Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2001 11:47:04 +0100 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org>, "G. Adam Stanislav" <adam@whizkidtech.net>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Gender in Indo-European languages (was: Laugh: [Fwd: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS01-008]) Message-ID: <20010209114704.A62359@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <20010209095838.E11145@wantadilla.lemis.com>; from grog@lemis.com on Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 09:58:38AM %2B1030 References: <3A81DDC9.EF6D7D84@originative.co.uk> <3.0.6.32.20010207223155.009d42a0@mail85.pair.com> <20010208110159.E2429@lpt.ens.fr> <xzpzofxffa2.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> <20010209095838.E11145@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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Greg Lehey said on Feb 9, 2001 at 09:58:38: > On Thursday, 8 February 2001 at 14:57:57 +0100, Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote: > > Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> writes: > >> The idea is that if "his" is supposed to be gender-neutral in > >> generic situations, "her" should also be regarded as > >> gender-neutral. > > In a newly-designed language, this would be reasonable. In existing > languages there are syntactical conventions. In English and most > other languages I can think of, a group of people of mixed gender is > masculine. I read an excellent argument against this claim, in an article by Douglas Hofstadter. Or rather, against the claim that "man" means both man and women. You often see sentences like "Man is the only animal who hunts for pleasure." You *never* see sentences like "Man is a species which gives live birth to its young." It will always be "Man is a species where the females give live birth to their young." One comes across such examples every day. In a place I was in formerly, a male head of the department (the usual situation) was a "chairman", but a female head was a "chairperson". Which is ridiculous. Sorry, I think the conventions are not only biased, they aren't even consistent. I'm not in favour of continuing with them. An author of another TeX book (The joy of TeX, I think) used another convention which I liked: use E for both he and she. (Analogous to I for first person.) I forget what he did for his/him/her. Hofstadter has another article (printed in "Metamagical Themas") where he exchanges the usual sexist usages of "man" and "woman", for "black" and "white", with utterly horrifying results. I think that was the article which first made me think deeply about this issue. R To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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