Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
That was a response to QuantumIguana's insistence that the use of the genderless pronoun he is a matter of the conflation of genders with once gender-specific professions and not a formidable obstacle in the structure of most modern languages.
|
I said that was part of it, but I didn't "insist" on anything. I simply observed the fact that the culture in the English-speaking world was strongly sex-segregated and no longer is today. I further observed the fact that as culture became less sex-segregated, the generic "he" fell out of favor. I simply don't think that is coincidence. Yes, sex-bias is part of the language, but why is it part of the language? Why is that bias there in the first place? I submit that at, least partially, this bias comes from sex-segregation, it arises from the assumptions made when the language came into being.
Quote:
|
You seem to have mistaken an expression of the idea that masculine genderless pronouns are built into languages (and are therefore quite difficult to remove) for the spectacle of you or someone else being beaten to death for improper usage.
|
Actually, it's quite easy to remove. The generic "he" is falling out of favor, while the singular "they" is ascendant. It doesn't matter whether you favor or oppose such a language change, it's happening. Dictionaries are waving the white flag on the issue.
I should say it is easy to remove in English, which is what we are discussing. Bias in language would be much more difficult to remove in Spanish, where even a table has a gender. Esperanto contains bias, which may have been one reason it didn't gain more popularity; those who wanted language reform may have felt that with the bias in place, it wasn't a real reform. In Esperanto, words are male by default, you have to add the "-ino" suffic to make it female. For example, "man" is "viro", "woman" is "virino", "boy" is "knabo", "girl" is "knabino".