Certainly things like that have happened - but it was I assume regarded as a silly argument. People will make such arguments, not because they honestly are confused, but because they wish to push a particular exclusive agenda.
Unsing totally gender-neutral terms will not stop such “arguments”.
Here in Canada, for example, one of our landmark court decisions was the so-called “persons” case.
In a nutshell: the issue was whether in Canada women could be senators. The constitution act stated that qualified “persons” could be senators. A woman was nominated as a senator. Were women then “persons”?
You’d have thought the answer was obvious, but the case went all the way to the Privy Council, which ruled as follows:
I can’t think of a more gender-neutral term than “persons”. Yet it did not of itself prevent controversy - not that anyone seriously thought a woman was not a person, but because some of the judges of the time refused to grok that women could be senators, and deliberately “read in” to the term a sex restriction that did not exist.
Considering how many times I’ve heard one female address another as “Dude” and how prevalent the addressing of one male by another as “Bitch!” (sexual orientation, that said, not determined in either case) has become, “you guys” to a mixed audience seems moot.
In cases where gender is indeterminate and I need to use a pronoun, I tend to use “one” as in “Someone left one’s briefcase behind.”
“Imagination in the hearts of folk” doesn’t sound the same. Try it.
There are no true synonyms, any two words for the same thing carry different connotations and nuances. The sound, the feel of the phonemes in the mouth, is always part of that difference.
As for gender neutral singular pronouns, if “they” was good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for me. Everyone should get their books. They President can nominate anyone they want. The customer came in for their shirt, so I gave it to them.
This is the way the English language handled, handles, and will handle gender-neutral pronouns, so all y’all better get used to the idea.
I really would have expected to see more people using “she and he” and “her and him” in that order occasionally. Can’t you vary your gender positioning just a little? You all seem to be in such a rut.
Because it does include the female. How often have you seen forms such as “skuespillere og skuspillerinner”? In plural it’s the suffixless, in your mind male exclusive, form that’s nearly universal. The suffix use also emphasises that male is the default, female requires an extra qualifier.
There’s really not a question of inventing words. Some have done so, but such words have not really caught on anywhere in any language. In Norwegian however we have examples such as “styreleder”(board leader) replacing “styreformann” (board chairman/foreman). It’s a question of using what we have in a less biased way. A good example is the intro to Star Trek TOS which goes Where no man has gone before, to Where no one has gone before in TNG.
The thousands of years of language evolution in a male dominated society is why political and ideological “interference” with language use and development is necessary.
Absolutely. So if you want a gender-inclusive word for “human being”, but at the same time want a connotation of males being more important than females, then “man” is the word you are looking for.
Rune: You said you’d never heard anyone making an issue of “han/ham” (“he/him”) being the default common gender in Nordic languages. I posted those links to give you a few examples of people making an issue of it. (Fighting ignorance is good, right?) Note: I don’t claim that it’s an important issue here. For instance I’m pretty sure most Nordic feminists think it’s far more important to fight war, poverty, and disease.
The problem in attempting to modify the language as constructed by centuries of development is the problem of recursion. For example, the apparently-neutral term “human” used by you visually contains the root word “man”, as does “woman”; same deal with “male” and “fe-male”. [Though I understand that this is not how “female” originally developed as a word - from the Latin “femella”]
All these words could be said, by visual implication, normalize the male sex and indicate that the female sex is the modification (and hence presumably of lesser importance). Yet the language is rife with them.
When discussing the game of go, a lot of people refer to the black player as “he” and the white player as “she” for demonstration purposes.
Not being a firm believer in linguistic relativity, I’ve never found the whole discussion on gender in language particularly enlightening. I guess that’s “male privilege”, though.
I agree. “Men” should, ideally, mean “persons.” Yet we still need a word for the virile sex,* el varón.* That’s what’s missing, and without it we’re screwed.
I suppose we could pull Old English “guma” out of the bog of history and modernize it. “Goom,” plural “gooms,” anyone? Of course, that’s another form of the Indo-European “earth/son of earth (i.e., human)” stem, like “human” so that may be confusing.
“Were” is a bit too close to “were,” “we’re” and “weir.”
“Boy” and “knave” are puerile; “knight” is a title equivalent to “chevalier” now.
“Churl,” “carl,” “earl,” “atheling,” and “lord” might refer to men but they’re social-class terms.
“Wight” signifies more or less “entity” etymologically, doesn’t it? That might do for the Anglo-Saxon sex-neutral term, as might “body.” Well enough if we have no better term than “man” for* el varón.*
I still like “goom” though, in theory. Or we might find another variant of “carl”/“ceorl”/“churl”
No, the super-computer was in “The General,” and the mind-transference is from “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling.”
Anyway.
I was going to suggest that this is what “wherefore” is supposed to be used for, but that’s a bit vague. I think the dialectal terms “why for” and “how come” are what you seek, but they get confused in practice. Or you could use “whence” and “whither”?
