Hofstadter has added a postscript to his essay which includes this observation:
My feeling about nonsexist English is that it is like a foreign language that I am learning. I find that even after years of practice, I still have to translate sometimes from my native language, which is sexist English. I know of no human being who speaks Nonsexist as their native tongue. It will be very interesting to see if such people come to exist. If so, it will have taken a lot of work by a lot of people to reach that point.Has it really been 23 years already?
(Sorry for the delay in putting this up, I've been getting a lot less online time than I'd anticipated lately, although hopefully I'll be back to normal in the next day or two.)
3 comments:
English is relatively gender neutral. In French and Spanish, EVERYTHING has a gender: trees, cars, boats, bricks, all of it. Trying to 'un-sex' languages like that would be impossible. I'm not sure why we need to do it anyway. I'm tending toward the language as a living celebration of history and tradition mixed with current diversity and freedom of thought expression. You says "Chairperson" I say "Shepherd" ...or we call the whole thing off. Changing the meaning of the word may be ultimately more effective than changing the word.
truth seeker - I'll leave it to a linguist to explain properly, but there are differences between the meaning of the word "gender" in linguistics and its meaning in everyday speech. So removing gender from a language is not necessarily "un-sexing" it.
I love that Hofstadter piece. It renormalizes my head in.
Toma: Understood....but a language like French, where EVERY thing has an aspect as masculine or feminine would tend to comprehensively wire one's head see things in gender terms. The gender of an object is CHOSEN based on some underlying perception of its 'sex'....related to qualities qualities perceived to belong to the respective genders. Whereas, in English, a brick is a brick is a brick.....and those underlying sexual /gender attributes aren't contemplated outside a poetic realm.
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