3 ms·

It seems a more natural route for English, where there is no grammatical gender. So the imposition of gender on the nouns for a subset of professions was inhere

It seems a more natural route for English, where there is no grammatical gender. So the imposition of gender on the nouns for a subset of professions was inherently an odd feature. Whereas, German and French both have a grammatical gender. In German I suppose you could neuter all the professions Whether that's feasible or not I couldn't say; I don't speak German. French doesn't have a neuter gender, though, so eroding the feminine gendered trade words could be (quite rightly) taken as an overt act of erasure. It means you'd be using male-coded pronouns and declension whenever you refer to a woman in terms of her profession.

paulddraper 8y ago
Though the grammatical gender of words have a lot of oddities too. E.g. German Maedchen (girl) is the neuter gender.
- sfRattan 8y ago
  That particular example isn't really an oddity; it's a pattern. The "-chen" used in "Mädchen" is a suffix/diminutive and it nearly always transforms the original word to the neuter gender. The original word modified in this particular case has fallen out of common use AFAIK, so it stands out as unusual if you aren't looking more broadly.
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    Sure. The point is that in languages with grammatical gender, the grammatical gender doesn't necessarily match the semantic gender anyway. (e.g. -chen)
macdice 8y ago
The situation in English is a bit more complicated though. We have words of Norman French or Latin origin that contain gender information, like actor vs actress, and then we have the ending -er that is of Germanic origin, and we can use that to make new words. I don't believe the French/Latin endings are "productive" in English: you can't really make up new words that have those endings, but you can readily make new words from verb + er (and I suppose in old English and its ancestors there must have been a feminine version of -er, like Dutch -ster and German -erinn, but we lost that along with all kinds of case endings and so forth a very long time ago). That's because we imported the "foreign" words as whole atoms when we bolted Norman lexicon on top of our Germanic grammatical base, and perhaps we've mashed them around a bit, but they're not really composed of phonemes that we can work with individually in quite the same way as we can with Germanic words. Those are the ones that some people are trying to kick out of the English language, with the idea that "actress" is somehow inferior or has connotations other than just gender, or that marking gender is unnecessary, and it's natural to get rid of them by analogy to our more Germanic words. But those types of endings are entirely productive in French -- they're in the toolbox of living phonemes you can make new words with, bolting on -eur, -rice/-euse/-resse etc (though I'm never sure to choose among those...) So it makes sense that French speakers are trying to "fill out" the missing logical combinations of gender-marking endings, and the English speakers are trying to "remove" the unnecessary variations that we see with just a few of our words. Perhaps someone who objects to "actress" should argue for "acter" instead of using the masculine ending "actor"! (Not a serious suggestion, just a shower thought really, as someone who's spent a bit of time in English and French speaking countries...)
hibbelig 8y ago
AFAIK, there are no neutered professions in German. So that would be a big change, it's hard to imagine. I know very little French, but if I understand correctly, because person in French is female (la personne), you could have a sentence mentioning "the persons" (plural) (les personnes?), and then later on using the pronoun "elles" (female version of "they") to refer to them. So a female-coded pronoun would refer to a mixed-gender group of people.
- umanwizard 8y ago
  Yes, your understanding is correct. Grammatical accord overrides physical gender for pronoun choice in French.

paulddraper 8y ago

Though the grammatical gender of words have a lot of oddities too. E.g. German Maedchen (girl) is the neuter gender.

sfRattan 8y ago
That particular example isn't really an oddity; it's a pattern. The "-chen" used in "Mädchen" is a suffix/diminutive and it nearly always transforms the original word to the neuter gender. The original word modified in this particular case has fallen out of common use AFAIK, so it stands out as unusual if you aren't looking more broadly.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  Sure. The point is that in languages with grammatical gender, the grammatical gender doesn't necessarily match the semantic gender anyway. (e.g. -chen)

macdice 8y ago

The situation in English is a bit more complicated though. We have words of Norman French or Latin origin that contain gender information, like actor vs actress, and then we have the ending -er that is of Germanic origin, and we can use that to make new words. I don't believe the French/Latin endings are "productive" in English: you can't really make up new words that have those endings, but you can readily make new words from verb + er (and I suppose in old English and its ancestors there must have been a feminine version of -er, like Dutch -ster and German -erinn, but we lost that along with all kinds of case endings and so forth a very long time ago). That's because we imported the "foreign" words as whole atoms when we bolted Norman lexicon on top of our Germanic grammatical base, and perhaps we've mashed them around a bit, but they're not really composed of phonemes that we can work with individually in quite the same way as we can with Germanic words. Those are the ones that some people are trying to kick out of the English language, with the idea that "actress" is somehow inferior or has connotations other than just gender, or that marking gender is unnecessary, and it's natural to get rid of them by analogy to our more Germanic words. But those types of endings are entirely productive in French -- they're in the toolbox of living phonemes you can make new words with, bolting on -eur, -rice/-euse/-resse etc (though I'm never sure to choose among those...) So it makes sense that French speakers are trying to "fill out" the missing logical combinations of gender-marking endings, and the English speakers are trying to "remove" the unnecessary variations that we see with just a few of our words. Perhaps someone who objects to "actress" should argue for "acter" instead of using the masculine ending "actor"! (Not a serious suggestion, just a shower thought really, as someone who's spent a bit of time in English and French speaking countries...)

hibbelig 8y ago

AFAIK, there are no neutered professions in German. So that would be a big change, it's hard to imagine. I know very little French, but if I understand correctly, because person in French is female (la personne), you could have a sentence mentioning "the persons" (plural) (les personnes?), and then later on using the pronoun "elles" (female version of "they") to refer to them. So a female-coded pronoun would refer to a mixed-gender group of people.

umanwizard 8y ago
Yes, your understanding is correct. Grammatical accord overrides physical gender for pronoun choice in French.