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From: mmar@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Mitchell Marks)
Newsgroups: net.women,net.nlang
Subject: Re: the closed class of pronouns
Message-ID: <737@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 26-Jun-85 20:08:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: sphinx.737
Posted: Wed Jun 26 20:08:21 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Jun-85 02:17:28 EDT
References: <290@wuphys.UUCP> <678@sphinx.UCHICAGO.UUCP> <300@wuphys.UUCP> <515@psivax.UUCP>
Organization: U. Chicago - Computation Center
Lines: 63
Xref: watmath net.women:6130 net.nlang:3289

In article <300@wuphys.UUCP> bsc@wuphys.UUCP (Bryan Coughlan) writes:
>     The third person singular is the only form without
>a gender neutral pronoun.  Why should this be so?
>Well, when the class was set up, women were considered
>by everyone to be second-class citizens.  Thus, when in
>doubt, the default gender was male.  Since then, things
>have changed to the point where women are actually
>considered to be first-class citizens (I hope!).  I
>think that this is a big enough change in society
>to open up the pronoun class to include a new one.

In article <515@psivax.UUCP>, friesen@psivax.UUCP (Stanley Friesen) replies:
>	Actually, this is incorrect. The system was set up so that
>the singular anaphoric pronoun agreed with its antecedent noun in
>*grammatical* gender, which originally was only loosely tied to
>biological gender. Thus, the "masculine" form was the default,
>when the antecedent gender was unknown, because masculine nouns
>were more common than other classes. Its "dominance" is an accident
>of grammatical history. (Note that German still uses these pronouns
>in the old, grammatical manner).
>--
>
>				Sarima (Stanley Friesen)

Wait wait!  Both sides: I have a lot of trouble with "The system was set up"
(let alone adding "so that"), if you mean it at all like an ordinary passive,
i.e., "[unspecified agent] set up the system (so that...)".  It grew, it
evolved, nobody set it up.  Of course, assumptions and attitudes in the
speech community have a major bearing on how a language changes.  So I'll
assume that's what you're arguing about (and not, say, a real conspiracy
theory), and not get on the rag about terminological purity .  <- {Speaking
of patently offensive sexist language ... }

SF does have a good point here, but I wonder if he's taking it too far.
It doesn't amount to an argument for maintaining the status quo, e.g.
on the ground that it originated from an innocent grammatical quirk.
Regardless of origins, today English almost entirely lacks grammatical
gender for nouns, which is to say that the gender for an anaphoric pronoun
will be determined by natural gender.  (There are a few moribund exceptions,
such as 'she' for ships -- for some people.)  But an indefinite, not yet
referring to one individual (or referring to one individual whose sex
is unknown),  can't reasonably have any natural gender at all.  If you
use "he" there, you are imputing natural gender (masculine), even
though there's no basis.  It just is not an adequate default anymore.

It's also possible to shore up BSC's position on the significance of the
history.  The language community during the time the (IE > Germanic > )English
pronoun system was evolving cannot be considered entirely innocent
of sexism just because there was a system of grammatical gender in large
part independent of natural gender.  (That last clause is meant as a
summary of SF's argument.)  Why do we call this grammatical feature "gender"?
Why do we call two of the genders "masculine" and "feminine"?  Because
(in the European languages for which this terminology arose) at crucial
places grammatical gender coincides with natural gender: words for male and
female animals, especially humans.  (Yes, there are exceptions, e.g.
"fraulein".)  And so it doesn't seem unreasonable to speculate that having
masculine as the unmarked (= default, ordinary, not special or peculiar)
grammatical gender may reflect that the speech community regarded male
as the unmarked sex and female as marked.

            -- Mitch Marks
               @ UChicago (linguistics)
               ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!mmar