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sexism in languages
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| 30. |
25 Nov 2006 Sat 11:54 am |
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if you wana know how good is this try arabic in arabic for each male there is afemal and its really hard to memorize it .
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| 31. |
25 Nov 2006 Sat 12:05 pm |
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Quoting aslan2: Quoting zigot: i just want to know what people think about sexism in english or other languages..and i really wonder if turkish is only one language has same words for genders...
what you say ? |
No. Finnish, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Mongolian, etc.
Gender Neutral Languages |
i think persian have diffirent words for genders
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| 32. |
25 Nov 2006 Sat 09:05 pm |
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Quoting aslan2: Quoting tatiyana: My mother toungue is Russian. I have been learning five other foreign languages of different level of difficulty as well as origin for some time. And frankly speaking I would prefer the words to have gender and to be identified by it's sex  but! - where it would be easy to recognize which gender group they refer to.The rules with that become more complicated at some point and hard to understand, but still these features bring speciality to the language and it's own beauty. |
OK. You can see it in that way, but for me it's an extra baggage you have to learn and that, of course, makes things harder in any case in my opinion. I have no idea about Russian but I have some idea of Italian. It definitely makes thing harder no matter how beautiful it may seem to some people.
Italian nouns are divided into two genders: masculine and feminine. The vast majority of singular nouns end in -o or -a. Those ending in -o are almost always masculine, as in libro (book); while those ending in ?a are predominantly ......
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hmmmm....i know smth about italian. have been learning for some time as well. but the question was about sexism in general i guess. no need to specify any lanuage features like u did. otheriwse we all can demonstrate lots of things here too.anyway i agree with u about "extra baggage",but im still of my point of view.and then - after beauty comes simplicity, after simplicity comes complexity.something is difficult to understand and take and smth is simple.u cannot do anything with it.and if u want to know about russian - we have feminine,masculine and neatral genders but we have simple rules how to identify it
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| 33. |
27 Nov 2006 Mon 12:28 am |
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My mother tongue, Finnish, has no genders at all. It also has other similarities to Turkish, such as vowel harmony. Nevertheless I find English and German easier for me to learn although they are not similar to my own language at all. But yeah, I definitely like it that Turkish words don't have genders. I hate trying to learn genders. Adding suffixes and such is easy because for me understanding vowel harmony is simple (Turkish vowel harmony is a little different from the Finnish one, tho).
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| 34. |
27 Nov 2006 Mon 04:50 pm |
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Quoting darrenmania:
i think persian have diffirent words for genders |
Old Persian, like Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, had the original Indo-European genders of masculine, feminine, and neuter. By Middle Persian all gender had disappeared. This was not the result of Persian feminist criticism, nor was it the result of the evolution of an equal opportunity society for women. It just happened -- as most kinds of linguistic change do. Modern Persian is a language completely without gender. There are not even different words for "he" and "she," just the unisex un. (There are not even different titles for married and unmarried women: Persian khânum can be translated as "Ms.") Nevertheless, after some progress under Western influence, the Revolutionary Iran of the Ayatollah Khomeini retreated from the modern world into a vigorous reëstablishment of mediaevalism, putting everyone, especially women, back into their traditional places. So the advice could be: If someone wants "non-sexist language," move to Iran. But that probably would not be quite what they have in mind.
Why didn't the "gender free" Persian language create a feminist utopia? This goes to show us that gender in language is completely irrelevant to the sexual openness of society. And one of the greatest ironies for us is that a feminist attempt to produce a gender free "non-sexist language" in English could only be contemplated in the first place because grammatical gender has already all but disappeared from English. Feminist complaints must focus on the meaning of words like "man," even though words can mean anything by convention, because the pronouns "he," "she", and "it" are all that remain grammatically of the three Indo-European genders. Getting gender to disappear in German or French or Spanish (etc.), on the other hand, would be a hopeless project without completely altering the structure of the languages. Occasionally feminists say that they are personally offended by people referring to ships or aircraft as "she"; and manuals of "non-sexist" language usually require that inanimate objects be "it" without exception. Good luck in French. Since every noun is either masculine or feminine, not only would this feature have to be abolished, but an entirely new gender, the neuter, presumably with new pronouns, would have to be created. Then there would have to be decisions about words like livre, which is differentiated into two words by gender alone: le livre is "book," from Latin liber, while la livre is "pound," from Latin libra. French doesn't even have English's happy refuge from inclusive "he" in "they," since you still have to decide in the third person plural between ils and elles. Only on ("one") allows for a gender free (or common gender) pronoun, just as "one" does in English.
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| 35. |
27 Nov 2006 Mon 06:59 pm |
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Quoting tatiyana:
hmmmm....i know smth about italian. have been learning for some time as well. but the question was about sexism in general i guess. no need to specify any lanuage features like u did. otheriwse we all can demonstrate lots of things here too.anyway i agree with u about "extra baggage",but im still of my point of view.and then - after beauty comes simplicity, after simplicity comes complexity.something is difficult to understand and take and smth is simple.u cannot do anything with it.and if u want to know about russian - we have feminine,masculine and neatral genders but we have simple rules how to identify it |
I was giving examples of how hard a language can get as far as gender is concerned. OK. So you say: You have simple rules in Russian but aren't there are any exceptions to these rules at all?
Anyway for me simplicity = beauty in a language (and in some other things as well).
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