and social behaviour. (Wrong to do so, in my opinion.)
> 
> Gender is all about social behaviour as mentioned above.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 3—Some people will impose more of a link between grammatical gender and human sex than is really there.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Well I think that I've already went to much over this.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> This is also wrong, in my opinion. Doing so creates a firm belief that there is such a link. It's a kind of self-perpetuating prophecy. It also, conveniently, points to an obvious solution. Change the language to suit the oppressed, but don't worry about the parallel irregularities that discriminate against the already empowered.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> The question here was if women felt included in the Male Rule and after getting so many defensive post, especially from men, I would be more worried to know why especially men felt to compelled to create this defensive network over here and why women that felt uncomfortable with the male norm only mentioned it on one post and left.
> Also there were some men making some remarks and did insist on it.
> 
> You see: when this issues come up many hostilities are opened and some people just don't even try to step down and try to make others understand.
> 
> If you keep talking about oppressed you should also read Paulo Freire. It's quite important.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Here is an example:
> 
> Sorry, but that is a faulty statement. I do see that there are people who don't feel included, and do feel acutely excluded, in the grammatically _masculine_ plural. In English, there is no such thing as a _Male_ Plural in language, while there obviously is such a thing in biology and in society. I won't attempt a comment about these constructions in any other language.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Well, there is Portuguese, of course in English is diferent, but I wonder why there is so much work in the UK regarding sexism in language if there isn't a Male Plural.
Click to expand...


----------



## Athaulf

Lusitania said:


> Gender is a social construction and its diferences have its origin on culture.Here you could read Margaret Mead and Simone Beauvoir ("Nobody is born a woman but becomes one"). Oakley later in 1972 mentioned this process of genderind as an internalisation of the gender differences. So cathegories as Man and Woman would have to be seen in light of other variables: culture, sexual orientation, colour, social status, etnicity.
> Joan Scott is a good author to read as well. Gender could be the social differences based in sex.
> Gender is a critic to diferencialism that exists in Sex and it's idea of superiority man. Gender breaksdown common sense and social divisions by trying to be more inclusive. A good reading should be the Shulamith Firestone "The dialectics of sex"



By now it seems like it's completely futile, but still, I'll say it once again...

_*Grammatical gender* _has *nothing *to do with the notion of gender from philosophy, social sciences, etc. that you're writing about here, any more than it has anything to do with the biological sex. And it most decidedly does not deal with any categories such as "Man" or "Woman" or "social differences" or anything else from the above. These notions are as different as the notions of "ring" in mathematics and in jewelry.

Your constant confusion between these two completely different notions has permeated this whole thread, and similar confusion has in fact given rise an impetus to a lot, if not most of the whole "sexist language" business.


----------



## Lusitania

cuchuflete said:


> You do like to be stubborn. Your right and privilege, but I remind you again that in English, there is no such thing as Male Plural. There is a grammatical designation, masculine plural.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I would kindly ask you to mind your way of speaking to me. You are a moderator here isn't it? This is democratic forum isn't it?
> I've been trying to avoid it but try to Get some reading done first on this before insulting people.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> "We could also try to change Hittory to Herstoy" and thereby demonstrate what? Total ignorance of the etymology of the word history, which has nothing to do with the possessive masculine pronoun.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> What's more important? Etymology or a step to a more inclusive society. And in many cases have you asked why the word had this origin?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I don't keep "scratching for" anything. Why don't you stop wasting your time and everyone else's characterizing questions, and just offer a rational answer, if you have one.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> I can try to offer a rational answer when I get rational questions and not just infantile rethoric to make me look ridicule.
> If you thing that your time is being wasted why don't you just leave a let others express themselves without the hostility that you brought to the thread.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Pessoa is feminine, (or would prefer to call it Female?) and by your own demonstrated logic it is an exclusionary word, as such. What is your proposed inclusive change?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> I didn't came here to propose any word. I had two questions, none of them was on proposals of words to be changed was it?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> "If there is a possibility why can't we try to be inclusive?"
> Sure, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> But it was on if women felt included in the Male Rule. Go count how many women replyed. They did started to post but men really felt down on this in a huge defensive way.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Selective linguistic reform is fine, but I would be a little more careful about who is doing the selections
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> You mean me? I'm doing selective linguist reform? I asked two questions and look how further you took me to attack me.
> It's worldwide, it's a practise.
Click to expand...


----------



## Lusitania

Athaulf said:


> You are substituting rational argument by emotional rhetoric. The issue that we are discussing is not whether and to what extent women were (or still are) mistreated in your country or elsewhere.


 
Don't take my sentences out of the context. I wrote this because he asked why people hadn't thought of it before.




> The issue that we are discussing is a grammatical peculiarity of Indo-European languages -- namely that they use masculine nouns and pronouns to refer to mixed-sex groups of people. You claim that this grammatical rule is somehow connected to sexism and oppression of women, while I argue that it's just an accidental quirk of grammar, which doesn't represent any greater "problem" than, say, the illogicality of double negatives in Spanish or Croatian.


 
Read the previous post I wrote to cucu, please I'm not repeating.




> By "outright false theories" I mean the claims that the universality of the masculine gender in Indo-European languages is somehow connected to sexism. In these posts, I have already explained at length why I find it absurd to postulate such a connection:
> http://forum.wordreference.com/showt...86#post1972886
> http://forum.wordreference.com/showt...64#post1967164
> http://forum.wordreference.com/showt...32#post1966332


 
This are WR discussions probably on the same level as this one.
Can you please provide me any study (like I did). This is common sense. Give me scientific/academic. Some research. No more "he said". Books, studies.



> Here is a brief summary of the arguments I have offered so far, and which you have failed to address at all:
> 
> (1) There is no worldwide or historical correlation whatsoever between the level of sexism in different cultures and the level of "sexist language" in their languages. If anything, the correlation might actually happen to be negative.


 
Language is clearly connected with male domination.



> (2) What is known from the historical linguistics about the development of grammatical genders in Indo-European languages shows how the universality of the masculine gender could have arisen without being caused by any sort of sexism.


 
They had to picture a world of equality which should be quite dificult. On what basis?



> (3) In various Indo-European languages, there are plenty of examples that make it plainly absurd to postulate any universal link between the gender of various nouns and the social status, roles and perceptions of the male and female sex. See my posts with the examples from Croatian for plenty of such examples.


 
I've told you already that I don't know anything about Croatian Language.
The correlation is there... I'm sorry I failed to explain it or you just don't want to see it.



> (4) The all-pervasiveness of grammatical gender in various Slavic languages, far greater than even in Romance languages, makes it plain impossible to achieve any sort of "gender-neutrality" in them. Thus, from your theories it follows that we Slavs are an irreparable bunch of sexist brutes, which is rather insulting if really meant seriously.


 
They aren't my theories, they are being written and developed worldwide! In Treaties! Don't let it be know in the Wall Street Journal or the NY Times, though.


----------



## Lusitania

cuchuflete said:


> What about the Male offspring, h/f de p?
> 
> It's inclusive, with a masculine noun and a feminine noun.


 

Yes but their origin is always the same isn't it?


----------



## Lusitania

itxaro. said:


> In Basque language (euskara) we are "remarkably gender-free. Most nouns have no gender or there are different words for males and females (ama, "mother"; aita, "father"; aita-ama, "father and mother"; guraso, "parent")". Sorry my English isn't so good to explain better but you can find this information and other interesting ones on the Wikipedia article about _Gender-neutral language in non-Indo-European languages._


 

Itxaro, I will move to the Basque country, I was thinking about going tomorrow to Badajoz but I'll move definetly to the Basque Country.

Gabon!


----------



## cuchuflete

It is very difficult to attempt a conversation with a person who

1) is thoroughly convinced of the righteousness, as well as the correct and exclusive nature of their cause;

2) characterizes all questions as hostile, whether they are invitations to provide more information, to clarify a point, or to disagree on logical or historical or cultural grounds;

3) avoids answering any and all direct questions, which might at very least highlight the underlying differences in opinion that are usually present in a conversation not entirely composed of "Yes, you are right", "Oh, that's true" and the like.

You attribute the lack of female support to a hostile (which for you is equivalent to male) environment in the thread.  No proof is needed to support this supposition.  If other women do not turn out in great numbers to agree with you, it must be because of the men who are present.

But wait! That in itself is a gross insult to the many highly intelligent, highly educated women I see in these forums every day.  They do not shy away from an argument, and often outdo their male opponents with better facts, better logic, and more persuasive arguments.   I won't insult the women of this community by assuming anything about their lack of participation in this thread, on one side of the arguments or another or another.  They can well speak for themselves.  I am not their spokesman, and you do not speak for them, but about them.  

There are three levels of conversation going on here, and you have confused all three and tried to make them one: grammatical gender, a primarily linguistic concept, biological sex, and gender as a social phenomenon and classification.
They are not one and the same, nor is there a broad pattern of causality in behaviour of social gender or biological sex as a consequence of any grammatical construction.  In specific instances, here may be some relationship between the two otherwise distinct meanings of the word "gender".

Yes, languages will change.  That is there organic nature.  Not even official acadamies of the language can restrain them for long.  They evolve in response to different needs, including recognition of changes in role expectations for the sexes.  Governments can attempt, through their regulations, to impose artificial changes as well.  Some of these persist, while others wither from disuse, ignored because they don't serve a purpose or fulfill a genuine need.   Governmental and academic jargon are often in the forefront of such imposed changes, which are used in academic papers, in courts of law and contracts—well known to be bastions of arcane jargon unknown to the public—and in government proclamations.  No need to say much about the latter.

In the meantime, people converse on the streets, at home, in the workplace.  Colloquial speech naturally gravitates towards what communicates comfortably and easily.  Difficult constructions, whatever their grammatical underpinnings, are ignored.  Needless complexities are unconsciously dismissed.
When something makes sense for clear communication, it recurs.  

I wish you well in your battles against sexism, both the real thing, and the perceived.


----------



## Lusitania

. said:


> The issue is slightly larger than you indicate. I feel uncomfortable addressing a group and being required to use a masculine pronoun or a combination of a masculine pronoun and a feminine pronoun.
> If I use only the masculine pronoun I risk misinterpretation.
> If I use both pronouns I feel clumsy.
> If I use a neuter I feel elegant.
> Policeman easily becomes police officer.
> A Chief Executive Officer has already addressed the situation.
> Our language will evolve with our society. A male nurse was once an object of derision because nurses were traditionally female but as society changed so has acceptance of the word and most blokes who are nurses simply refer to themselves as a nurse.
> We had policemen and firemen because only blokes were policemen and firemen but times change and we now have Firefighters and police officers.
> This discussion would have been pointless 30 years ago and so illustrates the leaps we have taken in one generation.
> 
> .,,


 

Yes, it's true, it's quite uncomfortable in the begining because you never know with whom you are dealing with. Like me here, I thought that I was being polite by saying Olá a todos e a todas as it's polite where I am, in my life, with the people I interact. Someone tells me that I shouldn't and calls me ignorant when I don't feel included.
I also believe that a forum like this would be Gender sensitive but I can see from this thread that it isn't.

You'll see that the best way is using both nouns and if you pay attention, you'll that many people around you already do it.

Here are some guidelines and more


----------



## cuchuflete

cuchuflete said:
			
		

> You do like to be stubborn. Your right and privilege, but I remind you again that in English, there is no such thing as Male Plural. There is a grammatical designation, masculine plural.





			
				Lusitania said:
			
		

> I would kindly ask you to mind your way of speaking to me. You are a moderator here isn't it? This is democratic forum isn't it?
> I've been trying to avoid it but try to Get some reading done first on this before insulting people.



I respectfully ask you to read, not dozens of academic studies, but a single line in the forum guidelines and rules you agreed to when you registered:



> Moderators are also forum members. *Unless they say otherwise, or it is clear from context, their posts are made as members.*


 When I am acting as a moderator, I write in red, and identify myself as a moderator.  

If you take offense at being reminded by more than one member that you repeat yourself, insisting on using a term which does not exist in the English language, that is your privilege.  It was not meant as an insult, but as a plain statement that it is tiresome to see such pointless persistence. 

You have, alone, made numerous mentions of "hostility" in the thread, and there is none.  There is honest disagreement.  You express your views with considerable forcefulness.  So do other people.  That is not hostility or armed neutrality.  It's discourse.


----------



## Brioche

. said:


> The issue is slightly larger than you indicate. I feel uncomfortable addressing a group and being required to use a masculine pronoun or a combination of a masculine pronoun and a feminine pronoun.
> If I use only the masculine pronoun I risk misinterpretation.
> If I use both pronouns I feel clumsy.
> If I use a neuter I feel elegant.
> Policeman easily becomes police officer.
> 
> .,,


 
How do you use a neuter when referring to people?

"Everyone should brush* its* teeth after eating."
"The Prime Minister of New Zealand and *its* spouse have never had real jobs."
"The nurse was really gentle. When *it* changed my dressings, I didn't feel a thing." 
"The police officer gave me a speeding ticket. I told *it* that I was taking my child to hospital, but *it* just laughted. Bracks needs the money."
"I'm getting my spouse a little something for Christmas. *It *loves diamonds, so I'll buy *it* a tiara."


----------



## Vin Raven

Lusitania said:


> I've been trying to avoid it but try to Get some reading done first on this before insulting people.



You may want to be careful not to come across as attempting to spread misandry.

As for your quoting of a radical misandrist rant from the likes of Casey Miller and Kate Swift as a source, please be aware that that type of misandrical routine has absolutely no relevance in a linguistic discussion, you might as well be quoting OJ in a prosecutorial discussion.

In case you're not familiar with why what you're saying is insulting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misandry


----------



## Lusitania

cuchuflete said:


> It is very difficult to attempt a conversation with a person who
> 
> 1) is thoroughly convinced of the righteousness, as well as the correct and exclusive nature of their cause;
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I could reply the same regarding the way you handled this. Your questions, basically didn't had anything to do with the questions that I proposed in the thread, you went to pick up words and tried to make me look ridicule. You went off-topic yourself.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 2) characterizes all questions as hostile, whether they are invitations to provide more information, to clarify a point, or to disagree on logical or historical or cultural grounds;
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> In general people who made questions were not seeking answers.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 3) avoids answering any and all direct questions, which might at very least highlight the underlying differences in opinion that are usually present in a conversation not entirely composed of "Yes, you are right", "Oh, that's true" and the like.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Well I've been here twice, this is my second time and I had many posts to read and after 7h I think that I've answered most of them.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> You attribute the lack of female support to a hostile (which for you is equivalent to male) environment in the thread. No proof is needed to support this supposition. If other women do not turn out in great numbers to agree with you, it must be because of the men who are present.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> There is no women sisterhood, women are educated to suspect one another. You assumed that. What I said was that many women started to write on how they felt uncomfortable and there was a huge defensive line here. There is an uncomfortable environment here and people (not only women) would avoid it. Especially people that are more gender sensitive and are used to be confronted with such situation.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> But wait! That in itself is a gross insult to the many highly intelligent, highly educated women I see in these forums every day. They do not shy away from an argument, and often outdo their male opponents with better facts, better logic, and more persuasive arguments. I won't insult the women of this community by assuming anything about their lack of participation in this thread, on one side of the arguments or another or another. They can well speak for themselves. I am not their spokesman, and you do not speak for them, but about them.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Your assumption. Basically you are very good in putting words in other peoples hands.
> Divide to rule. So basic.
> In fact by being highly educated women they probably have more interesting things to do than get involved in conversations that are most likely to lead nowhere but to insults.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> There are three levels of conversation going on here, and you have confused all three and tried to make them one: grammatical gender, a primarily linguistic concept, biological sex, and gender as a social phenomenon and classification.
> They are not one and the same, nor is there a broad pattern of causality in behaviour of social gender or biological sex as a consequence of any grammatical construction. In specific instances, here may be some relationship between the two otherwise distinct meanings of the word "gender".
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> You are the one mixing them up. I'm sorry. I'm not going back to explaining all these.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Yes, languages will change. That is there organic nature. Not even official acadamies of the language can restrain them for long. They evolve in response to different needs, including recognition of changes in role expectations for the sexes. Governments can attempt, through their regulations, to impose artificial changes as well. Some of these persist, while others wither from disuse, ignored because they don't serve a purpose or fulfill a genuine need. Governmental and academic jargon are often in the forefront of such imposed changes, which are used in academic papers, in courts of law and contracts—well known to be bastions of arcane jargon unknown to the public—and in government proclamations. No need to say much about the latter.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> It might be very different in your country.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> In the meantime, people converse on the streets, at home, in the workplace. Colloquial speech naturally gravitates towards what communicates comfortably and easily. Difficult constructions, whatever their grammatical underpinnings, are ignored. Needless complexities are unconsciously dismissed.
> When something makes sense for clear communication, it recurs.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> It happens that one day your child comes from school and tells you that you aren't being Gender neutral in your language.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I wish you well in your battles against sexism, both the real thing, and the perceived
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Write to the UN and EU and other international orgs, Council of Europe, Universities, NY Times, tell them the same. Don't make me the target of your "resistance to change".
> 
> I'm very tired, it's 4 a.m here and I really need a rest.
Click to expand...


----------



## Athaulf

Lusitania said:


> _[As an explanation for failing to provide any answer to the dozens of concrete arguments and points I've made:]
> 
> _ This are WR discussions probably on the same level as this one.
> Can you please provide me any study (like I did). This is common sense. Give me scientific/academic. Some research. No more "he said". Books, studies.
> [...]
> They aren't my theories, they are being written and developed worldwide! In Treaties!



Oh, so you refuse to address my arguments because they are "probably" such-and-such, without even bothering to take a look at them! How sweet. 

I obviously mistook you for a person willing to engage in a discussion of actual arguments, rather than just a game of throwing links and accusations at each other. I intentionally refuse to discuss at the level "here's 13 links to websites of people whose opinion I share, and by the way, you're all joining forces against me because you hate me." Yes, I am well aware that there are hundreds of websites and books, some of them academic, arguing the same theories as you. For some of us, however, a copious output of material arguing a certain point of view is not a fact that makes it immune to criticism -- and neither is its official endorsement by whatever political institutions. 

It is of course your right -- as others have noted already -- to conduct discussions in such a way. However, next time when you start a discussion, please save other participants some time and effort by immediately pointing out that you're seeking nothing more than an echo chamber. 

In fact, as a long-time participant of various Internet discussion forums -- although relatively new at this one -- I would say that your last series of posts seriously smacks of trolling. Actually, the only reason why I still think you might not be a troll is that you've apparently made hundreds of posts at the forum already without being banned.


----------



## Lusitania

Vin Raven said:


> The only person who I've seen be insulting in this thread is you, along with what is coming across as a rather palpable attempt to spread misandry.
> 
> As for your quoting of a radical misandrist rant from the likes of Casey Miller and Kate Swift as a source, please be aware that that type of misandrical routine has absolutely no relevance in a linguistic discussion, you might as well be quoting OJ in a prosecutorial discussion.
> 
> In case you're not familiar with why what you're saying is insulting:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misandry


 

Vin Raven, has you may understand and probably if you read well my posts. I did not insults men, there are 3 men here that have deliberatly turned questions at me in a very ironic and sometimes hostile manner. There was also one girl. It's gender, "you aren't born a woman you become one".
Look for mysogyny and probably it's more like it, but it isn't me.


----------



## Lusitania

Brioche said:


> How do you use a neuter when referring to people?
> 
> "Everyone should brush* its* teeth after eating."
> "The Prime Minister of New Zealand and *its* spouse have never had real jobs."
> "The nurse was really gentle. When *it* changed my dressings, I didn't feel a thing."
> "The police officer gave me a speeding ticket. I told *it* that I was taking my child to hospital, but *it* just laughted. Bracks needs the money."
> "I'm getting my spouse a little something for Christmas. *It *loves diamonds, so I'll buy *it* a tiara."


 

There some guidelines but why don't you just refer to the name of the person?


----------



## Lusitania

Lusitania said:


> Should/do women feel included in this male norm?
> 
> Do you think that we should move further to non-sexist languages or should we just leave it as it is because it has always been like that?
> 
> Many thanks


 


> Oh, so you refuse to address my arguments because they are "probably" such-and-such, without even bothering to take a look at them! How sweet.


 
As far I remember this were the words and you're taking it to a sort of academic discussion without any academic grounds.




> I obviously mistook you for a person willing to engage in a discussion of actual arguments, rather than just a game of throwing links and accusations at each other. I intentionally refuse to discuss at the level "here's 13 links to websites of people whose opinion I share, and by the way, you're all joining forces against me because you hate me." Yes, I am familiar that there are hundreds of websites and books, some of them academic, arguing the same theories as you. For some of us, however, a copious output of material arguing a certain point of view is not a fact that makes it immune to criticism -- and neither is its official endorsement by whatever political institutions.


 
Links that you haven't read because you would have to do more than just criticizing me. I don't share all opinions in the links, but they exist, as diferent opinions.
You only have one level of the discussion and usually you are right and everybody gives you the credit.
About immunity, maybe you should start questioning yourself first.



> It is of course your right -- as others have noted already -- to conduct discussions in such a way. However, next time when you start a discussion, please save other participants some time and effort by immediately pointing out that you're seeking nothing more than an echo chamber.


 
Why did you stayed and why haven't you unsubbed?



> In fact, as a long-time participant of various Internet discussion forums -- although relatively new at this one -- I would say that your last series of posts seriously smacks of trolling. Actually, the only reason why I still think you might not be a troll is that you've apparently made hundreds of posts at the forum already without being banned.


 
Hopefully because there are more flexible people around here than the ones you can actually talk to. I don't care how many posts I get. I'm also part of several discussion foruns and they are quite gender sensitive and this thread had never ended up like this.


----------



## cuchuflete

"...in this male norm" 

There is no agreement here that there is a "male norm".  Much of the thread has been devoted to discussing whether, in fact, grammatical masculine forms do or do not indicate a male norm.   It isn't an assumption from which to argue.


"move further to non-sexist languages"  We have seen a great many examples of real languages in which the correlation between masculine and feminine grammatical classifications are not in any way sexist.  Again, it's hard to argue or discuss something on which there is no agreement about the basic premises implicit in the questions.


----------



## Vin Raven

Lusitania said:


> Look for mysogyny and probably it's more like it, but it isn't me.



Well, you are quoting some pretty radical mysandrists, I don't see much of a difference between your site citation and some guy citing some radical misogynist to back his point.  

If you can see what I mean?


----------



## cuchuflete

Writing now as a moderator, I ask all participants in this conversation to address the topic, the statements others have made about it, or anything related to it, but omit all personal attacks.  They add nothing of value.  If they continue, another moderator who has not participated in this thread will likely come along and delete lots of posts and close the thread.


----------



## Victoria32

. said:


> The issue is slightly larger than you indicate.  I feel uncomfortable addressing a group and being required to use a masculine pronoun or a combination of a masculine pronoun and a feminine pronoun.
> If I use only the masculine pronoun I risk misinterpretation.
> If I use both pronouns I feel clumsy.
> If I use a neuter I feel elegant.
> Policeman easily becomes police officer.
> A Chief Executive Officer has already addressed the situation.
> Our language will evolve with our society.  A male nurse was once an object of derision because nurses were traditionally female but as society changed so has acceptance of the word and most blokes who are nurses simply refer to themselves as a nurse.
> We had policemen and firemen because only blokes were policemen and firemen but times change and we now have Firefighters and police officers.
> This discussion would have been pointless 30 years ago and so illustrates the leaps we have taken in one generation.
> 
> .,,


 (My son is a male nurse (student) who uses 'they' in his essays etc, and is astonished by the intransigence of we 'olds' in the use of exclusive gendered language by my generation... 


Vin Raven said:


> Well, you are quoting some pretty radical mysandrists, I don't see much of a difference between your site citation and some guy citing some radical misogynist to back his point.
> 
> If you can see what I mean?


Er, Casey Miller and Kate Swift are 'radical misandrists'? _You say that seriously? _

Vicky


----------



## Vin Raven

Victoria32 said:


> Er, Casey Miller and Kate Swift are 'radical misandrists'? _You say that seriously?_



Sure, and not at all because they're radical lesbian feminists, but because their book, "_*The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing" *_is required reading in misandrist circles.


----------



## gaer

This is certainly one of the longest discussions I've seen in a long time, and I think it has gone on so long because it is explosive. It's complicated.

On one hand, it is easy to assume that those who defend traditional language usage are "sexists". In some cases it might be true. I would say that men who refuse to even consider any of the points made by those who say language usage may contribute to or help keep in place a bias toward males are not being fair.

On the other hand, to automatically accuse anyone who is "linguistically conservative" of treating women unfairly and of having little or no respect for them is absurd and leads to some rather ridiculous assumptions.

In this discussion, for instance, if I were to state that I prefer "everyone is entitled to his own opinion" and feel uncomfortable with "everyone is entitled to their own opinion", on purely traditional and grammatical grounds, I fear I might be in for a "cyber-stoning".

If I defend the phrase "all men live quiet lives of desperation" by saying that "all people live quiet lives of desperation" sounds perfectly horrible to me, I'm fairly certain that many people will conclude that I am traditional and conservative socially and politically—and therefore probably not at all supportive of Women's Rights. 

(And if my wife agrees with me, which in fact she does, she will probably be assumed to be a traitor to women everywhere.)

Once people have assumed that I am against women and fairness on the basis of my views of grammar and defense of certain traditions in the English language, I doubt that anything I might say would convince people that I support Women's Rights and always have. Linguistic liberalism and social liberalism do not necessarily have anything to do with each other. They may. They may not.

How many other people in this discussion are willing to consider the idea that views about the gender of nouns do not indicate our views about sexual/gender matters? 

Gaer


----------



## .   1

I write poetry and have found that without exception the removal of the masculine and feminine pronouns has improved each piece taking it from a possible diatribe against men or women and turning it into an observation.

I can not see the need for masculinity or feminity in words unless the gender of the word is relevant.

.,,


----------



## ireney

.,, that maybe possible in English (removal of the masculine and feminine pronouns) but in i.e. Greek that would be a drop in the ocean since all words are of one of the three genders we use.

Unless we change the Greek language completely, there are going to be three genders always. I will call my boyfriend αγάπη μου (=my love f.) and he could call me (if he knew Greek that is  ) έρωτά μου (= my love m.).


----------



## Outsider

Lusitania said:


> In Portuguese we now say Os Estudantes e as Estudantes but it's more commonly used As alunas e os Alunos, or if it's for a training os formandos e as formandas. Os professores e as professoras.


Who's "we"? Everyone I know says "os estudantes", "os formandos", "os professores".


----------



## Vin Raven

. said:


> I write poetry and have found that without exception the removal of the masculine and feminine pronouns has improved each piece taking it from a possible diatribe against men or women and turning it into an observation.



Depends on the context, many times it makes things sound rather silly to most people's ears.



. said:


> I can not see the need for masculinity or feminity in words unless the gender of the word is relevant.



I cannot see the need to artificially create new additional terms when the existing terms are perfectly acceptable except to a few people who've decided to create an issue where none exists.

After all, just because someone may think there's an issue, that doesn't mean there really is any issue.


----------



## !netko!

Athaulf said:


> I'm pretty sure that's a recent novelty that came about as a calque of the English "gender" in such contexts. I have yet to hear anyone inquiring about the "rod" of a person in real life. And I've never heard the adjective "transrodni" (which really sounds ugly as hell). For this notion, "transseksualni"/"transseksualac" is normally used.
> 
> 
> 
> I know, "transrodni" is a hideous word, but according to Wikipedia, "transgender" and "transexual" are not the same thing. Accordingly, two different words should be used in Croatian for those two terms. And yes, it's new and it's not surprising you haven't heard it. You probably would have if you lived in Croatia. Its usage is growing (not in speech, of course). Still, all the words of a language were new once.
> And as for "rod" used as human gender is a newer calque, it probably is. But it is a necessary and suitable one. How would you talk about gender theory in Croatian otherwise? Reasonable calques become standard, inconspicuous words as language evolves. Being of a younger age, I've never really seen "rod" as human gender as weird. I guess that shows it's become a normal part of language by now.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> "Most languages"?! Even if you were familiar with _all _the Indo-European languages, it would still expose you to only a single-digit percentage of all the world's languages -- most of which have nothing comparable to the IE concept of grammatical gender. You can hear one such language if you just cross Drava, even though people speaking it are certainly no less sexist than their neighbors.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> Sure, I was overgeneralizing. But I wasn't really speaking from personal experience with the languages. My opinion comes from reading and hearing about sexism in language from trustworthy sources. But of course I cannot really *know*. That's why I wrote "I *think*", and not "I'm *convinced that*". It's just a personal opinion. Talking from experience, all the languages I speak/understand are sexist in some way. But as I already said, I don't think deconstructing them because of that is an attractive possibility.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> And from a "gender" perspective, I'd like to hear what you have to say about this phenomenon in our language?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> But I already said that I don't link gender in grammar and gender in society. So I don't really see this as a phenomen of any kind. Simply, some words in our language are of feminine gender, some masculine, some neuter. Words of different grammatical gender can be ascribed to the same object.
Click to expand...


----------



## Outsider

Lusitania said:


> Another issue is that just by being a woman it doesn't mean that you care about the way you should be address. Some don't even care about the way they are treated.


Exactly. So what makes you think you have the right to impose _your_ minority ideas on them as well as the rest of us?


----------



## Lilla My

> Another issue is that just by being a woman it doesn't mean that you care about the way you should be address. Some don't even care about the way they are treated.



I must say that, being a woman, I felt insulted by this. I do care about the way I'm treated, but don't mind being adressed with a masculine pronoun. I don't sense it as masculine ! 
And I don't want to see my language disfigured by some ugly changes.


----------



## .   1

Vin Raven said:


> After all, just because someone may think there's an issue, that doesn't mean there really is any issue.


The fact that someone thinks that there is an issue gives a greater possibility that there is an issue than if nobody thinks it an issue.
I do not have an issue with swearing and could not give a fig but I suspect that I would create a communication barrier if I started peppering my posts with gutteral words intergrated from Germanic or Low Dutch.
I am bothered ever so slightly by the modern trend to use both genders in English he/she or him/her and will be happy to use whatever alternative is eventually developed but while they're doing that their is there to fill the gap for me.

.,,


----------



## Victoria32

Vin Raven said:


> Sure, and not at all because they're radical lesbian feminists, but because their book, "_*The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing" *_is required reading in misandrist circles.


I read that book in the 1980s, and iit is very reasonable!

I am probably in for a world of pain for asking this, but why is it that you think  that  feminist = misandrist?  It doesn't.

(Feel free to PM me if you don't want to clutter the thread).

Vicky


----------



## Athaulf

!netko! said:


> And as for "rod" used as human gender is a newer calque, it probably is. But it is a necessary and suitable one. How would you talk about gender theory in Croatian otherwise? Reasonable calques become standard, inconspicuous words as language evolves. Being of a younger age, I've never really seen "rod" as human gender as weird. I guess that shows it's become a normal part of language by now.



But the problem is that, as I've explained at length in my previous posts, the English term "gender" itself nowadays lacks precision and coherence. Its two (at least) quite distinct meanings have been confused and obscured to the point where its meaning now unpredictably shifts back and forth between several distinct notions, making it almost impossible to have a coherent discussion about these matters. 

Not everything in the English language is perfect, let alone everything that's fashionable in the academia and politics of the Anglosphere. Thus, I'm not happy to see a seriously flawed and imprecise concept from English imported into Croatian in the same language-corrupting manner. If someone wants to talk about "gender" in its fuzzy "social construction" meaning in Croatian, I say -- fine, but please invent a new word for it. Don't do it by destroying the established meaning of a perfectly respectable word such as "rod."



> My opinion comes from reading and hearing about sexism in language from trustworthy sources. But of course I cannot really *know*. That's why I wrote "I *think*", and not "I'm *convinced that*". It's just a personal opinion. Talking from experience, all the languages I speak/understand are sexist in some way. But as I already said, I don't think deconstructing them because of that is an attractive possibility.


But when it comes to ideologically charged topics such as this one, there's no such thing as "trustworthy" sources. Thus I'm not arguing my points in this thread by citing some authorities or providing secondary sources, but by constructing from scratch concrete arguments based on well-known facts and asking people to provide concrete answers to that. 



> But I already said that I don't link gender in grammar and gender in society. So I don't really see this as a phenomen of any kind. Simply, some words in our language are of feminine gender, some masculine, some neuter. Words of different grammatical gender can be ascribed to the same object.


You might be surprised to find out how many of the most fierce "gender-neutral language" ideologues lack the knowledge -- especially the knowledge of non-English languages -- necessary to grasp this simple point.


----------



## Athaulf

Vin Raven said:


> Sure, and not at all because they're radical lesbian feminists, but because their book, "_*The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing" *_is required reading in misandrist circles.



Arguing a complete _non sequitur_ won't help your cause either. A lot of ideologically non-committed standard reference literature is required reading in many sorts of nutjob circles, too. 

In what category the book mentioned above falls, I have no idea, because I haven't read it. For all that I know, its authors might well be misandrists, but the fact (?) that their work is widely read by minsandrists certainly does not prove it.


----------



## Outsider

Athaulf said:


> But the problem is that, as I've explained at length in my previous posts, the English term "gender" itself nowadays lacks precision and coherence. Its two (at least) quite distinct meanings have been confused and obscured to the point where its meaning now unpredictably shifts back and forth between several distinct notions, making it almost impossible to have a coherent discussion about these matters.


I disagree with that. I think there are good reasons behind that modern notion of gender. Separating biological sex from psychosociological gender is a novel concept (or at least a novel distinction to make), and there was really no other good word for it. 

Besides, many words have multiple meanings. The word _sexo_ itself (Portuguese for "sex") can mean:

- gender;
- sexual intercourse (i.e. having sex);
- genitals.

This never causes any confusion in practice.

I see absolutely no problem with the use of "gender" for "sex" in English. It may sound a little prudish when I translate into Portuguese, but, then again, Portuguese has its own prudish points. For example, we don't normally describe a man as a "male", or a woman as a "female". We say they are "of the male sex", or "of the female sex", because plain "male" and "female" are for animals, and sound crude (even demeaning) when applied to humans.


----------



## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> I disagree with that _[my claim that the English term "gender" nowadays lacks precision and coherence -- A.]_. I think there are good reasons behind that modern notion of gender. Separating biological sex from psychosociological gender is a novel concept (or at least a novel distinction to make), and there was really no other good word for it.



I agree that such a distinction makes a lot of sense, and in a previous post, I have already noted that the notion of gender in that sense was initially useful and well-defined. The problems came when this notion started being mixed, confused, and conflated with the grammatical gender. When puritans of all persuasions started adopting the word as a euphemism for the dirty S-word, that didn't help either. 

This is what I had in mind when I wrote that _gender_ nowadays lacks coherence because it bounces back and forth between these quite different meanings. As soon as one starts speaking about the grammatical gender as a purely linguistic issue, one immediately faces confused counter-arguments talking about the psychosociological gender. As long as people take care to distinguish the term's precise distinct meanings, everything's fine -- but alas, this is rarely the case in practice these days.



> Besides, many words have multiple meanings. The word _sexo_ itself (Portuguese for "sex") can mean:
> 
> - gender;
> - sexual intercourse (i.e. having sex);
> - genitals.
> 
> This never causes any confusion in practice.


Not even in the case of "Male Plural" Lusitania?


----------



## Grop

At the risk of saying what has been said (I confess I didn't read everything) I think there is no issue here.

If you consider French (I don't speak other languages that are concerned) the rule is: whenever you don't know which gender to chose, use masculine. "Julie et Alain sont sortis" -> "Ils sont sortis".

(Not having this rule would be much more complicated than in English, as efforts to avoid chosing a gender would be heavier).

If you want to prove this implies sexism, you will have to prove that women in French speaking societies have a lower condition than in societies where the main language has no such rule, such as English-speaking societies. If there is no such difference, then the linguistic question has no implication on society.


----------



## Athaulf

Grop said:


> If you want to prove this implies sexism, you will have to prove that women in French speaking societies have a lower condition than in societies where the main language has no such rule, such as English-speaking societies.



Or the Iranian society, whose speakers got rid of the grammatical genders quite spontaneously several centuries ago.


----------



## Grop

Is it meant (as I think) as an example that a society whose main language has no such rule as the French use-masculine-when-in-doubt rule may deny equality of men and women?

It supports my point: a feature of a certain language does not represent the social system where this language is spoken.


----------



## geve

Lusitania said:


> I did not insults men, there are 3 men here that have deliberatly turned questions at me in a very ironic and sometimes hostile manner. There was also one girl.


I don't know if I am the "one girl" or if you were thinking of Natasha or Ireney or Lilla My or Karine or... We are all _women_ who expressed their _opinions_.  

Anyway, I'd like to thank you for starting this thread. It gave me the opportunity to learn interesting facts about *grammatical* gender in other languages. I hope you can see all the interest that there is to have this discussion on *this* particular forum of all places - a forum that gathers people with an interest for language from everywhere in the world. We can all learn something here, I know I have. 

So I'm a woman, and I'm not on "your side", if we have to pick a side - ie. I will not fight for people to say "hola a todos y todas".*
Why? Because the fact that I'm a woman does not suffice to describe me. And more importantly, because the fact that I'm a woman *should not make a difference* in many cases, hence does not need to be acknowledged - which is what I said in my post 94. 
I don't need to be reminded that I'm a woman every time someone adresses me - and I don't need to remind people that I'm a woman either (I'm hoping they can see for themselves). What matters is that there is a group of *human beings*, of students, of friends, of coworkers, or whatever characteristic that motivates the gathering. 
Grammar has the meaning one wishes to see in it. The neutral plural, which spells the same as the masculine plural in some languages, has a neutral inclusive meaning to me. Of course I want men and women to be treated equally, and I don't see that happening by imposing to constantly distinguish them in speech.

* Note that I said "I will not fight for people to say hola a todos y todas" - and not that I would forbid people to say it. As far as I'm concerned, you can say whatever you feel more comfortable with, and I will do the same.


----------



## AGATHA2

gaer said:


> Outsider, thank you for this explanation. I'm sure I must seem "thick as a brick", but this is a completely new concept for me. I know almost nothing about Spanish and absolutely nothing about Portugese.
> 
> I kept asking the same question simply because I got two answers. One was that "hijo" is "boy". Period. The other answer is that "hijo" is also used for "child", in the sense that you just explained. I believe you!


 
Hi Gaer !

The problem is, that the native speakers of romance languages don`t know that in german there is no distinction beetween "hijo / hija" and "nino / nina". That`s the reason of your confusion. "hijo" doesn`t mean "child" or "boy" it means "someones descendant".


----------



## Athaulf

Grop said:


> Is it _[my example of Iran -- A.]_ meant (as I think) as an example that a society whose main language has no such rule as the French use-masculine-when-in-doubt rule may deny equality of men and women?



Exactly so.

Actually, as a fact of incredible irony, the grammatical gender is completely absent from many non-Indo-European languages that have been spoken in societies practicing various forms of savagery and cruelty towards women  unprecedented in Western history. As for the example of Iran, the language spoken there happens to be the only Indo-European language that has completely lost its genders through a spontaneous process!

One should also notice the fact that nothing similar to the modern ideas about the equality of men and women ever arose outside the broad Western cultural and political tradition. Along with the rest of this tradition, these historically unprecedented ideas have arisen exactly in those countries whose peoples speak some of the supposedly most "sexist" languages on the planet.


----------



## Outsider

AGATHA2 said:


> "hijo" doesn`t mean "child" or "boy" it means "someones descendant".


In other words, someone's _child_.


----------



## AGATHA2

Outsider said:


> In other words, someone's _child_.


 
Of course, but "child" means "hijo" and "nino", but in spanish "hijo" and "nino" are not synonyms


----------



## Lusitania

cuchuflete said:


> Writing now as a moderator, *I ask all participants in this conversation to address the topic,* the statements others have made about it, or anything related to it, but omit all personal attacks. They add nothing of value. If they continue, another moderator who has not participated in this thread will likely come along and delete lots of posts and close the thread.


 

Thanks Cucuflete, 

I will avoid going off-topic.


----------



## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> Who's "we"? Everyone I know says "os estudantes", "os formandos", "os professores".


 

Well, I'm not sure where you live and where you work but I'll rephrase that. 

In accordance with the Portuguese Laws on non-discrimination (from the Portuguese constitution to labour law and publicity) there have been established rules on non-sexist language. On CITE website or CIDM you can find out more on that as well as there is a recommendation from the Council of Europe dated from 1990. Portugal as many other countries is a Member State and agreed upon.

As "we" I meant the country, although many people aren't aware of what has been reached so far.


----------



## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> Exactly. So what makes you think you have the right to impose _your_ minority ideas on them as well as the rest of us?


 

Minority depend on the context they are in, usually I'm not a minority. 

I tried to impose my ideas as much as some of you did. I have the right to my own ideas and seing things from my own perspective without being insulted and target for more personal attacks.

why strike me the most is that my topic was addressing especially women and how they felt and you just decided to answer for them.

If I agreed with you, I would be part of the majority and there wouldn't be a problem then?


----------



## geve

Lusitania said:


> why strike me the most is that my topic was addressing especially women and how they felt and you just decided to answer for them.


Well you did say in the opening post


Lusitania said:


> Hello to all of you, Ladies and Gentlemen




Outsider answered for himself; I answered for myself, as did other women in this thread. 
Why do you refuse to acknowledge our existence?


----------



## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> Besides, many words have multiple meanings. The word _sexo_ itself (Portuguese for "sex") can mean:
> 
> - gender;
> - sexual intercourse (i.e. having sex);
> - genitals.
> 
> This never causes any confusion in practice.
> 
> I see absolutely no problem with the use of "gender" for "sex" in English. It may sound a little prudish when I translate into Portuguese, but, then again, Portuguese has its own prudish points. For example, we don't normally describe a man as a "male", or a woman as a "female". We say they are "of the male sex", or "of the female sex", because plain "male" and "female" are for animals, and sound crude (even demeaning) when applied to humans.


 

Sexo is the act of sexual intercourse and it refers to genitals. It's a different concept from Gender.

SEXO do Lat. _sexu_

s. m., características estruturais e funcionais que permitem distinguir os organismos macho e fêmea;
conjunto dos indivíduos que têm o mesmo sexo.

GÉNERO do Lat. *_generu_ por _genere_

s. m., conjunto de seres com os mesmos caracteres essenciais;
reunião de espécies que tem um ou mais caracteres comuns;
agrupamento de espécies muito próximas;
por ext. raça, casta, variedade;
ordem, família;
modo, qualidade;
estilo, modo de escrever, de trabalhar, de executar;
feição artística;

É uma categoria de análise, inclusiva, cartacterizada pela transversalidade.


----------



## Outsider

Lusitania said:


> In accordance with the Portuguese Laws on non-discrimination (from the Portuguese constitution to labour law and publicity) there have been established rules on non-sexist language.


Nowhere does the Portuguese Constitution attempt to regulate how people speak or write. As for the rest you mention, I am skeptical, but I will take a look at the website when I have the time.



Lusitania said:


> As "we" I meant the country, although many people aren't aware of what has been reached so far.


If most people in the country are not "aware" of how much you've reached in indoctrinating them -- meaning, they don't practice what you're preaching --, then you haven't reached all that much, have you?



Lusitania said:


> I tried to impose my ideas as much as some of you did. I have the right to my own ideas and seing things from my own perspective without being insulted and target for more personal attacks.


The difference is that you've spent your time shoving laws and directives down our throats. No one on the "con" side of the debate has done that.


----------



## Lusitania

geve said:


> Well you did say in the opening post
> 
> 
> 
> Outsider answered for himself; I answered for myself, as did other women in this thread.
> Why do you refuse to acknowledge our existence?


 
Thanks Geve

I was answering previous posts and didn't got to yours. 
I didn't refuse to acknowledge your existence, I found your posts very ironic and didn't like your tone. 

You have your own opinions I have mine.


----------



## Outsider

Lusitania said:


> Sexo is the act of sexual intercourse and it refers to genitals. It's a different concept from Gender.


You don't even read your own sources, do you?

Look at the words in blue:



Lusitania said:


> SEXO do Lat. _sexu_
> 
> s. m., características estruturais e funcionais que permitem distinguir os organismos macho e fêmea;
> conjunto dos indivíduos que têm o mesmo sexo.


...now kindly retract yourself.

_É o que eu digo_...


----------



## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> You don't even read your own sources, do you?
> 
> Look at the words in blue:
> 
> ...now kindly retract yourself.
> 
> _É o que eu digo_...


 

You say that sex is gender and it's not. Sex is biological, Gender isn't.


----------



## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> Nowhere does the Portuguese Constitution attempt to regulate how people speak or write. As for the rest you mention, I am skeptical, but I will take a look at the website when I have the time.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> maybe we should wait for that.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> If most people in the country are not "aware" of how much you've reached in indoctrinating them -- meaning, they don't practice what you're preaching --, then you haven't reached all that much, have you?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Do I know you from some place or somewhere? What do you know about me preaching around the country?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The difference is that you've spent your time shoving laws and directives down our throats. No one on the "con" side of the debate has done that
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> That's what I was waiting.
> My questions was very simple you really brought an issue that should have went to another thread. And you failed to bring any studies to support your theories.
Click to expand...


----------



## geve

Lusitania said:


> Thanks Geve
> 
> I was answering previous posts and didn't got to yours.
> I didn't refuse to acknowledge your existence, I found your posts very ironic and didn't like your tone.
> 
> You have your own opinions I have mine.


You didn't like my tone?  You didn't like my opinion. 

I have the right to disagree, you have the right to disagree, but you don't have the right to simply dismiss my opinion because of an alleged tone. 
I have done nothing but express my opinion which you asked for in the first place. See my latest post for instance. It's my personal beliefs. If you choose to view this as ironic then it's your choice, not mine.


----------



## Outsider

Lusitania said:


> You say that sex is gender and it's not.


No, you're twisting my words around. What I said was that _sexo_ -- the Portuguese word, not the English one -- means "gender", among other things.

In any case, take a look at what I found at the Merriam-Webster online:



> *gender*
> 
> 1 a : a subclass within a grammatical class (as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms b : membership of a word or a grammatical form in such a subclass c : an inflectional form showing membership in such a subclass
> 
> *2 a : SEX* <the feminine gender>
> 
> b : the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex


----------



## Lusitania

geve said:


> You didn't like my tone?  You didn't like my opinion.
> 
> I have the right to disagree, you have the right to disagree, but you don't have the right to simply dismiss my opinion because of an alleged tone.
> I have done nothing but express my opinion which you asked for in the first place. See my latest post for instance. It's my personal beliefs. If you choose to view this as ironic then it's your choice, not mine.


 

Geve,

Besides answering to the questions on the topic. You've also started to ask me for a proposed model. 
Now outsider says that I'm preaching all around the country and imposing my ideas on people, as if he had ever known me.

This is not leading anywhere.


----------



## cuchuflete

The most recent posts here have mostly been

—people discussing perceived attitudes and styles of other members, or
—people talking at or by one another, rather than to one another.

This is not useful. Nobody is going to either be persuaded or learn anything new.  If we cannot offer something, whether a fact or a viewpoint or interpretation, that has not already be stated in the previous 279+ posts, it might be better to wait for some new participants, and read and consider what they have to offer.  

That's a forum member viewpoint.  Feel free to ignore it and continue to politely goad and thrust and parry if you find that satisfying.


----------



## Outsider

Lusitania said:


> That's what I was waiting.
> My questions was very simple you really brought an issue that should have went to another thread. And you failed to bring any studies to support your theories.


I beg your pardon?


----------



## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> No, you're twisting my words around. What I said was that _sexo_ -- the Portuguese word, not the English one -- means "gender", among other things.
> 
> In any case, take a look at what I found at the Merriam-Webster online:


 

I sent you both definitions in Portuguese, so they are diferent as you can see. But many people do tend to confuse them.


----------



## Lusitania

cuchuflete said:


> The most recent posts here have mostly been
> 
> —people discussing perceived attitudes and styles of other members, or
> —people talking at or by one another, rather than to one another.
> 
> This is not useful. Nobody is going to either be persuaded or learn anything new. If we cannot offer something, whether a fact or a viewpoint or interpretation, that has not already be stated in the previous 279+ posts, it might be better to wait for some new participants, and read and consider what they have to offer.
> 
> That's a forum member viewpoint. Feel free to ignore it and continue to politely goad and thrust and parry if you find that satisfying.


 
For me, I will wait for other member to come along and see what they have to offer. I feel like I'm walking in circles.


----------



## Outsider

Lusitania said:


> On CITE website or CIDM you can find out more on that as well as there is a recommendation from the Council of Europe dated from 1990.


I've taken a look at it. It's just a recommendation to member states. I am not required to follow it.

Furthermore, their careful wording says:



> Encouraging the use, as far as possible, of non-sexist language to take account of the presence, status and role of women in society, as current linguistic practice does for men;


Well, in my opinion saying "Olá a todos" rather than "Olá a todos e todas" is not sexist, so, even if I were to follow the EU recommendation, I would see no need to change how I speak.


----------



## Outsider

Lusitania said:


> I sent you both definitions in Portuguese, so they are diferent as you can see.


Whether _sexo_ and _género_ are synonyms in Portuguese or not is irrelevant. My post was only about _sexo_.


----------



## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> Well, in my opinion saying "Olá a todos" rather than "Olá a todos e todas" is not sexist, so, even if I were to follow the EU recommendation, I would see no need to change how I speak.


 

As long as you recognize the fact that some people might not feel included.


----------



## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> Whether _sexo_ and _género_ are synonyms in Portuguese or not is irrelevant. My post was only about _sexo_.


 
If it's irrelvant how come you made such a big deal out of it from the begining. They aren't synonyms.


----------



## Outsider

Lusitania said:


> If it's irrelvant how come you made such a big deal out of it from the begining.


I did not make any deal of it. You are confusing English with Portuguese. 

What I said was that _sexo_ -- the *Portuguese* word -- can mean "gender" -- the *English* word.

I never said that _sexo_ -- the *Portuguese* word -- meant the same as _género_ -- the *Portuguese* word. (Although it can, actually... But that's beside the point.)


----------



## geve

Lusitania said:


> Geve,
> 
> Besides answering to the questions on the topic. You've also started to ask me for a proposed model.


What? 

Will you please stop asserting what attitude people might or might not have had, and actually _read_ the answers you get to your questions? Your thread topic is an interesting one, let's keep it rolling with contributive contributions. I will follow Cuchu's wise words and let you have the last word on my behaviour or style or whatever it is that is wrong with me.


----------



## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> I beg your pardon?


 

One thing is Common Sense, another is Scientific knowledge. 
What I asked in the question was pure common sense on peoples feelings and beliefs on the issue and it was turned into a circus. You have provided all this theories but where are you based on this? Are they you opinions or have there been any studies to support. As you turned  this into a matter of life and death bring facts more than your own views.

Get some reading done


----------



## Lusitania

Ok, so lets wait on some newcomers that may provide some more ideas and inputs and lets avoid Ciberstalking and personal attacks.

Have a nice night todas e todos


----------



## Outsider

Lusitania said:


> One thing is Common Sense, another is Scientific knowledge.
> What I asked in the question was pure common sense on peoples feelings and beliefs on the issue and it was turned into a circus. You have provided all this theories but where are you based on this? Are they you opinions or have there been any studies to support. As you turned  this into a matter of life and death bring facts more than your own views.
> 
> Get some reading done


Where is your evidence that:

- grammatical gender correlates with gender inequality;
- changing language will reduce gender inequality

(Two separate propositions, by the way!)

You don't seem to have any.


----------



## Outsider

Outsider said:


> I did not make any deal of it. You are confusing English with Portuguese.
> 
> What I said was that _sexo_ -- the *Portuguese* word -- can mean "gender" -- the *English* word.
> 
> I never said that _sexo_ -- the *Portuguese* word -- meant the same as _género_ -- the *Portuguese* word. (Although it can, actually... But that's beside the point.)


The confusion here arose, I think, from the fact that we had previously been talking about "gender" as a sociological concept, but in my post I used the word in the biological sense (which is also possible in English; see the M-W quote).

Looking back, I see now how this may have misled Lusitania. Anyway, I was just using that example to make a minor point, addressed at Athaulf, that words can have more than one meaning.


----------



## xarruc

Sorry, but I haven’t read all the 279+ posts here, far too much squabbling to wade through.. I read bits here and there … If I go repeating other peoples threads feel free to all shout at me at once….

Is the use of todos sexist? Only if it is meant to be. Words are just sounds to convey a sentiment we are trying to communicate. We all interpret those sounds in a different way. If I say todos without any intention of excluding women, and by lexical rules am not, then I can’t see that anyone should take offence. Likewise with manhole, chairman, or any other such case.

Is the use of todos a sexist remnant of a chauvinistic society? Perhaps. So what? I am not sexist just because I use todos, due to what I said above.

Should we get rid of todos because it might be a sexist remnant of a chauvinistic society. Definitely not – because while we are at it lets rip down roman bathhouses because they were only frequented by men, smash up the ampitheatres as we no longer have gladiators, lets burn down Shakespeare’s globe again because originally plays were performed by all male casts, in fact, while we’re at it, lets burn all his works too. As many foreros comment, from time to time, culture is inseparably tied up in language, in phrases that have lost their original meanings and context, in the way vocabulary swapped hands during migrations. To artificially remove a standard piece of grammar in case someone gets offended makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.

Finally, adding these artificial changes will effect the style in which people write. The alternative, Tod@s contains a non standard character. How is it pronounced? If that pronunciation is not changed then it will still be sexist in speech. 

And, besides, a lot of work and bother, and for what? There are worse cases of sexism out there to campaign about.



*The road to hell is paved with good intentions. *



PS if I have used lexical wrongly please correct me.


----------



## Marga H

Wow!Number of posts is really impressing!
If you are still interested in *grammar curiosities* related with gender, here is another one:
In Polish language some inflection patterns have 2 forms:
1.*virile* or personal masculine form
2.*nonvirile *that is to say any other possibility: feminine, neuter and inanimate masculine.
For example:
*wszyscy *chłopcy *byli* w domu = all boys were at home
*wszystkie *dziewczyny *były *w domu = all girls were at home
*wszystkie *dzieci *były *w domu = all kids were at home ( kid in Polish is neuter gender )
*wszystkie *stoły *były *w domu = all tables were at home ( table in Polish is masculine gender )
In comparison with that obvious discrimination the problem of todos and todas seems to be a little less painful  .
Luckily if you say greetings for all, the form ( in genitive case ) is the same: 
Pozdrowienia dla *wszystkich* !
Seriously I have decided to add my two cents to your thread Lusitania,  because I think that so heated approach to the subject is acting to the detriment to the women's rights battle.It gives an occasion to humiliate the problem and there is still a lot of things to do about the matter.
The topic of the thread is very interesting but it needs laid-back *linguistic  *approach, not the political one.
Marga.


----------



## chung

I agree fully with Marga, cuchuflete, Athaulf et al. This is a linguistic matter. It has nothing to do with social or biological traits. Confusing these three aspects undermines the credibility of anyone trying to sound intelligent about grammatical gender. I also agree with Athaulf's points that trying to purify/mutilate some languages on the model of gender-neutrality in English is virutally impossible and shows deep ignorance on behalf of the "purifier" of how other languages function (especially in those languages which still make a strong distinction between masculine, feminine and neuter). Drawing conclusions about people's social attitudes because of some morphological aspects in their language seems dubious at best and laughable at worst.


----------



## Lusitania

Outsider said:


> Where is your evidence that:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> You did replied so fast that I'm afraid that you didn't even read my post properly. As probably you haven't read anything I sent.
> 
> So maybe you should clarify on what it's you definition of evidence.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> - grammatical gender correlates with gender inequality;
> - changing language will reduce gender inequality
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> 1. My point of view is that Language shapes society, reflects the nature of the relations established in each society, it tells us a lot about social relations in each society. Speaking is a living force in every society, it can be used as a way to control society, also to suppress or build identities, to avoid change.
> 
> Everything starts with language.
> 
> 2. Some changes could benefit societies, without destroying the language. Languages have changed throughtout history.
> We've included foreign words even.
> And the main issue is not to change the language, is how we speak it.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> (Two separate propositions, by the way!)
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Btw what was the purpose of this comment?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> You don't seem to have any.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> And you do?
Click to expand...


----------



## Lusitania

xarruc said:


> Sorry, but I haven’t read all the 279+ posts here, far too much squabbling to wade through.. I read bits here and there … If I go repeating other peoples threads feel free to all shout at me at once….



 
It would have been great if you took the time.




> Is the use of todos sexist? Only if it is meant to be. Words are just sounds to convey a sentiment we are trying to communicate. We all interpret those sounds in a different way. If I say todos without any intention of excluding women, and by lexical rules am not, then I can’t see that anyone should take offence. Likewise with manhole, chairman, or any other such case.


 
No, the use of todos is not sexist. But is the use of "todos e todas" wrong? The question was if women felt included. I don't. If your a man in a group of woman and it's said "Hola a todas" do you feel included?
Nowadays many people decided on chairperson for example, ombusperson, etc. 




> Is the use of todos a sexist remnant of a chauvinistic society? Perhaps. So what? I am not sexist just because I use todos, due to what I said above.


 
Your choise. Please see my previous post.
 



> Should we get rid of todos because it might be a sexist remnant of a chauvinistic society


 
No, just include todas if you are addressing women as well.
 



> Definitely not – because while we are at it lets rip down roman bathhouses because they were only frequented by men, smash up the ampitheatres as we no longer have gladiators, lets burn down Shakespeare’s globe again because originally plays were performed by all male casts, in fact, while we’re at it, lets burn all his works too.


 
No, lets keep it all, they are signs of their times and lets not forget it.
 



> As many foreros comment, *from time to time*, culture is inseparably tied up in language, in phrases that have lost their original meanings and context, in the way vocabulary swapped hands during migrations. To artificially remove a standard piece of grammar in case someone gets offended makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.


 
I would disagree with from time to time. What you mean by standard?

Grammars should be inclusive and fit to the societies in which they exist. Don't you agree?




> Finally, adding these artificial changes will effect the style in which people write. The alternative, Tod@s contains a non standard character. How is it pronounced? If that pronunciation is not changed then it will still be sexist in speech.


 
I don't use the @ in that context. I do see it to fit any purpose, but some people prefer to use it.
 



> And, besides, a lot of work and bother, and for what? There are worse cases of sexism out there to campaign about.


 
I've also answered to this in my previous post, I find Language very important and basic as the wish to communicate. It's one of the faces of gender inequality as it tended to turn women invisible. It's a very important step.

*



The road to hell is paved with good intentions. 

Click to expand...

 
That could work for anything in life.*


----------



## Lusitania

Marga H said:


> In comparison with that obvious discrimination the problem of todos and todas seems to be a little less painful  .


 

I fully agree, there are more important expression, the thing with todos is adding todas. It can be dramatic for some.



> Seriously I have decided to add my two cents to your thread Lusitania, because I think that so heated approach to the subject is acting to the detriment to the women's rights battle.It gives an occasion to humiliate the problem and there is still a lot of things to do about the matter.
> The topic of the thread is very interesting but it needs laid-back *linguistic *approach, not the political one.
> Marga


 
Thanks for doing it. 
This kind of issues are usually discussed in minor audiences and try to keep it as a secret and eventually things change and nobody notices. I don't agree with that. I think that we should discuss this issues.

For me it has been a great experience because this thread (if you read it all) is how it works in power relations. The problem here is no longer the grammar or the todos thing. It's to put me in what some consider to be my "place". I don't want it, as I don't feel included. 

I don't think that this discussion is leading anywhere.

Many thanks for your comments


----------



## Lusitania

chung said:


> I agree fully with Marga, cuchuflete, Athaulf et al. This is a linguistic matter. It has nothing to do with social or biological traits.


 
So you'd say that linguist has nothing with social sciences?



> Confusing these three aspects undermines the credibility of anyone trying to sound intelligent about grammatical gender. I also agree with Athaulf's points that trying to purify/mutilate some languages on the model of gender-neutrality in English is virutally impossible and shows deep ignorance on behalf of the "purifier" of how other languages function (especially in those languages which still make a strong distinction between masculine, feminine and neuter).


 
I'm not sure where is the point. Is you are talking to a woman you'll use the feminine, if it's a man in the masculine. If you have a doubt you can avoid both by using neuter. While addressing a group of people it's a matter of trying to include both women and men. Todos is masculine, where is the problem of including todas?




> Drawing conclusions about people's social attitudes because of some morphological aspects in their language seems dubious at best and laughable at worst


 
Well, some Linguists do point that out, if they are laught at that's another issue. studies of History of Social language, sociolinguistics. 
Never saw a discussion reaching a good end by trying to make others feel ridicule.

Many thanks


----------



## Athaulf

Lusitania said:


> _ [addressing the point about the objective impossibility of speaking in a gender-neutral way in Slavic languages -- A.]_
> I'm not sure where is the point. Is you are talking to a woman you'll use the feminine, if it's a man in the masculine. If you have a doubt you can avoid both by using neuter.



I rest my case.


----------



## Outsider

Lusitania said:


> 1. My point of view is that Language shapes society, reflects the nature of the relations established in each society, it tells us a lot about social relations in each society. Speaking is a living force in every society, it can be used as a way to control society, also to suppress or build identities, to avoid change.
> 
> Everything starts with language.


My point of view is that society shapes language, but not the other way around. Until society has changed, attempting to switch words and phrases will have have no more than cosmetic effects.

Language lies at the end, not at the beginning of social change. 



Lusitania said:


> And you do?


Wrong answer. You're the one who wants people to change their behaviour, so you're the one who has to prove the change is worth it.


----------



## chung

Lusitania said:


> So you'd say that linguist has nothing with social sciences?


 
I assume that you meant "linguistics". Indeed, (theoretical) linguistics just means the study of languages. It doesn't have anything to do with social sciences such as economy, sociology or geography. Of course, some BRANCHES of linguistics are tied to social sciences. (e.g. sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics). Other branches or sub-branches of linguistics have nothing to do with social sciences (e.g. phonology, syntax, historical linguistics, computational linguistics)

When we talk about things such as masculine and feminine words, there is no sexual connotation nor is the assignment of gender by speakers of standard languages directly connected to their ideas on how people should behave to each other. The earlier examples using Farsi and Croatian show the obvious disconnection between grammatical gender and social attitudes between men and women.

If you want to be inclusive in your choice of words, that's fine. Some languages are obviously more flexible than others. What is irritating a lot of people here, is that your posts have confused grammatical gender with biological gender and social attitudes of men towards women and vice-versa. Your posts also insinuate that those who don't subscribe to your brand of linguistic neutrality must therefore be sexist and somehow perpetuating the inequality between men and women. Athaulf's point using his native Croatian illustrates succintly how flawed your arguments become if you extrapolate aspects of grammatical gender to explain relations between men and women.


----------



## .   1

Lusitania said:


> 1. My point of view is that Language shapes society, reflects the nature of the relations established in each society, it tells us a lot about social relations in each society. Speaking is a living force in every society, it can be used as a way to control society, also to suppress or build identities, to avoid change.


This is also my point.  Language is a reflection of society just as an individual reveals much of themselves by they way they chose to use their language the society reveals so much of itself by the language it develops.

I have read of a case where a Japanese man was working at a quite high level in a multinational I.T. company when it was noticed that his work performance had dropped below his known level of ability so his supervisor asked him what was the problem and could she help him.  He was delighted to accept her offer of assistance but due to language barriers he was incapable of translating the concept of a man asking a non intimate woman for help.  He just did not have the words for the concept so the concept did not exist for him.  The supervisor gave him the required assistance and he was as right as rain.
English has more than 100 words to describe a lie but just one for truth.
Innuit has dozens of words for snow.
Australian has dozens of words for drought.
I will guess that Irish has a few dozen words to describe rain.
We are no more than what we say.

.,,


----------



## Athaulf

. said:


> This is also my point.  Language is a reflection of society just as an individual reveals much of themselves by they way they chose to use their language the society reveals so much of itself by the language it develops.
> 
> I have read of a case where a Japanese man was working at a quite high level in a multinational I.T. company when it was noticed that his work performance had dropped below his known level of ability so his supervisor asked him what was the problem and could she help him.  He was delighted to accept her offer of assistance but due to language barriers he was incapable of translating the concept of a man asking a non intimate woman for help.  He just did not have the words for the concept so the concept did not exist for him.  The supervisor gave him the required assistance and he was as right as rain.
> English has more than 100 words to describe a lie but just one for truth.
> Innuit has dozens of words for snow.



Hold it riiiiiiiiiiight there! 

Here is a debunking of this ridiculously persistent urban myth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow.

The example right above that one is clearly false too. If one takes such a loose definition of "lie" that it has a hundred synonyms in English, then it should be no problem to find equally many synonyms for an equally loose definition of "truth." Not to mention that "truth" does have at least one literal synonym -- "veracity."

I very strongly suspect that your other examples are no more authentic than these ones. 




> Australian has dozens of words for drought.
> I will guess that Irish has a few dozen words to describe rain.
> We are no more than what we say.
> .,,


----------



## cuchuflete

Do societies create languages? No, they inherit languages, and sometimes modify them in small, and often trivial and sometimes meaningful ways.

Do languages influence societies?  I don't need a single academic study to accept that they do.  

Are there people in any society who don't care for some aspect of their language?  Sure.  Don't bother trotting out learned studies to prove the point.  Common sense will do just as well as science for something so obvious.  

Should those people have the right to use unconventional language, to address their disquiet with conventional forms?
Why not!  They should be prepared to be perceived as unconventional people when they do so.  This may please or displease them.  There is nothing inherently bad or subversive about being unconventional.  There is nothing inherently noble or brave about being unconventional.  

Should people with a disquiet about conventional language have the right to require other people to adopt their proposed linguistic changes?  No.  They should have a right to present their facts and logic, and request that others give these honest consideration.

Are claims of linguistic injustice valid and accurate?  Some are and some are not.  

When linguistic injustice is perceived by listeners and readers, but is not the intention of writers and speakers, what should be the solution?  Calm conversation among all parties concerned is a good starting place.  Loud proclamations of guilt and innocence, justice and injustice, logic and reason or illogic and lack of reason rarely accomplish anything of benefit to any of the parties concerned.  

In discussions of language and society, are majorities likely to be correct?  Maybe.
In discussions of language and society, are minorities likely to be correct? Maybe.


----------



## .   1

Athaulf said:


> Hold it riiiiiiiiiiight there!
> 
> Here is a debunking of this ridiculously persistent urban myth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow.
> 
> The example right above that one is clearly false too. If one takes such a loose definition of "lie" that it has a hundred synonyms in English, then it should be no problem to find equally many synonyms for an equally loose definition of "truth." Not to mention that "truth" does have at least one literal synonym -- "veracity."
> 
> I very strongly suspect that your other examples are no more authentic than these ones.


You misspelt riiiiiiiiiight  .
I apologise for being ridiculously taken in by the incorrect anecdote. Innuit and snow could hardly be farther from urban myth.
When you get into the list with; white lie, polite lie, social lie, half-truth, bending the truth, putting a little spin, euphamising, lie by ommission, the number does rapidly approach a hundred. 
With truth we have a choice of the _Latin based _veracity or the prehistoric _Germanic _treww. This is probably a moot point because I am sure that many languages have this trait of more words for lie than for truth.
I definitely read the story of the Japanese executive and his IT problem. I can not verify the truthfulness of the anecdote. I relayed the story in good faith.
You are right that Australian probably does not have more than a dozen ways to describe drought.
The jury is still out on the number of Irish words for rain but as your link about snow indicates that English has 40 words for snow I will be surprised to find that a country such as Ireland does not have a few more than average ways of describing a wet day.

.,,


----------



## Lilla My

> The jury is still out on the number of Irish words for rain but as your link about snow indicates that English has 40 words for snow I will be surprised to find that a country such as Ireland does not have a few more than average ways of describing a wet day.



I think I could easily find at least a dozen *french* word to describe rain. I let you judge if France it's a rainy country...

But it's off-topic, sorry


----------



## maxiogee

. said:


> English has more than 100 words to describe a lie but just one for truth.
> Innuit has dozens of words for snow.
> Australian has dozens of words for drought.
> I will guess that Irish has a few dozen words to describe rain.
> We are no more than what we say.
> 
> .,,





Athaulf said:


> Hold it riiiiiiiiiiight there!
> 
> Here is a debunking of this ridiculously persistent urban myth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow.



No, back up one. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight there!
"English has more than 100 words to describe a lie but just one for truth"

F…orgive me, but I doubt the *veracity* of that statement.
A…nd the *reality* is different from what you allege.
C…an I challenge the *authenticity* of what you say.
T…here's a few books missing from your *Gospel* there.


----------



## Chaska Ñawi

Has anybody noticed a topic in the last few pages of this thread?  It seems to have been buried under a heap of synonyms.


----------



## Lusitania

chung said:


> If you want to be inclusive in your choice of words, that's fine. Some languages are obviously more flexible than others. What is irritating a lot of people here, is that your posts have confused grammatical gender with biological gender and social attitudes of men towards women and vice-versa.


 
My questions addressed human behaviour and not grammar. But my point of view is that if gender is a crosscutting concept, so then it can be applied to all aspects of human life. That's the idea of Gender Mainstreaming.
I believe that the irritation had other sources.



> Your posts also insinuate that those who don't subscribe to your brand of linguistic neutrality must therefore be sexist and somehow perpetuating the inequality between men and women.


 
I disagree with the *insinuation*, there has been a lot of misinterpretation and assumptions of what I've written in which I don't see reflect anything that I've said. Many times my words have been taken out of context to produce completly diferent sense to what I've said. Starting from the point that my questions addressed women and the male rule and the discussion has been run by men.
English is not the native language of everybody here so some patient understanding must be in order.

Also the part of *"your brand of linguistic neutrality". *I suggest a lot of links and as you can see they are not my brand, but are studies, researches and thesis on the issue. Obviously, they were overlooked.




> Athaulf's point using his native Croatian illustrates succintly how flawed your arguments become if you extrapolate aspects of grammatical gender to explain relations between men and women


 
As I've written before, I do not know the Croatian Language. However, if a language as masculine, feminine and neuter it should be very easy to address people. If it doesn't have neuter "all/everybody", we can address both "todos e todas".

You have "Hi all/everybody" in English but in Portuguese it's basically "Olá a todos!" Todos is masculine, basically used to include everybody present. It can be seen as inclusive of all people by many. As far as I'm concerned I don't feel included and I don't see where is the problem of saying "Olá a todos e a todas!" if there are women present, it could also work if you have transgender around. 
I'm not even getting into the point that women are more than half of the worlds population and still they must feel included in "todos".

What strikes me the most here is how easy is to call people ignorant when they have a different opinion/perspective. Also I've been very much pressured to "retract myself" and never did that to anyone while giving my own opinion.

Many thanks for your oppinion


----------



## Lusitania

Chaska Ñawi said:


> Has anybody noticed a topic in the last few pages of this thread? It seems to have been buried under a heap of synonyms.


 
A good way to release the tension


----------



## geve

Lusitania said:


> Starting from the point that my questions addressed women and the male rule and the discussion has been run by men.


Are you saying this again? Then I'm afraid I must say THIS again - but then don't go complaining that the discussion is going round in circles. 

Now I hope you don't mind if I get back to the discussion:


Marga H said:


> In Polish language some inflection patterns have 2 forms:
> 1.*virile* or personal masculine form
> 2.*nonvirile *that is to say any other possibility: feminine, neuter and inanimate masculine.
> For example:
> *wszyscy *chłopcy *byli* w domu = all boys were at home
> *wszystkie *dziewczyny *były *w domu = all girls were at home
> *wszystkie *dzieci *były *w domu = all kids were at home ( kid in Polish is neuter gender )
> *wszystkie *stoły *były *w domu = all tables were at home ( table in Polish is masculine gender )
> In comparison with that obvious discrimination the problem of todos and todas seems to be a little less painful  .
> Luckily if you say greetings for all, the form ( in genitive case ) is the same:
> Pozdrowienia dla *wszystkich* !


I want to be sure I understand it right: so in Polish, grammatical gender is the opposite, ie. the neutral inclusive plural is the same as the feminine plural, as opposed to French and Spanish for instance where the plural for a mixed group is the same as the masculine plural ?


----------



## karuna

Lusitania said:


> As I've written before, I do not know the Croatian Language. However, if a language as masculine, feminine and neuter it should be very easy to address people. If it doesn't have neuter "all/everybody", we can address both "todos e todas".



One should be very careful to give any linguistic recommendation whatsoever in a language that one is not native of or even does not speak it fluently. If  "todos e todas" works for Portuguese then good for them but as I already explained it doesn't work for Latvian. Each language is unique in every aspect. 

Christian missionaries who first translated their scriptures into many languages also often showed such disrespect towards language. One such missionary who was sent to Japan to preach there later wrote back to Rome that Japanese language must be invented by devil to hinder the spreading of God's word. In another case where the language did not have the passive voice they just tried to invent it in the target language. Of course, such things doesn't work. In Latvian people still become puzzled when the hear Christians saying _Nelietīgi nevalkā Dieva vārdu – _"Don't be dressed in God's name in vain" (i.e., don't take God's name in vain). It is obviously a translation mistake.

While Christians have learned from their past mistakes and many of them are actually very good translators and linguists, today politicians have taken their role. Even very recently they tried to impose their proposed spelling of the "euro" in Latvian language, completely disregarding the Latvian grammar and linguistic tradition.


----------



## Outsider

. said:


> Innuit and snow could hardly be farther from urban myth.


If you mean the story about their having 20/50/100 words for "snow", yes it is a myth, according to this guy, who actually speaks the language (or languages). Do you speak it?



geve said:


> I want to be sure I understand it right: so in Polish, grammatical gender is the opposite, ie. the neutral inclusive plural is the same as the feminine plural, as opposed to French and Spanish for instance where the plural for a mixed group is the same as the masculine plural ?


Looking at the example, it seems to me that in Polish the plural is different from the masculine, the feminine, and the neuter (and others), but unique. Like "they" in English. 



Lusitania said:


> My questions addressed human behaviour and not grammar.


Your original questions were about language. I don't see how you can discuss language without relating it to grammar, in this case.



Lusitania said:


> What strikes me the most here is how easy is to call people ignorant when they have a different opinion/perspective. Also I've been very much pressured to "retract myself" and never did that to anyone while giving my own opinion.


I asked you to retract an inaccurate statement you had made about the meaning of the Portuguese word _sexo_. What's wrong with that?


----------



## Athaulf

. said:


> When you get into the list with; white lie, polite lie, social lie, half-truth, bending the truth, putting a little spin, euphamising, lie by ommission, the number does rapidly approach a hundred.
> With truth we have a choice of the _Latin based _veracity or the prehistoric _Germanic _treww.



Well, in some contexts, you might also use the Greek _aletheia_. 

But anyway, you're not presenting a list of synonyms for _lie_, but rather an assortment of phases related to lying. One can be equally creative with phrases related to telling the truth, and indeed many such phrases are common:

_objective reporting,
unembellished description,
__faithfulness to the facts,
__an unbiased __view,_
_unadulterated facts,
_
and so on, _ad infinitum_. There are also many words that can serve as synonyms for _truth_ in various contexts: _objectivity_, _accuracy_, _factuality_, _authenticity, __actuality_, _verity_...

I am aware that we've now strayed far off the original topic, but I still think that it's worth to additionally emphasize how easy it is to form misguided theories about people's behavior and attitudes based on plausible-sounding, but entirely wrong "facts" about their language.


----------



## Athaulf

Lusitania said:


> As I've written before, I do not know the Croatian Language. However, if a language as masculine, feminine and neuter it should be very easy to address people. If it doesn't have neuter "all/everybody", we can address both "todos e todas".



It seems like after all, I was wrong to question your motives in this thread, and I would like to apologize for such insinuations. Having had my faith in your good intentions renewed, I will try to restate my point related to your persistent error displayed above, hoping that you might actually grasp it after all. 

Now, please don't be offended by this plain statement of fact, but as an admitted non-speaker of Slavic languages, there is no way you could understand the gender-related complexities in their grammars. They are incredibly more vast than in English, and also far greater than in any Romance language. Please understand that your statements such as the one quoted above are completely misguided and based on the horribly wrong assumption that what is true for your language, must necessarily be true for others too. 

If you're not willing to read through my previous posts that demonstrate these facts by numerous examples (such as this, or this, or this one), then please consider taking them on good faith. Any other speaker of Croatian (or any other Slavic language) should be able to confirm them.


----------



## Lusitania

geve said:


> Are you saying this again? Then I'm afraid I must say THIS again - but then don't go complaining that the discussion is going round in circles.


 
If you have mentioned the importance of everyone being intitled to their own opinion, how come you are now trying to advice me or warn others on what to do?

I'm a big girl Geve and i know where I want to stand maybe you should stick to clarify your own doubts instead of trying to decide on what others should have to write.

Best wishes



Outsider said:


> I asked you to retract an inaccurate statement you had made about the meaning of the Portuguese word _sexo_.


 
It's that your definition of sexo included gender, and since 1935 it has been said that these are two different concepts that people keep them as being the same.




> What's wrong with that?


 
I don't see why do you thing that you can go around telling people to retract from their own beliefs or when they give you other views. If you can see it as being wrong, they we've failed to communicate.



Athaulf said:


> Any other speaker of Croatian (or any other Slavic language) should be able to confirm them.


 

But we haven't read any other croatian speaker on this, that is why. Of course, I don't doubt your knowledge but I have some doubts if you are able, or if you want to see your language on a gender perspective.


----------



## Brioche

Lusitania said:


> Of course, I don't doubt your knowledge but I have some doubts if you are able, or if you want to see your language on a gender perspective.


 
And I doubt that you are able, or even want, to see language from anything but a feminist gendered perspective.


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## chung

Lusitania: Athaulf provided three links to past posts about gender in Croatian and shows how inapplicable your thinking is within Croatian. Marga H provided information on how Polish deals with gender which indirectly shows the same inapplicability. If I would think that it would be helpful, I'd show examples from Slovak but that would merely reinforce what Athaulf Karuna and Marga H and have already pointed out, directly or indirectly. In addition, seeing your last response to Athaulf's comment, leads me to think that you're willfully missing the point and haven't even looked at Athaulf's comments even though the links are there in good faith. Athaulf's and Karuna's observations about the flawed belief that what you find works in Portuguese ought to be "shoe-horned" into other languages in the name of equity is spot-on. It's one thing if you don't feel comfortable hearing Hola a todos! when you're in the audience but the speaker is using the masculine plural form to include everyone anyway. It's another thing to try to extrapolate others' use of such expressions which don't conform to *your* sensitivities and brand them as unequivocally sexist or what not.

Brioche: Hear, hear!


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## Outsider

Lusitania said:


> It's that your definition of sexo included gender, and since 1935 it has been said that these are two different concepts that people keep them as being the same.


For some decades now, certain scholars have been arguing for a distinction between psychosociological _gender_ (which they prefer to call "gender"), and biological _sex_ (which in English I think is more often than not called "gender", too, nowadays). These are two facts about the *English* words _gender_ and _sex_. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the *Portuguese* word _sexo_. In Portuguese, for instance, government forms ask for one's _sexo_ (M/F), not for one's _género/gender_.

Even in English, though, "gender" may still mean "sex", according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. (I quoted it a few pages ago. Look it up, if you doubt me.)

In short, Lusitania, you are wrong in two languages.



chung said:


> Athaulf's and Karuna's observations about the flawed belief that what you find works in Portuguese ought to be "shoe-horned" into other languages in the name of equity is spot-on.


It's not even that -- she probably thinks what works for *English* and *Scandinavian* languages (most of which barely had any grammatical gender, to begin with) should be shoehorned into every other language in the planet. She's not being truthful when she says "we" have been doing it in Portuguese.


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## ireney

Just adding that, as I have mentioned in previous posts of mine in this thread, gender-neutrality wouldn't work in Greek either. In case my examples are not clear enough I can provide more. In case my assurance is not enough, I think I can pester some more Greeks to come and state the obvious.

That said, I don't think that anyone should not use both forms if he or she feels that  he or she is not included by the use of only one of these (I use "he" too since my mom, admonished me, two of her girlfriends and my dad to fasten our seat belts and so on and so forth using the female endings; since the 3 women in our party were busy rolling our eyes heavenwards it was my dad who answered "Yes dear" -and he is not the truest advocate of equality of sexes let me tell you  )


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## kurumin

In Brazil, we normally say
OI PRA TODO MUNDO  = Hi everyone
TODO MUNDO = everyone [both men and women included ]


[_todo mundo_ = everybody; different from
_todo o mundo_ = o mundo inteiro = whole world]

As for the ''men rule''
A GENTE can be used with masculine adjective:

A gente está cansado. = Nós estamos cansados. = We are tired (m)
A gente está cansada. = Nós estamos cansadas. = We are tired (f)

[A gente + 3rd person singular = Noi si + 3rd person singular in Tuscan Italian]


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## cuchuflete

For days I've been looking at the title of this thread, and wondering if anyone would comment on the obvious error.

Consider that we have been discussing multiple topics, all scattered in a bunch:

—The meaning of the word "gender" in English
—The meaning of the word "gender" in other languages.

There are more than a few conflicts in that arena alone, which suggests that carrying a conclusion, especially a disputed conclusion, from one language to another is dangerous.

—The distinctions and possible or occasional correlations of grammatical 'gender' and sociological 'gender' in the language of your choice.

—The differences beween "gender" as a grammatical term and biological sex and sociological 'gender'.  These may coincide not at all, somewhat, a lot, depending on language, and within language, on both circumstances (context) and perception.

The thread title is an example of many of these multi-faceted terms colliding to create, bluntly speaking, a bad mistake.

"Male rule" may have a perfectly valid meaning when used to describe authoritarian management by men.  Adding the article "the" to the term implies a different usage, and one that doesn't exist in English: a supposed rule for use of a masculine grammatical form.    In many Romance languages the word may be masculino or equivalent.  This can be translated, depending on intent and context, to either male or to masculine in English.

English grammar has no rules that are named "female rule" or "male rule".  The thread title is, therefore, either a polemical statement, a translation error, or a misunderstanding of English grammar.  If it is just an attempt at a literal translation from Portuguese, it's not the end of the world...just a small slip.

It's difficult in English to be included in, or excluded from, a usage based on a non-existent rule.


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## gaer

cuchuflete said:


> For days I've been looking at the title of this thread, and wondering if anyone would comment on the obvious error.


I never commented at all on the title because the whole thread has caused me to shake my head.


> Consider that we have been discussing multiple topics, all scattered in a bunch:
> 
> —The meaning of the word "gender" in English
> —The meaning of the word "gender" in other languages.


I don't see any way to have an intelligent discussion about grammar affecting or being affected by society without picking one language and exploring the history of that language. This means having a number of people who have a thorough understanding of that language.

I would be willing to discuss English here, but I would pick the German forum to discuss German. I would make no comments on any other languages. I don't know enough.

For instance, in the very first post, I saw this:

"Olá a todos e a todas"

I Googled the phrase and found this:

Results 1 - 10 of about 121 for "Olá a todos e a todas".
Results 1 - 10 of about 184 for "Olá a todos e todas".
Results 1 - 10 of about 615,000 for "Olá a todos". 
Results 1 - 10 of about 19,300 for "Olá a todas".

My _*tentative*_ conclusion is that by combining the first two sets of hits, the number is still quite small. That is my ONLY thought.

I hope that no one assumes that this is an attempt by me to condescend to Lusitania or anyone else. The fact that the thread title was never right to begin with has little to do with the great lengths various people have gone to in this thread NOT to understand each other. And I do believe that people do just that, deliberately misunderstand what other people to "score points". The result is that very little is learned and many people are angry or frustrated.

I've seen a great deal of "talking". I've seen very little "listening".


> There are more than a few conflicts in that arena alone, which suggests that carrying a conclusion, especially a disputed conclusion, from one language to another is dangerous.


I agree. But let me tell you something that has made me quite angry and always makes me quite angry: you and I both know that anything approaching "Equal Rights" in this country is a rather recent development. We also both know that men and women still do not earn the same amount of money for the same jobs.

To suggest that in English, at least, there is not SOME link between male domination and language just feels so wrong to me that I don't know what to say. I can't prove it, and I'm not going to try. I'm sure many of our members will easily make light of what I've just said through cleverly worded responses.

If I say, for instance, that a statement such as "one is entitled to his own opinion" _in this thread_ sounds arrogant, condescending and downright snotty, I'll probably be ridiculed. This is why I have remained almost completely silent.


> —The distinctions and possible or occasional correlations of grammatical 'gender' and sociological 'gender' in the language of your choice.


I totally agree with you. Again, I think to discuss such things in regard to any language requires an intimate knowledge of the language, and discussing many languages in one thread reduces the conversation or debate to absolute absurdity.


> —The differences between "gender" as a grammatical term and biological sex and sociological 'gender'. These may coincide not at all, somewhat, a lot, depending on language, and within language, on both circumstances (context) and perception.


Same point. Too many languages are being discussed. 


> "Male rule" may have a perfectly valid meaning when used to describe authoritarian management by men. Adding the article "the" to the term implies a different usage, and one that doesn't exist in English: a supposed rule for use of a masculine grammatical form. In many Romance languages the word may be masculino or equivalent. This can be translated, depending on intent and context, to either male or to masculine in English.


Again, the thread title should have been changed at the start. In any society where men have clearly had the upper hand, there is no doubt in my mind that language will reflect that in many ways, but not in ways that can be described with grammatical labels that attempt to bridge the hopeless gaps between languages that are incredibly different in structure.


> English grammar has no rules that are named "female rule" or "male rule". The thread title is, therefore, either a polemical statement, a translation error, or a misunderstanding of English grammar. If it is just an attempt at a literal translation from Portuguese, it's not the end of the world...just a small slip.


Again: the thread title may be unfortunate, but I believe the reason we have failed to come to any kind of logical and reasonable consensus is due to the discussion of too many languages.


> It's difficult in English to be included in, or excluded from, a usage based on a non-existent rule.


All languages can be either fair or unfair. They just have different ways to do it.

Of course "Hi everyone" is no problem in English.

But "Hi guys" might confuse people who don't live in the US.

The use of "Miss" vs. "Mrs." was a huge problem for women in this country (at least) who did not want to be publicly labeled as married or not married based on a title. That has changed.

In the spirit of what I believe was intended for discussion, I think we can easily have a sane discussion, in English, about ways language either is or was used to hold other people down.

However, I think it's too late in this thread. I've read all the posts, and I think it is a mess. _*It's too late.*_ 

Gaer


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## cherine

*Thank you Cuchuflete and Gaer. Your last two posts sum up the problems we're having with this thread.*

*I'll use Gaer words -I hope he won't mind  - :*


gaer said:


> Same point. Too many languages are being discussed.
> [...]
> Again: the thread title may be unfortunate, but I believe the reason we have failed to come to any kind of logical and reasonable consensus is due to the discussion of too many languages.
> 
> All languages can be either fair or unfair. They just have different ways to do it.
> [...]
> However, I think it's too late in this thread. I've read all the posts, and I think it is a mess. _*It's too late.*_


 
*There are too many languages in this thread, which makes it a bit messy. Each language and each culture has its own rule. We can't just create one universal rule and pretend we can apply it for all languages and all cultures. This is not a doable thing.*

*So, I hope it's not really too late to close this thread.*

*And I invite whoever is still interested in -and have any energy left to- discussing this subject any further, to open a new thread in the appropriate language forum.*

*Thanks you all.*


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