The English Language Needs a Neutral Gender

I usually use they, one, them, our... etc. On one of my notes for Economics class we were reading an excerpt of "The Wealth of Nations," I wrote to the side "Why did people just use him, his, he, and man?" It's just kind of not right that women are excluded in older documents.

As for german, it gets confusing with all those der, die, das, dem, den, denen... etc. Though, just to add to what Thorwench said on the first page (I didn't realize until my reply was posted that there was more than one page), Mädchen is basically "it" but meaning young girls, and it's really not that fair that girls are called "it's".

it's acceptable to use 'they' and 'one' instead of (s)he etc over here. You dont get marked downn for it. I always use they as it's less complicated.

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Originally Posted by certiorari

I usually use they, one, them, our... etc. On one of my notes for Economics class we were reading an excerpt of "The Wealth of Nations," I wrote to the side "Why did people just use him, his, he, and man?" It's just kind of not right that women are excluded in older documents.

As for german, it gets confusing with all those der, die, das, dem, den, denen... etc. Though, just to add to what Thorwench said on the first page (I didn't realize until my reply was posted that there was more than one page), Mädchen is basically "it" but meaning young girls, and it's really not that fair that girls are called "it's".

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Calling a girl 'it' has nothing to do with gender discrimination. It also has nothing to do with any kind of actual gender. In language gramatical gender is totally different than natural gender. In fact, the only reason we dscuss words as having 'gender' is to give a convenient term for catagorizing linguistic phenomenon from a Euro-centric viewpoint. The catalogs of language are rife with conflicts of actual gender and grammatical gender and grammatical gender can cover many more catagories than natural gender. For example, Swahili has fifteen seperate genders.

As for the use of 'man,' I throughly approve of it. In English the term need not be discriminatory as the word 'woman' comes from the word 'wyfman' in Middle English, meaning a female person. In any case, 'man' in Old English was a neuter which referred to people in general and the actual word for woman and man were totally different ('wer' and 'wyf' respectively). Man had a seperate existence denoting the entire human race for a very long time, nearly until modern English, as such it is not an improper or discriminatory term to employ in language to describe the human race.

Is that what they're calling it nowadays? "Grammatical Gender" and "Actual Gender"? Hogwash! It's "gender" and "sex." That's what it's always been until people got this bizarre deal going on and got all squeamish over saying the word "sex" when there is absolutely nothing about such a sense that any sane person could be squeamish over! Ugh!

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Originally Posted by SummerSolstice

Is that what they're calling it nowadays? "Grammatical Gender" and "Actual Gender"? Hogwash! It's "gender" and "sex." That's what it's always been until people got this bizarre deal going on and got all squeamish over saying the word "sex" when there is absolutely nothing about such a sense that any sane person could be squeamish over! Ugh!

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Hear Hear! i completely agree!

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Originally Posted by SummerSolstice

Is that what they're calling it nowadays? "Grammatical Gender" and "Actual Gender"? Hogwash! It's "gender" and "sex." That's what it's always been until people got this bizarre deal going on and got all squeamish over saying the word "sex" when there is absolutely nothing about such a sense that any sane person could be squeamish over! Ugh!

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I don't think you understand. It's not what they are calling it nowadays, it's what it has always been called. There is nothing involved in grammatical gender about squeamishness or pudery, I assure you. In language gender is an abstract concept with often no relation to reality, which is something most sane involved in languages (teaching or studying) people acknowledge.

In linguistics the gender of a word often has no correspondance to actual (natural) gender and the only reason we call it gender is because that is the traditional Euro-centric view of language (i.e. that Indo-European languages have three genders which can be roughly catagorized in masculine, feminine, and neuter). A noun's grammatical gender is often at dissonance with its actual gender, an example in German has been cited already, the same example holds true in Old English, and in Arabic there are many examples where things have non-natural genders, for example EVERY non-animate plural is Arabic is feminine, even if it is a boy doll, and some masculine plurals become feminine when pluralized. This DOES NOT mean that the Arabs have a tendancy for being transgendered, or that students in Arabic (an example of such a word) do.

As I said before, in some languages there can be up to fourteen genders, few of which are based on natural gender, for example; certain Australian languages have a gender for men and animate objects, women fire and dangerous things (the title of a relatively famous book on linguistics), edible fruits and vegetables, and miscellania (perhaps a note should be written to them about the political incorrectness of their grammatical catagories); there is a Caucasian language with a gender for insects, regardless of whether the insect is male or female; and as mentioned above Swahili has fourteen genders, and I would challenge you to find fifteen genders in the natural world. In short, grammatical gender has no relation to actual (natural) gender, never has, and the reason has nothing to do with squeamishness, fairness, or social commentary. Just because the Germans use a neuter for the word 'girl' does not mean they don't think girls are people, and just because I use 'men' when referring to humanity in general does not mean I discount women as being important. These are just linguistic trends, trends which, in my opinion, are better left alone, but that is another conversation.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

I have no problem using the masculine pronoun when being general. I don't give a hoot about political correctness when it comes to grammer.

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This rule definitely applies. The masculine pronoun thingy.