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Subject:Sex and Gender in Language From:"Delaney, Misti" <ncr02!ncr02!mdelaney -at- UCS01 -dot- ATTMAIL -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 7 Aug 1995 18:47:00 -0500
Joanna says
In Spanish, the HIStory of MANkind becomes LA historiA de LA razA (all
feminine
words). They have LA libertad, LA igualdad, and LA fraternidad. Latin
America should
be a bastion of female power and influence.
I wonder if it isn't partly a language-specific issue, as well as a gender
issue. If you think about it, English has been slowly getting away from
gender specificity for hundreds of years -- which makes those words that
have gender seem ever less "generic" or "neutral".
Perhaps I would feel far less strongly about this in a language in which all
or most nouns had gender. When all nouns have gender, gender becomes less
identified with the sex of the object (unless we are to debate the masculine
or feminine qualities of a chair <grin>) and thus its use in describing
people is also less significant. But in English, gender is used almost
exclusively to describe creatures that also have a sex. The correlation of
the two having become so close to absolute, it becomes almost automatic to
equate the two.
