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Editor for this issue: T. Daniel Seely <dseelyemunix.emich.edu>
CS.Wayne.EDU>Lydie Meunier seems to be asking which comes first, sexist language or sexist behavior. But there is surely a third alternative, that language and behavior evolve together, reinforcing each other. It is also important to distinguish the question of how some form of language or behavior arose in the first place from that of how it is transmitted to successive generations. I would have little doubt that sexist language plays a major role in transmitting ideas which lead to sexist behavior, but it is difficult for me to believe that HISTORICALLY sexist language came before sexist behavior. Alexis MRMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
CS.Wayne.EDU>Since my views seem still not to be clear, let me try to make them clearer. (a) I do believe that people in all kinds of cultures themselves believe that men and male behavior are superior in some sense to women and female behavior, and I hold that this perception (even if it were not accurate) is what must matter to us as we discuss sexist language. Whether the perception is accurate is of no importance in this context. (b) I do not make any necessary connection between oppression of womn and oppression of black people at all. I simply used the example of black slavery as an example of the general principle that to admit the existence of a form of oppression practiced by some group (by white people) does not mean that one must necessarily hate them. My point was that I am not a mysandrist just because I accept that men have historically not been very nice to women. (c) It does seem to me evident that there is no point discussing sexist usages in the last couple centuries in English outside of the context of other languages and the much longer attested history of English itself. And it also seems to me quite evident that there is nothing at all unusual about the usages we have been discussing in this context. So the issue is not what the normative English grammarians might have thought or done, but what millions of speakers of all kinds of languages have thought and done over the millennia of recorded linguistic history. -- But even though this all seems evident, I do not claim (as Jeff seems to think) that this view is widely or universally held. (d) I agree that it would be very good to find out whether languages which are commonly described as having no gender-tyoe phenomena, of which there are many, have any traces of the usages under discussion anyway. I have of course so far asserted only a conditional universal, that if a language has a gender system (in the broadest sense of the term, which will subsume English as well as Latin, say), then it will have usages with male/masculine as the unmarked term. (There are, importantly, languages where the feminine appears to be unmarked in the sense that more nouns are feminine than masculine--or at least I think there are--but I believe they still have the kind of "sexist" usages we have been discussing.) Alexis MRMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue