Right! and you expressed it clearly.
Native speakers don’t even notice the sexiness of their languages.
English speakers * who learn a foreign language as adults, always act amazed and confused by the concept of masculine and feminine inanimate objects.(If it doesn’t have a dick or tits, how can if be masculine or feminine?).Sex is confusing…
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I’ve found that a good way to explain it to the poor suffering English-speaker, is to invent my own grammatical terms. Instead of teaching him abut masculine or feminine nouns, I tell them to just imagine that some nouns are “blue” and some are “red”. It makes things less confusing for the novice.
So in French, “bridge” is a red word and “Table” is a blue one.
Blue words get an extra “E”.
A small bridge is “petit” and small table is petite".
So , even though english speakers know the word “petite” as a feminine dress size, there is really nothing sexy about it.
*(esp. those dumb Americans, who think that speaking 2 languages is an amazing feat )
That’s always been my feeling, as someone who grew up with Polish as his first language. I didn’t even realize Polish had grammatical gender (or even a case system) until well into high school, even though my own speech reflected appropriate use of the masculine, feminine, and neuter. I really don’t think native speakers notice the grammatical gender of what they’re discussing. It’s always struck me as something more related to euphony (at least in Polish) than any sort of biological gender parallels.
Semantically, a language can’t be sexist, only a society can.
A society can be quite sexist even if their language is gender-neutral. Society A can also be perceived as sexist depening on how it is visible in language by Society B and vice versa.
For example, American women took/take the full name of their husband - Alice Miller becomes Mrs. John Smith when she marries. To Europeans, despite having gendered languages, this is terribly sexist - loosing their whole identity upon marriage. American women don’t seem to mind. This is not related to the genders dropped from the English language over centuries.
On the other hand, in slavian languages, woman always take -ova or similar endings to their names to identify them as females from the start. Is this sexist, or just information about who they are?
The current hypothesis (After modified Safir-Worf) about language and thinking is that
a) language shapes how we think, esp. words that describe a difference mean that we recognize a difference; if people lack words that describe a difference, it will be harder for them to recognize the difference.
b) but society also changes language.
An example: In both German (and Romantic languages) and English, male adults get one honorofic (Mr./ Herr), while female adults get two depending on their marital status (Mrs. and Miss / Frau und Fräulein).
During the women’s lib movement in the 60s, feminists pointed out how unfair that was. In American English, a new honorifc was introduced, Ms. So now people show by their form of address whether they are married, single or feminist / old-fashioned or modern.
In Germany, the use of Fräulein was dropped instead, except for old-fashioned people when addressing waitresses, or when talking to under-age females (often ironically: Mein liebes Fräulein! - Listen young lady!) So now the honorific Frau just tells people that this is an adult female, and nothing about her marital status.
The problem of nouns being gendered esp. with regards to professions has been a topic for several decades for feminist in Germany, and attempts to change the language in order to change the thinking have been used some time now, with more or less success and of course some backlash from people making fun of “slash-writing” - not that slash, but writing eine/n neue/r Lehrer/in - one new teacher (m/f); other forms include the big i form LehrerInnen or the double Lehrer und Lehrerinnen, which eats up space and quickly becomes cumbersome. Some people just ignore or forget it (showing how deeply entrenched the belief is that the male form “means to include also women”), some use the Big I as easiest form, some at least put a statement at the beginning “for ease of writing, only the male form was used in this document, but is not meant to exclude the women”.
That this is a problem in English also because it reflects also society’s attitude and clichees is mentioned not only in Cecils column on personal pronouns, but easily with a thought experiment:
take 10 or 15 nouns that describe professions or activities: teacher (kindergarden, primary, university); flower shop seller; hair cutter; librarian (low-level); boss; Senator/ politican; medical doctor; etc.
and assign genders to them. You’ll get a clicheed list usually based on majority percentages (90% of kindergarden teachers are female, 90% of librarians are female, 80% of bosses are male, most medical doctors are male in general, though in some special fields like psychology, it turns around again…)
There might be some differences between societies, but in general, even if English the language doesn’t have two seperate words for a male doctor and a female doctor (Arzt - Ärtzin), you will still think of doctors in a stereotypical = sexist way.
In some it is reversed. Wrap your mind around French where the most common words for penis (pine) is feminine and the word for vagina (vagin) is masculine.
As in the Persian-speaking world: Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan. And Turkic too.
In America today, that practice has been almost obsolete for decades. From my earliest memories in childhood in the 1960s of seeing that practice, it made me instinctively wonder why can’t women keep their own first names, at least.
Since at least the 1980s, if not the 1970s, it’s gone out of the national customs except for maybe a few holdouts. Old people. I was surprised the other day (I’m on various Democratic party mailing lists) when I received a letter from Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy. Surprised because it’s been years since I’ve seen anyone still doing that. My Mom switched to using her own name forty years ago. Ethel’s letter asking me to send money to some Democratic campaign fund was like opening your grandmother’s wardrobe from which wafts a hint of scent (maybe her closet was built of cedarwood, or she put up her clothes in lavender) that instantly triggers your vivid memories of the days when Kennedys ruled the land, women went by their husbands’ first names, and all ladies had to wear white gloves to be properly attired.
I don’t think I’ve ever met an American woman who described herself as “Mrs. Husband’s Fullname”. Nowadays there’s a melange of women who trade in lastnames, women who keep their original lastname, women who are in their nth marriage where n>1 and who use the lastname of an ex-husband, women who add their husband’s name to theirs…
OTOH, the US isn’t the only country where trading your birth-lastname for your husband’s upon marriage used to be standard. Angela Merkel uses the lastname of her first husband, and I don’t think she’s anybody’s idea of a weak little woman.
There’s a confusion between actually taking on the name of the husband, vs how one might be addressed in formal settings, like a wedding invitation. Alice Miller never became Mr. John Smith, but she might be called in certain situations.
Ooh, I got the same letter, and had the same reaction. (I didn’t actually open or read the letter; the return address was noticeable enough.) So…quaint. So…old-fashioned. So…silly.
Not sure what this means. (And you meant Mrs. John Smith, correct?) I think “Mr. and Mrs. John Smith” is still used in wedding invitations and the like, at least sometimes, though I don’t think I would use it. But it certainly used to be that in even semi-formal-ish settings women would often be identified as “Mrs. John Smith,” even without the “Mr.” being anywhere nearby.
I recall a booklet that I read in high school that was typed up by “Mrs. James E. Shoreland, Jr.” --that was about 1975, and I remember wondering why the hell they couldn’t say it was typed up by plain ol’ Maisie Shoreland, or whatever her name actually was.
And I remember being involved in a community theater group a year or so later and seeing the names of fundraising committee members (all women, virtually all married) listed in the program as “Mrs. Thomas Easton III, Mrs. Peter Froehlich, Mrs. Benjamin Gates,” etc., and wondering why anybody thought this was a good idea.
Anyway, “certain situations” were “many situations,” in my recollection at least.
Precisly because Alice Miller becoming Alice Smith after marrying John Smith is standard in most of the Western World (and probably the Far and Near Eastern societies, too) that custom itself would not be remarkable.
It’s the additional, unusual practise of calling Alice Smith Mrs. John Smith that strikes non-USians as weird.
It’s only used in the most formal of contexts, and not even there a lot of the times. At least in my area of the US. I personally have only encountered it in the form of “Mr. & Mrs.” on invitations. I’ve never had a woman introduced to me as “Mrs. John Smith,” nor have I ever seen a letter singly addressed to “Mrs. John Smith.” I’m sure it happens, but it’s a bit odd.
As mentioned above, Hungarian do it, too, with the né suffix, so somebody married to John Smith would be Kovacs Janosné. However, this also tends to be limited to a formal register. That said, I’ve heard this form spoken and written with relative regularity.
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