Xref: utzoo comp.unix.wizards:12491 news.sysadmin:1525 sci.lang:3354
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!dasys1!jpr
From: jpr@dasys1.UUCP (Jean-Pierre Radley)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,news.sysadmin,sci.lang
Subject: Re: sexist language
Message-ID: <7731@dasys1.UUCP>
Date: 16 Nov 88 16:42:15 GMT
References: <1460@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu> <698@packard.UUCP> <1988Nov9.200939.6069@utzoo.uucp> <10837@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> <1988Nov13.202622.23562@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu> <3803@imag.imag.fr>
Reply-To: jpr@dasys1.UUCP (Jean-Pierre Radley)
Organization: TANGENT
Lines: 55

In article <3803@imag.imag.fr> pierre@imag.UUCP (Pierre LAFORGUE) writes:
>Why don't you use the latin language, instead of decadent ones as is the
>english ? Distinction between "HOMO" and "VIR" allows to avoid frustations.

As a native speaker of both French and English, I can say that it ill
behooves you to describe English as "decadent". It is, au contraire,
[and we don't necessarily put a phrase like "au contraire" in quotes]
extraordinarily alive. Certainly it is more tolerant than French, more
adaptable, larger (just a count of the word-list), and still growing.
Dieu merci, we do NOT have an Academie to protect English from useful
foregn words. And most people do not object to the common adjective "dead"
as applied to Latin.

>The french language is more subtil than english : we distinguish the
>"genre grammatical" from the sexual attributes. Nobody (male or female)
>thinks that an object (or an appointment or an art or a feeling or ...)
>is "viril" (male) because its grammatical mode is "masculin".
>Maybe is it because we do not know sexual discrimination ; maybe is it
>because we have not the same conceptual undergrounds ; maybe is it
>because we like the economy of our language : use of a neutral form for
>objects and creatures (men included), adjunction of a suffix or special
>form only to specificaly reference a feminal being (she has something
>MORE) or a very important thing (the sea for example, or the earth/ground
>-of course this last one was a goddess, Ge, in the good old greek times).

I do not agree that a language that has gender attributes for its nouns is
therefor more "subtle" than one which does not. French is not the only
example of languages with grammatical gender, but by your own reasoning,
do you concede that languages with three (or even more) genders are _ipso
facto_ subtler than French?

Last night, at a lecture for the unigroup/newyork, Brian Kernighan spoke
of "Little Languages" (small tools that you write quickly to solve a
specific problem), he quoted the linguist Benjamin Whorf. I can't remember
it exactly, but it was to the effect that "the kind of the language we
speak affects how we think". While I think that idiotic attacks on the use
of the word "history" because our past is also "herstory" are a perverse
manifestation of the modern sexual revolution; while I refuse to use "Ms."
in my correspondence; while the old, established convention that "he",
"man", and other such words, in a given context, do NOT necessarily refer
to males: I reject your claim that "[the French people] do not know sexual
discrimination [because the French language affords a thought-mode that
inherently rejects sexually discriminating thoughts]".

>By the way, when you speak of the virus or the worm, do you use "he or she" ?

I use "it".

Un peu de calme, mes amis, un peu de calme.


-- 
Jean-Pierre Radley		Honi soit		jpr@dasys1.UUCP
New York, New York		qui mal			...!hombre!jpradley!jpr
CIS: 76120,1341			y pense			...!hombre!trigere!jpr