English, gender and God

Firsly, let's clarify some issues of etymology. Rhrain wrote The etymology of the word he is that it originally was a neuter construction. I'm not sure where Rh gets this from. The OED pretty clearly says, The simplest form of the (orig. demonstr.) base hi-, ... was cogn. with OFris. hi, he (fem. hiu, neut. hit). In other words, all the dictionary has to say about the gender of root forms of the pronoun is that it was cognate with a masculine form of Old Frisian.My contention is that Old English had a default masculine gender - which is the reason he was used of things not sexually distinguished and the reason he was the root for third-person pronouns. The data supporting the default masculine gender is well described in Rice and Steinmetz The Evolution of Gender in English, Tromso, 2000. In essence, the argument is that words which fall outwith discernable rules for forming gender are treated as masculine.

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Take, for example, a common claim amongst some that the word history is actually a contraction of the words his and story. They claim that this is somehow part of the reason that the field of history, especially as taught in many schools, is so filled with the deed of men and not of women. But there's a problem: It isn't true.

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I think the problem may be that this claim is not true. The gender historians I know have not claimed that history is etymologically biased, but that the presence of his gives the impression of bias in usage and subtly influences the practice of history. I would be really interested if you had a suitably early source which makes an etymological rather than a psycholinguistic case for moving to a new usage. If you have one you should send in a readers slip to the Oxford, as they are pretty clear (in the 1993 additions to the second edition) that the new usage is a fanciful pun and not based on a claim that history is actually a contraction.I am puzzled by Rhrain's statement ...

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The language has no sexist connotation. The usage, on the other hand, can easily have one. The language uses a single word for both masculine and neuter objects. That doesn't mean the language in and of itself has any confusion over the two. That can come only from usage.

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The clear implication here is that there is a distinction between the language and the usage. I cannot see how this distinction can be reliably or made, or by what authority one could make it.

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So why is it only the people who feel that it is sexist who get to have their opinions count? Why don't the people who feel that it isn't sexist get to have an equal claim to the language?

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All have an equal claim, and etymology doesn't help to resolve it because it is usage, not etymology that counts.In contemporary English, the pronouns he and she sound egregious when used as gender-neutral terms. My grandmother's usage of she for all cats and he for all dogs sounds distinctly wrong to contemporary ears: he has just given birth or she is a lovely tomcat don't work, but were phrases she and her generation used naturally and comfortably. Nor was this purely a dialect - the usage can be found in Jane Austen, for example.The claim that he can be used of God without implication of gender just doesn't wash. It would, perhaps, be tenable if there were comparatively common contemporary usages of beings referred to in a gender neutral manner. I am not aware of any.

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... you have to look at the people on either side of the message: The sender and the receiver. It is quite possible that the receiver heard something that the sender didn't mean. And that is not the fault of the language.

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And this is the answer to your question about why one side rather than the other modifies its language - the sender typically modifies their terms in order to clarify their meaning. This is what we do when speaking to children and foreigners - a phenomenon known as motherspeak. The history of language is the history of senders evolving language. Where there is disagreement, the onus is ever on the sender to disambiguate terms. Much though I think a loss to the language - I cannot, on this beautiful May morning, describe myself as "feeling gay" to my colleagues without them drawing conclusions I would not wish them to draw.NB - the Oxford does record a written form which could get round this problem for texts. S/he is defined as written representation of ‘he or she’, used as nom. sing. third person pron. to include both genders.[This message has been edited by Mister Pamboli, 05-05-2003][This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 05-06-2003]

This second post is intended to clear up two picky issues from Rhrain's reply to my reply ...I really don't grok the point you are trying to make about forms in Old English being "all over the place" - what exactly is it you are trying to say about Old English pronouns? When you say "the crossing of words is all over the place, crossing case as well as gender" are you suggesting there was some sort of confusion of forms? If not, what is it you are suggesting?

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You're right that "heo" is nominative feminine form and that "hie" and "hi" are plural...but they are also feminine singular.

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I am aware that the Oxford gives hie and hi as feminine nominative singular forms. The problem lies, as with any discussion of inflections, in trying to tease out the underlying regular forms from the tangle of written versions. For example, what do we mean when we say that tid is feminine in Old English? What are we to make of seemingly masculine usages such as aet ilcum tide on the Kirkdale sundial? Does this show a variable gender, a local usage, a mistake or a gender shift? Perhaps any of these, but the concensus remains that tid in its most common usage was feminine. In the same way, the common usage for expressing the nominative feminine singular pronoun is heo or occasionally hio. That the Oxford lists the rare alternatives is testament to its thoroughness, but not very helpful in drawing conclusions as to the regular forms of Old English pronouns.[This message has been edited by Mister Pamboli, 05-05-2003]

Mister Pamboli responds to me:

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The OED pretty clearly says, The simplest form of the (orig. demonstr.) base hi-, ... was cogn. with OFris. hi, he (fem. hiu, neut. hit). In other words, all the dictionary has to say about the gender of root forms of the pronoun is that it was cognate with a masculine form of Old Frisian.

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Here's what my OED says:"In English, the typical form in all ages has been he, from which emphasis probably produced heo, hye, hee, and tonelessness ha, a, which last long prevailed in representations of familiar speech, as in the dramatists, and is still a prevalent dialect form. In OE, the base he supplied all parts of the third personal pronoun, singular and plural; it was thus inflected:"[insert table of singular masculine, feminine, and neuter and plural forms for the nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive here]I don't know about you, but that last statement seems to be pretty direct: "he" is the root and all the third-person pronouns are derived from it.

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I think the problem may be that this claim is not true.

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You mean the American Studies professor I had who railed at me about "his-story" didn't really exist?You seem to be confusing a claim by people who want to carry out a social/political agenda with the work of actual linguists in the field of etymology. You will note that I am not saying that any serious linguist is claiming that "history" is actually a contraction of "his" and "story." I am saying that there are people who do make that claim and expect us to bow down to their wonderful opinions about how to solve the problem.As an example of a similar problem, take the history of the phrase "rule of thumb." There are actual professors who claim that the origin of this phrase is that common law once held that a man could beat his wife with a stick provided that the stick was no bigger than his thumb.Again, this simply isn't true. Despite what Claire Bride Cozzi wrote in the July 1986 issue of Ms. magazine, it simply isn't true. But the story is so widespread that the Canadian Medical Association Journal wrote an article that claimed it was MDs have key role in bringing ugly secret of wife abuse out of closet:"The expression 'rule of thumb' comes from an 1824 American law that permitted a husband to 'chastise his wife with a whip or rattan no wider than his thumb.'"Well, no...there never was any such law. No matter how much a person may want there to have been, it simply isn't true and it isn't up for debate.

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The clear implication here is that there is a distinction between the language and the usage. I cannot see how this distinction can be reliably or made, or by what authority one could make it.

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Because there is a difference between structure and use. The grammar and syntax of a language will tell you how to form a sentence. It cannot tell you what to actually say.For example, it is incorrect to say:This sentence no verb.And yet, there is a meaning to the utterance. While the structure of the language forbids me from making such a sentence...indeed, it technically isn't a sentence since there is no verb...I actually use the language in such a way that violates the rules and achieve meaning by saying it.That's what slang is: Violation of the rules to achieve communication. For the longest time, "bad" didn't mean "good." Well, now it does in certain contexts. The word "bad" was not commonly understood to have a positive connotation, but usage has changed that.

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All have an equal claim, and etymology doesn't help to resolve it because it is usage, not etymology that counts.

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Didn't I say that? I'm sure I did."The problem is that people don't use it in a gender-neutral fashion."And then I said it again here:"Take, for example, the word 'orientate.' It's being used. And much as I detest the word (the word you're looking for is 'orient'...it's already a verb...there's no need to make it a verb yet again by tacking on the '-ate' suffix), the fact remains that it is being used and thus exists and has a meaning."And again:"The language doesn't force you to think in a certain way. However, you will force the language to conform to the way you think."So it would seem that I am claiming the point that it is usage that counts.And simple observation of usage indicates that "he" is both masculine and neuter. There is a shift occurring such that "he" is losing its neuter meanings, but it hasn't succeeded yet and the majority of speakers still use it both in masculine and neuter ways.

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In contemporary English, the pronouns he and she sound egregious when used as gender-neutral terms.

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So why do people use them that way?

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My grandmother's usage of she for all cats and he for all dogs sounds distinctly wrong to contemporary ears: he has just given birth or she is a lovely tomcat don't work, but were phrases she and her generation used naturally and comfortably.

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You just contradicted yourself.You just said that usage is what counts. Well, if usage is what counts and all of the speakers involved with your grandmother and her peer group understood exactly what was being said, who are you to tell them that their usage is "egregious"?You don't get to call somebody else's usage "egregious." If everybody else seems to understand it, then you're the one with the problem. You may eventually convince everybody else that it ought to be different but until that shift actually happens, you are the one that is out of step.For now, the word "black" does not mean "white." It simply doesn't. You could try to convince people that it does but until they go along with you and start using "black" where they once would use the word "white," the language simply doesn't follow that precedent.And currently, "he" still has a neuter meaning. It's changing. Languages evolve, after all, but we aren't there yet and to call a common usage "egregious" is to substitute your lexicon for everybody else's.

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Nor was this purely a dialect - the usage can be found in Jane Austen, for example.

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So Austen was "egregious" in her use of language? Are you really trying to say that?

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The claim that he can be used of God without implication of gender just doesn't wash.

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Says who? You? Why should we believe you?Besides, I don't know of anybody who seriously uses "he" with "god" without indicating that god is male. Or, more accurately, those that have an active belief in god or those that are talking about the specific active beliefs of those who believe in god do not use "he" in the neuter when referring to god. The opinion of the Christian religion is that god is male. I am having a hard time coming up with a religion that truly thinks that god has no sex.See, "he" in the neuter is not used to indicate a specific person. Instead, it is used to indicate an abstract person. When referring to the concept of the president in general, "he" is used in the neuter because no specific president is being mentioned. But when talking about, say, Clinton or Bush, one would use "he" in the masculine because Clinton and Bush are specifically male.

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you have to look at the people on either side of the message: The sender and the receiver. It is quite possible that the receiver heard something that the sender didn't mean. And that is not the fault of the language.

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And this is the answer to your question about why one side rather than the other modifies its language - the sender typically modifies their terms in order to clarify their meaning.

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No, it really depends upon the specific instance. If the receiver is simply refusing to accept a common definition, it is not a requirement of the sender to change terms to coddle him.Take, for instance, all the times we have to educate creationists on what a "theory" is in science. The fact that they have screwed up and insist that a "theory" means "guess" does not necessitate any obligation on our part to rephrase things or to stop using "theory" to mean "analysis of a set of facts for their relationship to one another." The receiver has made an error and it is the receiver's responsibility to fix it.The sender might be gracious enough to try and come up with an alternate way of saying things, but words have meanings for a reason.

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This is what we do when speaking to children and foreigners - a phenomenon known as motherspeak.

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And when you are not dealing with a child or a foreigner but rather someone who simply doesn't like the common meaning of the word? What then?Indeed, etiquette demands that we try to accomodate others, but it's a two-way street. If I let you know that I consider a certain term to be offensive, then you would be gracious to rephrase yourself when in my presence. But, I don't get to accuse you of being a lout for daring to use the word in the first place when the common usage of the word doesn't have that connotation.Once again: Why the immediate assumption that the person using "he" in the neuter was deliberately being sexist? The comment that brought this up wasn't asking for clarification. It was accusing.

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Where there is disagreement, the onus is ever on the sender to disambiguate terms.

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Incorrect. Sometimes the receiver needs to get over himself.As Freud pointed out...sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

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Much though I think a loss to the language - I cannot, on this beautiful May morning, describe myself as "feeling gay" to my colleagues without them drawing conclusions I would not wish them to draw.

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Then you need to get some better colleagues. Either that or a backbone. Is your sexuality really a topic of conversation between you and your colleagues? And if it is, is there any real doubt as to what it is? And even then, other than the possibility that someone whom you don't typically find to be a suitable sexual partner might ask you out on a date and thus you'll have to politely decline the offer, what harm could come from it?Even today, people know that "gay" has a meaning of "happiness and joy."

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NB - the Oxford does record a written form which could get round this problem for texts. S/he is defined as written representation of ‘he or she’, used as nom. sing. third person pron. to include both genders.

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Indeed...it is still considered non-standard and is not commonly used, primarily because it is a written form and has no way to distinguish it in spoken language.------------------
Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Mister Pamboli responds to me:

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I really don't grok the point you are trying to make about forms in Old English being "all over the place" - what exactly is it you are trying to say about Old English pronouns?

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In current English, there is only one standard form that has multiple meanings: "he" and its derivatives as both masculine and neuter for the various cases. All the other third-person pronouns are specific and don't get used in other ways: "She" is always singular feminine. "It" is always singular neuter. "They" is always plural for single-sex, mixed-sex, or neuter.Old English, on the other hand, had many single words with multiple meanings: "Heo" is singular feminine nominative and plural nominative and plural accusative. "Him" is singular masculine dative and singular neuter dative and plural dative. "Hiere" is singular feminine dative and singular feminine gentive.That is what I'm talking about. Old English had much more fluidity in which words meant what. In modern English, the only word that has multiple grammatical meaning is "he" for both masculine and neuter. Currently, "they" is becoming more commonly used as singular in cases where "it" would be considered inappropriate given the assumption that "he" is also inappropriate.

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The problem lies, as with any discussion of inflections, in trying to tease out the underlying regular forms from the tangle of written versions.

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Given that spelling was a bit of a new thing, it will always be a difficult thing. Spelling was something you could reasonably make up as you went along and nobody minded all that much.

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That the Oxford lists the rare alternatives is testament to its thoroughness, but not very helpful in drawing conclusions as to the regular forms of Old English pronouns.

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I know, but the primary listings for singular masculine, singular neuter, and plural for the dative are all "him." For the genitive, the plurals ("hiera," "hira," and "heora") are much closer to the feminine singulars ("hiere" and "hire"/"hyre"), though not identical, than to the masculine ("his"/"hys"). And since for the nominative and accustaive, the plurals are sometimes identical to the feminine singulars, this appears to be a linguistic pattern and it is actually the fact that the dative uses the masculine that appears to be out of place.------------------
Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

And I think Mr. P's point (and mine as well) is, where do these rules come from? How are they inferred? How is it possible to make arguments from the authority of those rules if thery're only inferred from usage?It's not like there's a standards body dictating usage to people (except within the arenas of highly technical writing). The OED only records usage shifts that have already arisen in the language (they're descriptionist, not perscriptionist).

How about the word 'woman',woman comes from the old saxon for 'wife-man'

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How about the word 'woman',
woman comes from the old saxon for 'wife-man'

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But man meant human - irrespective of gender. The word for a female adult hom. sap. was wif.The word for a male adult hom. sap. was wer - as in werewolf. Now that's sexist! What do you call a woman who turns into a wolf - a "wifwolf", I suppose.

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"In English, the typical form in all ages has been he, from which emphasis probably produced heo, hye, hee, and tonelessness ha, a, which last long prevailed in representations of familiar speech, as in the dramatists, and is still a prevalent dialect form. In OE, the base he supplied all parts of the third personal pronoun, singular and plural ... I don't know about you, but that last statement seems to be pretty direct: "he" is the root and all the third-person pronouns are derived from it.

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That's fine and I see no reason to disagree with it - but it has nothing to do with whether the root form was masculine or neuter. In fact, if anything, it supports my contention that the root form was masculine, especially when taken with the evidence (in the paper I referenced) of a default masculine gender, and that the root form which supplied all parts of the third personal pronoun was cognate with a masculine form in a related language. From where do you get the inference that the root he was neuter?

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You mean the American Studies professor I had who railed at me about "his-story" didn't really exist?

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Well of course if you tell me that you have a source which made the claim then I will take you at your word. I would have preferred a written reference, but I'll accept your point. However, the origin of the history/herstory move is pretty clearly a fanciful pun rather than a false etymology, as the OED confirms.

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As an example of a similar problem, take the history of the phrase "rule of thumb." There are actual professors who claim that the origin of this phrase is that common law once held that a man could beat his wife with a stick provided that the stick was no bigger than his thumb.

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Again, this simply isn't true. Despite what Claire Bride Cozzi wrote in the July 1986 issue of Ms. magazine, it simply isn't true. But the story is so widespread that the Canadian Medical Association Journal wrote an article that claimed it was MDs have key role in bringing ugly secret of wife abuse out of closet:

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"The expression 'rule of thumb' comes from an 1824 American law that permitted a husband to 'chastise his wife with a whip or rattan no wider than his thumb.'"

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This kind of thing is very common - a plague all etymologists have to learn to live with. The same is true of place-name studies - fanciful derivations are constantly trotted out as historical and authoritative.

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Because there is a difference between structure and use. The grammar and syntax of a language will tell you how to form a sentence.

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Strictly speaking this is a tautology, sentence being a grammatical term - an utterance which conforms to certain rules. All you are really saying here is that the rules enable you to form an utterance which conforms to certain rules.

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For example, it is incorrect to say: This sentence no verb.

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Not necessarily. It is incorrect within a certain set of grammatical conventions. Correctness of grammar and syntax remains just about the most controversial area of lingusitics.

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That's what slang is: Violation of the rules to achieve communication.

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Not quite - slang is typically more concerned with vocabulary and phraseology than grammar and syntax. Your are perhaps thinking of pidgins or creoles?

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So it would seem that I am claiming the point that it is usage that counts.

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Yes I thought so. But you confused me with The language uses a single word for both masculine and neuter objects. That doesn't mean the language in and of itself has any confusion over the two. That can come only from usage. It suggested that there was some distinction between language and usage - as if there was some platonic, usage-independent langauge.

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And simple observation of usage indicates that "he" is both masculine and neuter. There is a shift occurring such that "he" is losing its neuter meanings, but it hasn't succeeded yet and the majority of speakers still use it both in masculine and neuter ways.

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Simple observation? In some contexts perhaps the dual use remains, but this shift has surely been pretty much completed in many and widespread socio-linguistic contexts. In others, sure enough, it has hardly started.

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Pamboli: In contemporary English, the pronouns he and she sound egregious when used as gender-neutral terms.

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RhRain: So why do people use them that way?

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Because people don't always speak contemporary English - they may include archaisms, turns of phrase, quotation, dialect etc. My example, of my grandmother's usage was an example of a generational difference.

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You just contradicted yourself. You just said that usage is what counts. Well, if usage is what counts and all of the speakers involved with your grandmother and her peer group understood exactly what was being said, who are you to tell them that their usage is "egregious"?

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Did I say everyone understood? Actually quite the opposite - the example stands out in my own experience precisely because it was a source of much confusion. Those in my grandmother's immediate circle understood it - but speaking to neighbours and friends, she could confuse the hell out of them! A grand aunt, a rather proper English lady, used to get quite worked up because my grandmother could apparently not even remember the gender of her much-doted-upon Peke.

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You don't get to call somebody else's usage "egregious."

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Don't I? Who says? Actually, I don't. I said they sound egregious: that is to say, from the listener's standpoint. The receiver not the sender, if you will. All the other points about egregious usage shake out from that. My gardener frequently uses the forms brung and drug - I brung my pickup and drug that old log away - which sounds egregious to me, but it perfectly naturally to him. The egregiousness(?) is my response and in no way inherent in his usage, which even I would admit has a certain charm of its own.

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Pamboli: The claim that he can be used of God without implication of gender just doesn't wash.
RhRain: Says who? You? Why should we believe you? Besides, I don't know of anybody who seriously uses "he" with "god" without indicating that god is male.

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Says you, apparently! Or, rather, you are saying that God's gender is not implied but directly affirmed, which not only makes schraf's point for her, but puts a cherry on top and calls it trifle.

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The opinion of the Christian religion is that god is male.

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Really? The Christian Religion defined how? And only male? In September of 1999, speaking in Saint Peter's Square, the Pope referred to God the mother and said that God had both male and female nature. So referring to God as she would work quite as well as referring to God as he, in so far as one referred to God's gender.

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I am having a hard time coming up with a religion that truly thinks that god has no sex.

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Don't have a hard time - it's not difficult. Check out Sikhism. The Guru Granth Sahib says How can anyone describe God? When God is neither male nor female.

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See, "he" in the neuter is not used to indicate a specific person. Instead, it is used to indicate an abstract person.

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Why should I believe you?

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When referring to the concept of the president in general, "he" is used in the neuter because no specific president is being mentioned. But when talking about, say, Clinton or Bush, one would use "he" in the masculine because Clinton and Bush are specifically male.

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You're not from the United Kingdom, are you? You see, your argument is somewhat crippled by using as an example a post that has never been held by a woman. Try applying it to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and see how it works. It doesn't! I remember the spate of activity as civil servants - my father was one - changed their protocols which had until that point always referred to the Prime Minister as male. They certainly didn't think the term covered the female by virtue of referring to an abstract person.

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No, it really depends upon the specific instance. If the receiver is simply refusing to accept a common definition, it is not a requirement of the sender to change terms to coddle him.

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The difference here is that you are prescribing how you think the sender ought to behave rather than describing how senders are typically constrained to behave by real world circumstances. I was trying to describe the situation where the sender who wishes to be understood must modify their language in order to be understood. This, as in motherspeak, is a natural human phenomenon, not a prescriptive rule. The onus is on the sender, not because of any rule that says they should, but because that is how human language works.

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Why the immediate assumption that the person using "he" in the neuter was deliberately being sexist? The comment that brought this up wasn't asking for clarification. It was accusing.

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I re-read shcraf's post and cannot find anything that would support this. She did not say anything about someone being deliberately sexist - but that sexism is ingrained. This is actually almost entirely opposite to deliberate sexism - she was objecting, if I read her correctly, to inisudous, subconscious sexism permeating our discourse about God.

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Then you need to get some better colleagues. Either that or a backbone.

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Ooooo, hark at the catty tongue on her! Aren't we the forceful manly one?

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Old English had much more fluidity in which words meant what.

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Nah, sorry. Do you speak a strongly inflected language natively? I have generally found this problem with people who do not. Inflections are not quite the same word (even when spelled the same) and not quite different - they are, just as they are called, inflections. So in OE, two inflections, both heo are not quite the same - the difference is subtle, being not a difference lexically, but an inflection. In OE, for example, there is some evidence that the plural pronoun had a subtly different pronounciation from singular feminine forms - suggested in part by the occasional orhtography hiz - where the z is, of course, a yogh.

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the fact that the dative uses the masculine

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This rather begs the question, but also nicely sums up the problem. The dative perhaps does not use the masculine but shares, or converges to, or is largely but not wholly indistinguishable from, the same transcribed form.Or you could be right at this point, as i think you are, and the root form of pronouns in old English is masculine, and not neuter as I beleive you claimed at one point.

crashfrog responds to me:

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I think Mr. P's point (and mine as well) is, where do these rules come from? How are they inferred? How is it possible to make arguments from the authority of those rules if thery're only inferred from usage?

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We all as the entire community of speakers make them up.And that means that if there is a sizeable number of people who use "he" in the neuter, then "he" has a definition that includes being the neuter, third-person, singular pronoun.No matter how many people dislike it.The fact of the matter is that the word is still out there being used as third-person, singular, neuter.

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It's not like there's a standards body dictating usage to people (except within the arenas of highly technical writing). The OED only records usage shifts that have already arisen in the language (they're descriptionist, not perscriptionist).

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I know.That's my point.Every dictionary I can find seems to include the neuter definition. Therefore, there is still a sizeable community of speakers who still use the word that way.So for someone else to come along and say the language is "sexist" because of this is trying to impose his personal opinion upon everybody else and he simply doesn't have that authority. For someone to tell someone else that when he said X, he really meant Y, even though the context made it clear that X was meant and even though a majority of speakers would understand that X was meant, then the problem is not with the speaker but with the person complaining.As soon as enough speakers find "he" in the neuter to be unacceptable, then the definition will fade. We can see it happening right now, but we haven't hit that point yet.

Mister Pamboli responds to me:

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Do you speak a strongly inflected language natively?

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A couple, actually.

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Inflections are not quite the same word (even when spelled the same) and not quite different - they are, just as they are called, inflections.

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Ah, but inflections come from a root. In this case, according to my OED, all of the third-person pronouns, including the masculine, come from the same root.

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So in OE, two inflections, both heo are not quite the same - the difference is subtle, being not a difference lexically, but an inflection.

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So why the complaint over "he" in the masculine and "he" in the neuter if you're not going to complain about "heo" in the feminine singular and "heo" in the plural?You can't have it both ways.

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This rather begs the question, but also nicely sums up the problem. The dative perhaps does not use the masculine but shares, or converges to, or is largely but not wholly indistinguishable from, the same transcribed form.

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Or you could be right at this point, as i think you are, and the root form of pronouns in old English is masculine, and not neuter as I beleive you claimed at one point.

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Or, I could be just misspeaking.All the third-person pronouns are inflected from the same root. It so happens that in many instances in Old English, certain cases shared the same inflection. The dative masculine and the dative plural were the same. The nominative feminine and the nominative plural were the same.If you're going to say that they were "slightly different inflections," then why the complaint that "he" in the masculine and "he" in the neuter is somehow sexist when, for Old English, they weren't?You don't get to have it both ways.------------------
Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

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I re-read shcraf's post and cannot find anything that would support this. She did not say anything about someone being deliberately sexist - but that sexism is ingrained. This is actually almost entirely opposite to deliberate sexism - she was objecting, if I read her correctly, to inisudous, subconscious sexism permeating our discourse about God.

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Exactly correct.

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quote:Then you need to get some better colleagues. Either that or a backbone.Ooooo, hark at the catty tongue on her! Aren't we the forceful manly one?

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ROTFLMAO!!!

There has been some research which rather strongly shows that people use the masculine pronoun as male to the exclusion of females, rather than as a truly gender-neurtral meaning:(Emphasis added)"In 1972, two sociologists at Drake University, Joseph Schneider and Sally Hacker, decided to test the hypothesis that man is generally understood to embrace woman. Some three hundred college students were asked to select from magazines and newspapers a variety of pictures that would appropriately illustrate the different chapters of a sociology textbook being prepared for publication. Half the students were assigned chapter headings like ``Social Man'', ``Industrial Man'', and ``Political Man''. The other half was given different but corresponding headings like ``Society'', ``Industrial Life'', and ``Political Behavior''. Analysis of the pictures selected revealed that in the minds of students of both sexes use of the word man evoked, to a statistically significant degree, images of males only --- filtering out recognition of women's participation in these major areas of life --- whereas the corresponding headings without man evoked images of both males and females. In some instances the differences reached magnitudes of 30 to 40 per cent. The authors concluded, `This is rather convincing evidence that when you use the word man generically, people do tend to think male, and tend not to think female ([Miller et al 1980, pages 19--20,]).Additionally, ``a number of studies have shown that young people are influenced in their job preferences and their willingness to apply for advertised jobs by gender bias in the wording of the advertisements'' ([Bem et al 1973] in [Frank et al 1983, page 90,]).Several sentences can be found that demonstrate that ``man'' is often unintentionally used to exclude women:David Moser once .... observed that in books you will find many sentences in this vein: `Man has traditionally been a hunter, and he has kept his females close to the hearth, where they could tend his children.'.... So much for the sexual neutrality of the generic `man'. I began to look for such anomalies, and soon ran across the following gem in a book on sexuality: `It is unknown in what way Man used to make love, when he was a primitive savage millions of years ago' [Hofstadter 1986, page 145,]."Additionally, of using she/he, "engineer-hours" instead of "man-hours", etc. in our usage, Douglas Hofstadter writes:"This is not progress, in my opinion. In fact, in some ways, it is retrograde motion, and damages the cause of nonsexist language. The problem is that these people are simultaneously showing that they recognize that ``he'' is not truly generic and yet continuing to use it as if it were. They are thereby, at one and the same time, increasing other people's recognition of the sham of considering ``he'' as a generic, and yet reinforcing the old convention of using it anyway. It's a bad bind [Hofstadter 1986, page 150,]."[This message has been edited by schrafinator, 05-08-2003]

Page not found | MIT CSAILSeveral writers, in order to argue for non-sexist writing, have written essays with other biases than the traditional male/female ones, and the results are (intentionally) shocking. In this section, I describe three such forays.* Douglas Hofstadter has written an essay ostensibly arguing for traditional usages but from an imaginary standpoint with different terms for whites and blacks analogous to those for men and women in our culture. For instance, ``white'' is used for ``whites and blacks'' (as ``men'' is used for ``men and women''), and blacks have different honorifics and pronouns. Here is an excerpt of his (long) essay:
Most of the clamor, as you certainly know by now, revolves around the age-old usage of the noun ``white'' and words built from it, such as chairwhite, mailwhite,... The negrists claim that using the word ``white'', either on its own or as a component, to talk about all the members of the human species is somehow degrading to blacks and reinforces racism. Therefore the libbers propose that we substitute ``person'' everywhere where ``white'' now occurs. Sensitive speakers of our secretary tongue of course find this preposterous. There is great beauty to a phrase such as ``All whites are created equal.'' Our forebosses who framed the Declaration of Independence well understood the poetry of our language. Think how ugly it would be to say ``All persons are created equal'', or ``All whites and blacks are created equal''.... [Hofstadter 1986, page 159,]* Bobbye Sorrels Persing, in [Persing 1978], has written a powerful essay of an office scene with the male and female roles reversed. Not only are male workers called ``boy'' and ``sir chairwoman'' (corresponding to ``girl'' and ``madame chairman''), they are treated and talked about as men stereotypically treat women who work for them [Persing 1978, pages 1--5,].* A recent example exists in the computer world. In MacTech Quarterly (now MacTech Journal), ``she'' is used instead of ``he'' as the generic pronoun. An editorial justified the policy and announced that it would be used henceforth by the magazine [MTQ 1989A]."I'm the co-author of the [X] Guide;... One of the decisions that I made was to remove all the sexist language, e.g. ``when the user types his command'' sort of stuff. It wasn't that hard to do, and I figured that it was appropriate.A couple of the reviewers ... noticed this --- I suppose my prose wasn't quite as seamless as I thought it was --- and commented on it. They both suggested putting the male gender pronouns back in since ``most of the users are men, anyway''. I didn't take this suggestion; but what struck me was that these folks actually noticed the lack of male pronouns."

R,Have you had a chance to think about my points against your claim that our language isn't sexist?Specifically, I'd like you to address my "guy" usage example.It's still in the other thread, and I'll cut n paste it here if you like.