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From: holstege@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Mary Holstege)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Can feminists change the language?
Message-ID: <1989Nov11.004923.9568@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 15 Nov 89 16:49:56 GMT
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Sender: tittle@ics.uci.edu (Cindy Tittle)
Reply-To: holstege@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Mary Holstege)
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This is veering a bit from soc.feminism, but as a sometime linguist I 
feel compelled to make a few comments.  

First, one must distinguish between vocabulary change and grammatical change.

Recently English has been grabbing new vocabulary to describe new
technology fairly quickly.  It is difficult to say whether this is at
a greater rate than previously: English has always been welcoming of
foreign terms and there have been bursts of vocabulary associated with
the colonization era (local languages), the enlightenment (greek and
latin), and if you want to consider it the same language, the invasion
of England by a bunch of French speakers.

On the other hand, there has been little change in the grammar of
English in the last few hundred years.  I can't think of too many.
Even the much-maligned use of 'they' as a singular pronoun goes back
to Chaucer, at least in such constructions as 'If anyone says that,
they are fools.'  Modern English, especially on the west coast, is
slightly more accepting of 'they' for other constructions than with
'anyone' or 'someone' than in the past, that's all.  Another slight
change in this area is the hypercorrective reaction of using 'he'
where 'she' or 'one' would have been used previously: 'When a patient
goes into labor, he should be made as comfortable as possible.' or 'If
one is not careful, he looks like a moron.'  Both of these are
generally regarded as 'incorrect'.  (The latter is more acceptable to
US speakers, who tend not to use 'one' very much and so have weaker
intuitions about it.)

How has feminism changed the language?  Some of the increased
acceptance of 'they' is probably due to feminist sensibilities, I
would say, and the loss of such horrid terms as 'authoress',
'aviatrix', and 'poetess'.  It's fairly minor.

                              -- Mary
                                 Holstege@cs.stanford.edu

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