Manmonth

[Maaike Groenewege <mgr -at- MEDIASYS -dot- NL>]

Hi guys (oh dear, have to watch my words here...I also ment girls of course)

*looks around in wonder* I am really quite amazed at this issue of political
correctness; I've lived in Great Britian for quite a while and I've got lots
of German, French and Spanish friends, and I never experienced this kind of
issue. This could perhaps be because German, French and Spanish have
explicit gender determiners, but those determiners do not always denote the
actual gender of the object they're indicating.

Hmm, does this make sense? Here's an example from German: the word for
'little girl' is 'das Madchen'. The determiner 'das', however, is an
indicator of the neuter gender (which in this case is used to indicate a
diminutive). But surely Germans don't think that a Madchen has no gender?
Neither do they propose to change the determiner into female 'die', simply
because that would upset the entire language system.

Isn't this much more a social thing? Language always follows real life
social issues, so rather than saying a language in itself is politically
incorrect, I'd say political correctness is such an issue in some societies
that it is reflected in the language of those societies.

*mild sarcasm on* Oh, by the way, shouldn't we change the word 'woman' too?
It derives from Old English wif-man 'wife man', and  wijf (Dutch) and Weib
(German) are derogatory terms for someone of the female gender...*Mild
sarcasm off*


Maaike Groenewege
Tech Writer
Mediasystemen b.v., a Triple P company
Bloemendaal
The Netherlands

mgr -at- mediasys -dot- nl
http://www.mediasys.nl


 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=