LINGUIST List 3.887

Tue 10 Nov 1992

Disc: Japanese Pronouns, Gender-Marking

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1. mark, 3.860 Pronouns
2. Michael Newman, Re: 3.871 Objectionable Words

In # 3.860, Makoto SHIMIZU writes

> 3) As far as I know, when you modify the English personal pronouns
> with adjectives, you'll get highly marked expressions such as;
>
> ?the beautiful I
>
> But in Japanese, the equivalent is totally unmarked;
>
> utsukushii watashi

The "subjective" or "nominative" pronouns in modern English are
generally replaced in non-subject position by the "objective"
forms. (Warning: This formulation is sloppy and inadequate.)
This change produces a much more acceptable construction:

 Oh, beautiful me!
 Clever him!

I find these forms slightly odd, and Shimizu's "the beautiful I"
nearly or totally unacceptable.

Of course, this has no bearing on Shimizu's argument that such
Japanese words as "watashi" and "boku" should be considered
(members of the large general class of) nominals rather than
(members of a highly specialized subset called) pronouns.

 Mark A. Mandel
 Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
 320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA

 Tlhingan khol daghojbe'chugh vaj bikhegh.

Message 2: Re: 3.871 Objectionable Words

Has anyone noticed the irony in the fact that just as almost all female ending
morphemes have disappeared (waitress is most resistent) from professions and
nationalities (ie., the decline and fall of HOSTESS, POETESS, and JEWESS) for a
mix of political and social reasons; all of sudden we have LATINO/A. That seems
to be the most pc way to refer to Iberian-language speaking Americans, at least
in NY. It seems that the peculiar sporadic English propensity to import
foreign morphology along with a loan word is threatening to reimport via
the back door just the sort of gender marking on one word that would be consi-
dered totally out of place on another. Furthermore, o/a distinction remains
presumably because it is found on the word in the original language and there-
fore is, presumably, considered correct in the same way that CORPORA & INDICES
are. Yet would we be willing to also import the plural for a group of Latin
American containing members of both sexes: ie.the masc. pl. LATINOS, and there-
by reimport the highly un-pc unmarked masculine?
I don't think so.
Michael