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The interesting thing is that in languages with more explicit gender marking than English, and with no less claim to feminism than the US, this does not seem to
by Jun8 9y ago
The interesting thing is that in languages with more explicit gender marking than English, and with no less claim to feminism than the US, this does not seem to be an issue. For example, in French, to use your example, if there were 50 female students and one male student in the class you would still refer to them using the male plural pronoun (http://www.cafebabel.co.uk/society/article/sexist-grammar-the-french-and-german-cases.html http://www.cafebabel.co.uk/society/article/sexist-grammar-th...).
- firethief 9y agoI wonder if that's connected to gender-marking languages like French randomly gendering most nouns? It seems like that could weaken the significance of a words' grammatical gender...
- emmelaich 9y agoYeah, I asked my French teacher whether you could say "s'elle vous plait" instead of "s'il vous plait". She laughed, probably because of the shear novelty of such a thought. It would never occur to a native speaker.
- sulam 9y agoI don't speak French, and am curious about this example. If you have 50 women in a room, do you use the female plural pronoun? In other words, are you saying that all it takes is one man in the room to make it male plural? Honestly (and I'm no gender theorist) this seems fairly sexist too. It's essentially saying psychologically that the man in the room takes precedence over any number of women.
- feborges 9y agoYes, in Portuguese (my native language) it is the same. For instance, "amigos" means "friends" with at least one male (the example of 50 women in a room and 1 man). "amigas" would be "friends" with only women/females. There is in Brazilian Portuguese (probably in other pt speaking countries as well) a movement of people pushing for the usage of letter-tokens to turn gender-specific words into gender-neutral. In this case, they would use "amigxs" or "amig@s".