Xref: utzoo news.admin:3095 misc.legal:5397 soc.women:12096
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!watdcsu!hbetel
From: hbetel@watdcsu.waterloo.edu (Heather)
Newsgroups: news.admin,misc.legal,soc.women
Subject: Re: Proposed lawsuit
Keywords: Sexual, gender, discrimination,pronouns,language
Message-ID: <4910@watdcsu.waterloo.edu>
Date: 22 Jul 88 15:29:09 GMT
References: <12165@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <6278@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <23951@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 24


As many people have already stated, gender is grammatical term, referring to
a property of nouns, where sex refers to living things.  It is true that 
all nouns in French have a gender, it is not true that the gender of the
noun is the same as the sex of the person or animal the noun denotes. 
This may be difficult to understand since the only words with gender
distinction in English, also indicate sex.

If it is confusing, take the example of singular and plural in English.
The word "group" is a singular noun indicating many objects.  In
French, the word for person, "personne" is a feminin noun, obviously not all
persons are women.  

So the answer to the question is that non-sexist terms can be constructed
in French in the exact same way they would be constructed in english:
fire fighter instead of fireman.  Even if the word "fighter" is feminin
this would not be equivalent to saying "fire fighter-who-is-a-woman,"
or even "firewoman."

By the way, I have never noticed that the gender of nouns is stereotyped.
In most languages, gender depends on the ending of the word.

In Finnish, (and probably Estonian and Hungarian too), there is never
a sex distinction, (even between he and she).