Even more on gender neutrality

["Corecomm" <runar -at- corecomm -dot- net>]

Geoff Hart wrote that "man" meaning "male" seems to come from Sanskrit, but
this is not entirely true.  The word "monn" existed in Old English, where it
was a gender-neutral pronoun corresponding to "one" as it is used in Modern
English.  The word for "man" meaning a masculine human being was "ceorl",
pronounced "churl".  The word for a feminine human being was "cwaen", which
became ModE "queen".  So, who got the better deal there?  Certainly not the
churls.  The word "woman" derives from Old E "wifmonn" which meant,
literally, "wife-person".  We could always switch to writing in Finnish,
which has two pronouns, meaning "it (animate)" and "it (inanimate)", but
that would make technical documents even harder to read, and it might be
asking too much to ask our colleagues to master all fifteen noun cases.
Modern German still uses the word "man" to mean a person of indefinite
gender, as in the phrase "man sagt", literally meaning "one says", but more
properly translated as "they say" or "people say".

By the way, Sanskrit is Indo-European, though distantly related.  And, it
turns out, the term "gender" in language has nothing to do with the sex of
an object; the term is derived from Latin "gens" meaning "type".  It is just
a coincidence that Indo-European languages generally have three genders that
happen to correspond roughly to masculine, feminine and neuter.  There are
languages that have more than three genders (I believe the record is 127),
and some that only have two.

One of the best solutions to the problem we have in English is to use a
contraction of the phrase "he or she or it", which would be spelled
"h'or'sh'it".




"All people have their opinions.  Liberals believe that those who disagree
are misguided;  conservatives believe that those who disagree are wrong."

--- Philip Taterczynski



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