Xref: utzoo news.admin:3098 misc.legal:5399 soc.women:12101
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!joyce!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: news.admin,misc.legal,soc.women
Subject: Re: Proposed lawsuit
Keywords: Sexual, gender, discrimination,pronouns,language
Message-ID: <187@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 22 Jul 88 03:30:14 GMT
References: <12165@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <6278@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <12180@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <1040@unccvax.UUCP> <23898@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA> <792@isieng.UUCP> <23951@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA> <147@dcs.UUCP>
Sender: news@quintus.UUCP
Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
Lines: 25

In article <147@dcs.UUCP> wnp@dcs.UUCP (Wolf N. Paul) writes:
>The only peculiarity relative to women's rights and the German language
>is a bit strained and artificial.  German uses a general pronoun
>"man" to refer to either female or male persons in a sentence such as
>"What is one to do with frivolous lawsuits" -- "Was tut man mit leichtfertigen
>Anklagen". Some people, wishing to make a point and noticing the similarity
>of looks (and probably etymology) of "Mann" and "man", have taken to use
>"frau", the German word for woman, but without the capitalization reserved
>for nouns, in such situations.

"Strained and artificial" fairly hits it off:  if there is an etymological
connexion between "Mann" and "man" it must be _very_ old.  Exactly the
same distinction is found in Old English:
	man	pronoun "one"
	mann	human being
There are other words for "male"(ceorl, guma, wer &c).
For what it's worth, the word
	wif	woman, wife
has *Neuter* gender in Old English, and the modern "woman" comes from
wif+mann = "female human being".  

Such "man" attacks on language are about as sound as the following joke:
	Q: What kind of a bull is a steer?
	A: Incapa-bull.
Shall we change "incapable" to "incapacow"?