The not-so-silent return of Chauvinism

About Tommaso Dorigo

I am an experimental particle physicist working with the CMS experiment at CERN and the CDF experiment at Fermilab. In my spare time I play chess, abuse the piano, and aim my dobson telescope at... Full Bio

Tommaso
Dorigo

From the front page of an operational circular of the CERN laboratories:

In the interest of readability, this circular has been drafted using the masculine gender only. However, use of the masculine gender should be understood to refer to both sexes. The provisions of the circular therefore apply to both men and women except where it is clear from the context that they concern one sex or the other exclusively.

A very polite and careful way to address the burden of having to refer to both sexes at once, indeed. So we went from male-only documents, to gender-equal ones, to male-only ones which carry a disclaimer on the front page. Evolution or involution ? I wonder if it occurred to the writer of the document that he or she had a choice between using the male gender or the female gender, after deciding to act "in the interest of readability"...

Or maybe I am just being paranoid, or biased, or both. The fact is, I have the misfortune of living in Italy, a country which has seen an amazing involution in the matter of gender rights. A strong "velinism" has been instilled in the mind of women and men by years of chauvinist television: Veline is the nickname for eye-candy young girls, possibly undressed, which populate all popular TV shows since the Berlusconi era. The velinism is founded on the idea that to succeed in life and make a effortless fulminating career, a girl will just need to be good-looking and do some TV appearance, and learn to say yes when needed.

In a country where the Prime Minister populates his billionaire villa in Sardinia with scores of attractive half-naked girls fifty years younger than himself, lies about his relationship with a 17-years-old girl, enlists to get elected in the European Parliament soubrettes and pin-up girls who can barely speak Italian, manages to elect as Minister for Equal Opportunities a very attractive lady with no prior political experience but with whom he allegedly had a liaison, or is publically said to be "sick and in need of help" by the mother of his three youngest children, a CERN document addressing both sexes with the masculine gender should not surprise. Nor is surprising the fact that catholics still vote for him, in the knowledge that, in exchange for one more Pater Noster spelt to wash their soul at Sunday's mass, they have a guarantee that their tax evasion can continue unhindered. As unsurprised as I am, I retain the right to claim I am bitterly sick of this trend.

Comments

Stupid English :)

In Russian all words have grammatic gender and so the gender of pronouns is controlled by the subject of a sentence. For example, "user" is always "he", so no problems with sentences like: "After the user does ..... he/she/their should do ....".

Anonymous (not verified) | 06/08/09 | 06:28 AM

When change is inevitable it is irrational to oppose it. For the person who objects that 'they' is plural I recommend that they study how language really works. They will find that 'he' most definitely colours our powers of observation. They will find that they get used to 'they' after a while. They will find that future pedants will insist that 'they' is neutral as to both gender and number. Each and every pedant is doomed to be proven wrong in the long term, aren't they?

Patrick Lockerby | 06/08/09 | 06:42 AM

Right, there are many ways to avoid being gender-specific. I was in fact surprised of the choice of the CERN management in the case I quoted from.
Cheers,
T.

Tommaso Dorigo | 06/08/09 | 08:19 AM

Tommaso, I guess you are paranoid. There is no reasonable way to compare corruption with the use of gender in phrases, because this is comparison is so politicaly correct, that can easily be used to hide hyprocritical behavior and personal abuse. Any way, I guess the use of unpersonal "they", "one" and "we" is a humble and practical way to write.

Daniel Rocha | 06/08/09 | 07:34 AM

Daniel, I think the problem is cultural, and on that ground the way one writes and the things one watches on television are not so distant at all. Anyway, mine was largely a provocatory stance, meant to introduce yet another defamatory post at our beloved leader.

Cheers,
T.

Tommaso Dorigo | 06/08/09 | 08:03 AM

Tommasso, I cannot see how the simple use of genders can lead to sexism.

Daniel Rocha | 06/08/09 | 08:15 AM

Sorry Daniel, who said that ? I am saying that it is an effect, not a cause.
T.

Tommaso Dorigo | 06/08/09 | 08:18 AM

Alright, I cannot see how that could be a strong indicative of an effect of anything. It is really tiring to read such kinds of text and so the justification in the message you got from CERN might be true.

Daniel Rocha | 06/08/09 | 08:29 AM

lady with no prior political experience but with which he allegedly had a liaison,

Well, referring to a lady as "which" is also not a particularly gender-enlightened
manner of expression...

Anonymous (not verified) | 06/08/09 | 14:22 PM

Tell me about it.

Hontas Farmer | 06/08/09 | 14:51 PM

Thanks, corrected. As you might know, I am not a native English speaker.
Cheers,
T.

Tommaso Dorigo | 06/08/09 | 14:29 PM

Gender neutral pronouns are a good thing. Let me make you aware of such pronouns invented by the transgender community. Along our specturm there are people who call themslves "gender queer". They basically are right in the middle in terms of gender identity and expression. Some of them are physically male or female, many of them are some varieyt of intersexed person. So they are in effect neutral of both sex and gender.

They invented and prefer that to be refered to with pronouns ze zir and zim instead of he/she sir/mam, or him/her. They have not caught on much beyond the LGBT community. However if we are to use gender neutral pronouns, who can better invent these pronounds than people who's gender is neither male nor female?

Hontas Farmer | 06/08/09 | 14:58 PM

For a gender-neutral language, travel to Iran. As the Wikipedia Farsi article says:

There is no gender in Persian, nor are pronouns marked for natural gender.

Robert H Olley | 06/08/09 | 15:37 PM

Incidentally, this Persian grammar is a good example showing that a new Orwellian speech hiding the differences between men and women is far from a sufficient condition to women to be treated as equal to men.

Luboš Motl (not verified) | 06/09/09 | 02:43 AM

It does indicate why of all the islamic nations they are the most accommodating of the transgendered (but not the gay unlike here in the west where it is arguably the opposite.)

Oh and by the way Lubos long time no type. :-)

Hontas Farmer | 06/10/09 | 02:49 AM

Dear Mr or Ms Farmer, good to see you - and you're surely joking. In Iran, transsexuals are being really loved - by whips and electrical chairs. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transsexuality_in_Iran#After_the_Revolution

"The new religious government that came to be established after the 1979 Iranian Revolution classed transsexuals and transvestites with gays and lesbians, who were condemned by Islam and faced the punishment of lashing and death under Iran's penal code."

It has recently become possible to survive and even have a surgery but the idea that similar nations are "the most accommodating" relatively to the West is ludicrous.

Luboš Motl (not verified) | 06/10/09 | 02:55 AM

It is Ms. thankyou.

In Iran the government pays 1/2 of the price for transsexual women to have the operation if they choose to have it and does not force it on anyone at all. (despite what the pink media says they are a bunch of irrational islamophobes) If you scroll down the page you cited....

"At first she was stopped and beaten by his guards, but eventually
Khomeini gave her a letter to authorize her sex reassignment operation.
The letter is later known as the fatwa that authorizes such operations in Iran.^[2]"

Furthermore these documentaries about this issue are real information on how such people are treated in Iran...

This one shows transwomen living openly in Iran.

Added

4:58

Transsexuals in Iran 2

5,128 views

This one features a journalist from a state run radio station interviewing these people. This is not "underground" hidden or any such thing. It is in the open and quite public there.

Transsexuals in Iran (Tanaz Eshaghian, 2008) Part 5

Added

7:15

Transsexuals in Iran (Tanaz Eshaghian, 2008) Pa...ted...
.

Hontas Farmer | 06/10/09 | 03:19 AM

Well, if you think that these sources show that the situation is better than in the West, good for you. You may always emigrate to Iran. ;-)

And sorry, I don't plan to memorize what a transwomen means. If transsexual women undergo a surgery, does it mean that they were women before the surgery or after the surgery? In fact, frankly speaking, I don't care: the main conclusion for me is identical in both cases. :-)

Luboš Motl (not verified) | 06/10/09 | 03:25 AM

Better than in the west... perhaps in some respects. Even if the gov't bent over backwards for transsexual women* it would still be a third world country.

(* or for short transwomen, OR even shorter TS for transsexual or TG for transgender...it's a regular alphabet soup :-? )

Hontas Farmer | 06/10/09 | 04:14 AM

Berlusconi is getting the blame for advertising campaigns on billboards?? You can find a way to blame him for ANYTHING!! :)

Hank Campbell | 06/08/09 | 15:43 PM

Berlusconi is getting the blame for advertising campaigns on billboards?? You can find a way to blame him for ANYTHING!! :)

Yes, and I did.

Patrick Lockerby | 06/08/09 | 15:49 PM

:) Well Hank, yeah, I do. I have to say, Berlusconi is quite likable, but he has really done a lot of damage to my country, not to mention the fact he has enriched himself more than it is reasonable by turning upside down the logic of bribery: after 1992, when tangentopoli showed how politicians were systematically corrupted by businessmen, he went into politics so that he could take their place, and not need to bribe anybody. A genius in his own right.

About the girls, I wrote a quite moralistic piece above. In fact, I well understand him as a man. However, when you lead a country you cannot let go with that kind of behavior, because you are not credible as a statesman anymore. The fact that he manages to remain at the helm after all of that shows that he is basically at the level of dictatorship: he is infallible, unbreakable, and a tyrant.

Cheers,
T.

Tommaso Dorigo | 06/08/09 | 16:09 PM

Argh -- how irritating. i skimmed the discussion above, and tire of hearing the justifications. if it doesn't matter, why don't we just use "she" half the time, to represent all? but it's used *much* less than this. and it *does* matter. i thus make it one of my small missions to simply use "she" and "her" everywhere personally, in a small way to rectify things. esp. for GOD, when needed. that gets a lot of people. ;-> And we should wonder why.

thx T,
-M

mandeep gill (not verified) | 06/08/09 | 19:42 PM

Dear Tommaso,

the reason why the "gender neutral" formulations have been abandoned, after a few years of these attempts, is that they sound horrible, they waste everybody's time, they prove that the speaker or writer is a politically correct, hypocritical, and non-independent jerk, and they're simply not necessary for anything useful.

All of political correctness will be abandoned once most people realize that it has been not only raping our languages but also destroying the human civilization. The people who have been spreading this dishonest ideology of PC should be removed, too.

The languages have evolved to describe primarily certain things, and the basic rules how to use genders lie at the very core of pretty much every language. To change these rules means to invent a new language - and people just don't want to learn a new language, for no good reason. One of these fundamental rules is that if one talks about groups of people such as job occupations, then he (and, indeed, she) uses the gender that is dominant in the given group.

When an important misunderstanding could occur, one may use "this and thisess" instead, but it depends on a very delicate comparison of costs and benefits. Using the majority-dictated gender is the standard procedure to convey as much information as efficiently as possible.

Concerning technical, high-expertise, and similar occupations, it's obvious that masculine gender has always been used - and is still used - to describe the groups because technical occupations are heavily dominated - and most likely, will always be dominated (for biological reasons) - by men. In this case, it's absurd to introduce feminime gender to make the texts longer because the texts I am talking about are not about sex but about technical matters. And it would simply be silly if a big part of technical texts were solving or not solving some (off-topic) sexual issues.

Every sensible person can calibrate all these things and learn to understand that masculine gender can often represent a mixture that includes women, too, depending on the context.

There's one more angle to describe the situation: the genders in grammar are a priori (and in reality) independent of biological sexes: they often describe social roles. And technical job occupations are simply masculine social roles: it's not the same criterion as a measurement of penises. Indeed, they're masculine because these groups used to be virtually restricted to men and the social and biological roles used to coincide except for people (or mammals!) who were viewed as sick. But they're no longer restricted (and transsexuals and e.g. women in science are no longer considered sick by the establishment), so it means that the definition of the gender in grammar has evolved and no longer exactly agrees with the biological sex.

Are girls taught that they should be pretty, smile, and nod to succeed? Well, that's because it's how it works in much of the world. In the politically correct environments, it actually works in this way, too: the people in these environments just hypocritically try to deny the reality and use special language to pretend that their world is different than it is. On the other hand, one also has many women who are succeeding in the masculine way, and these women have simply learned to be see themselves behind the masculine gender in sentences, too: they're playing socially masculine roles.

If some of these women want to rape language nevertheless, and to be separately cited in all sentences (even though it is a waste of time), such a desire is clearly driven by their desire to gain advantages relatively to their male colleagues, and all good people should do what they can to make these attempts fail, much like most PC attempts to reorganize the world.

Best wishes
Lubos

Luboš Motl (not verified) | 06/08/09 | 23:59 PM

This business of biological brain difference you are on could be part of why we initially clashed when we first parlayed Dr. Motl. When I first came across you on WP I was not at that time living as a woman, yet based on something you wrote it seems you were unable to discern just what gender I was. That matters allot to you.

As someone who has thought allot about this I have only two things to say to you.

1.) There is in fact scientific proof that the brains of women, differ from the brains of men. This proof comes in the context of studies on the neurological differences between men and transsexual women, homosexual men and straight men. It has been found by direct observation that the brains of transsexual women, and homosexual men process pheromones in a different way than straight men. The same people who research this have indirect evidence that sex hormones organize the brains of homosexual men , and transwomen differently than straight men. So you are not just full of hot air in this regard there are real difference.

2.) However these differences don't imply as far as I can see that women not getting into technical fields is a biological thing. From what I see it's mostly culture. Consider that most African Americans who are in college for any science related discipline are female. Because in African American society it is very often the women who pride themselves on doing the brain work. The same seems to be true of south Asian society... If they can afford to send their daughters to private schools and get ivy league graduate education in a science or tech field they will encourage it. Whereas in europe, brains in a woman seem to be an unattractive quality.... not that there aren't smart white women, it just seems that european society does not value the thoughts of women as much as the thoughts of men.

Now you can argue all you want that somehow the European way of thinking is most natrual for all man kind...if you do then you might as well not bother because that is plainly false. Like anyone else your views are shaped by your culture.

Hontas Farmer | 06/10/09 | 03:02 AM

Political correctness is so tiring sometimes. Do we really have to put disclaimers on everything we do now, including using grammar and pronouns that are so ingrained in common parlance that its effectively subconsious.

Maybe its just me, but I think ill continue in my heathen ways, and perhaps add an Epitaph on my tombstone along the lines 'I'd like to specify that I meant no disrespect to any soul I happened to offend during my travels'

Haelfix (not verified) | 06/09/09 | 02:12 AM

Dear Haelfix, the quote on your tombstone plays a very similar role to the disclaimer, and it's the reason why I don't find it worrisome.

What it actually says is "Please, dear readers, do understand that the writers of this circular are already fed up with the redundant and awkward feminist-friendly language. We will return to the proper grammar rules as they have evolved for centuries: get used to it. We are ready to copy and paste this disclaimer everywhere, including your face, up to the moment when you and the feminists themselves will be annoyed by it. Meanwhile, we won't spend a second by creating this awkward language in the texts. We will continue our lives and our jobs and leave feminist balancing acts to the graves."

Luboš Motl (not verified) | 06/09/09 | 02:48 AM

Lubos, Haelfix, we can do what we want with language, but the way we express ourselves has an impact on the people who listen to us. It is too easy to shrug our shoulders at these issues as unimportant or futile if we are not those who are discriminated. I really believe that what we do and think has a strong connection with the way we talk. Be the latter an effect or a cause, it is a concern to me. Then again, I am a certified sexist as some of you might know, so am I being a hypocrite ? Perhaps, but maybe unconsciously so.

Cheers,
T.

Tommaso Dorigo | 06/09/09 | 02:50 AM

Dear Tommaso,

does language influence what people think? You bet. That's why it was created. A language with no impact would be a useless invention. However, you're overlooking the opposite influence - the language was created in this way for a good reason. Scientists appear in masculine gender - in languages that tell them apart - because scientists used to be almost universally male.

It's no longer the case but it's still mostly the case. It just means that the masculine gender is not the same thing as the biological sex. People (probably children) who have never seen a female scientist may be confused by this point and think that the masculine gender means that scientists can't be women. Everyone who already knows that female scientists exist simply can't be affected by it: he or she has learned the actual physics and the "non-straightforward" meaning of the words by seeing one counterexample. The more people know about sociology of science, the less they can be affected by genders in the local language. And the people who know nothing simply don't matter: for example, children who have never seen a female mathematician usually don't decide about hiring. So the confusion, if it exists, doesn't matter.

Also, it would be ludicrous to expect the children to know everything - like the percentages of women in physics - from the beginning. Children are slowly learning almost from zero and indeed, thinking that "scientists are male" may be the first impression before they learn the second bit of information about the sociology of science. There's nothing wrong about it. They must start somewhere.

The example of Persian - that doesn't distinguish genders - shows pretty clearly that women can't become emancipated by some gender-neutral deformations of the language (of any kind). On the opposite side, the Czech women are arguably the most emancipated ones in the world (by their self-confidence, working hours, and other things) - despite the highly gender-asymmetric language we use. By the way, virtually all nouns have a gender in Czech and most other Slavic languages. Dogs are male, cats are female, and so on.

Biologically speaking, dogs can also be female (bitches!) and cats may be male: the difference between the two species' sexuality is negligible. But the main words denoting the animals (or anything else) have the genders I indicated. It's also "unfair" and may have an "impact" on the listener. But this impact is fully justified. Our ancestors had some reasons why cats became "female" while dogs became "male". Dogs look more violent while cats behave more gently. For very similar reasons, the main word for a "physicist" has masculine gender in Czech (and surely most other languages that recognize genders). It is no coincidence, and if these words create an asymmetric feeling in the ears of the listener, it is a fully justifiable and justified asymmetry (and feeling).

The only reason why some PC people called you a "sexist" is that their vocabulary is limited and "sexist" is the only related word they know. What they actually meant was that you were a "sexual pervert unable to control his hormones". But because they know that ideologically speaking, you are a hardcore feminist, they have always forgiven you your sexual deviations. In fact, they secretly love you for that, as long as your ideology is OK with their agenda.

If effects and causes are a concern to you, you shouldn't do science - and you shouldn't live in this "screwed" world that is built on effects and their causes. If you don't like the asymmetry between things, you shouldn't live in a world with broken symmetries - even the SU(2) x U(1) electroweak symmetry is spontaneously broken in this "sad" world. Neutrinos are discriminated relatively to electrons (or vice versa): at least, they were given a gender-neutral Italian name. ;-)

Best wishes
Lubos

Luboš Motl (not verified) | 06/09/09 | 03:14 AM

In Portuguese, names of animals and things are always in the masculine unless they end in "a", in general, although I can't remember any exception. Some animals are not gender neutral, like dogs and cats, but you call them in the masculine when they are in groups where there is at least one male, just like with people.

And transgender people here likes to be called in the feminine, not in some kind of extraterrestrial kind of conjugation. Well, you can't fight that in Portuguese, since the whole language is based in that kind of differentiation.

Daniel Rocha | 06/09/09 | 05:52 AM

That's pretty close to Czech - most of the Czech feminime nouns also end with "a", like "kočka" which is the cat. But that's because of a reason that is just a small part of the complex rules of Czech declination that make Western languages trivial in comparison.

Masculine nouns get declined according to four main templates - "sir", "castle", "man", and "engine" (pán, hrad, muž, stroj). The feminime nouns have four templates - "woman", "rose", "song", "bone" (žena, růže, píseň, kost). The neuter gender nouns decline according to "town", "sea", "chicken", "building" (město, moře, kuře, stavení). The genders are distinguished even in plural - no universal "they" here (we have different they for males and females: we distinguish male "oni" and female "ony" for "they"), although most Czechs say these subtler things incorrectly, anyway. ;-)

Each of the nouns is transformed according to 7 cases (who-what, of-who-of-what, to-whom-to-what, see-whom-what, call-him, about-whom-what, with-whom-what) - although usually only 4-5 of them are distinct from each other. If you learn to decline the 3x 4 template nouns according to the 7 cases, which is 3x4x7 = 84 forms of words, plus the same 84 for the plural, you already get most of the Czech nouns correctly, assuming that you remember/figure out what template you should use for a given noun. :-) That's usually apparent from the ending. For adjectives, one essentially has one male, one female, and neutral, and similarly 1+1+1 plural templates, which makes it easier than the nouns. Declination applies to numerals and those "they"-like words, whatever their name is.

Similar complications arise for verbs. Their endings reflect gender, tense, conditionals, activity/passivity, and many other parameters. All these things look difficult. On the other hand, they're naturally remembered by human brains, and even by computers today, and when you get it in your head, and kids do it before they're 6, it's still a small portion of the memory dedicated to language.

The male forms of job occupations etc. are used both in the strictly male meaning, as well as in the gender-neutral meaning. This rule - which appears as the disclaimed above - has been a part of the official grammar taught to kid for 200 years. So Tommaso's disclaimer is rediscovering a wheel that has been well-established in Czechia for centuries. Almost all such words have their female counterparts, too. Because gender is such an important part of grammar rules, this attention simply had to be dedicated to these subtleties.

It's surely not just Portuguese and Czech that are very careful about this differentiation and context-dependent subtleties how to specialize and generalize the nouns (and adjectives and verbs).

Luboš Motl (not verified) | 06/09/09 | 06:38 AM

OK, I oversimplified the masculine templates a bit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_declension

As we always learned, we must distinguish masculine animate and masculine inanimate. The latter sometimes follow the feminime rules. Imagine the discrimination - dead men are a little bit like women. ;-)

Correspondingly, there are really six templates, and kids of this generation just learn them as 6 equal forms (although we really used to say that there were only 4, and treated the additional two as some kinds of exceptions).

The six male forms are sir, man, chairman, judge (předseda, soudce) - plus the two inanimate words, castle and engine.

Luboš Motl (not verified) | 06/09/09 | 06:47 AM

One more potentially amusing comment. Whether the grammar is found to be discriminating against men or women is a matter of interpretation and stories that must be added to the grammar.

When I was 8 or so, my teacher of the Russian language - who was also teaching Czech and literature to other classes - was a pretty pro-Soviet woman (unlike most other teachers of ours, some of whom were way more important for me). She was kind of funny and she could have also classified as a feminist (although quite clearly a horny one).

She was able to interpret both situations in her preferred, anti-male way. There are cases where the feminime and neuter gender have the same declension. For example, "two" is "dvě" in feminime and neuter, while it is "dva" in the masculine form. In such situations, she was saying: you see, men must always have something "extra", with her characteristic, male-despising intonation.

(Incidentally, the "dva" and "dvě" words are identical in Russian and Czech, except for the alphabet. But the "normal" form of "2" is masculine, "dva", in Russian, but it is feminime, "dvě", in Czech - mostly because things that come in pairs - such as hands and legs - are feminime. Not sure what's the Russian explanation of the opposite rule.)

On the other hand, there are also situations in which the masculine and neuter forms coincide while the feminime form is different (I could recall the examples, but let's omit it here). She was saying "you see, men are still just like children". It took me some time - a year? - before I fully realized that her setup was ready for both situations, and that the "derivation" of the anti-male attitudes from the grammar depended just on the biased interpretation.

Needless to say, I would never believe a conclusion about the real world based on some analysis of linguistics. That's not how physicists think. Language is derived from physics, not the other way around (as postmodern nuts liked to say). Again, I find it completely plausible that some people don't care about the real physics of the society and other physical systems, and they derive the truths from the words, literally, from reading the Bible etc. These people might indeed be inclined to derive wrong things out of the language. But the same people also probably fail to see that the language-derived things are wrong, so they're not worried by them. :-)

The only people who are concerned with these things are other people who also want the society to build its opinions irrationally - from the way how we speak - except that they want the opposite "bias" of the language. They may be in a minority in the U.S. South or elsewhere - and probably in a majority in other regions. But any bias is wrong, and I think that fair people simply admit that the language is just a tool to share the information, not a tool that pushes or should push the society in a direction. Everyone who realizes that languages is just an approximate reflection of the real world, not an isomorphic object to the real world itself, also lacks the need to use the language as a tool for propaganda. That includes all the people who are able to go beyond a superficial look summarized in one or two words.

Luboš Motl (not verified) | 06/09/09 | 07:06 AM

Thank Lubos :)

Unfortunantely the imediate acestor of my language, vulgar latin,
already missed almost all declensions. So, you are very prileged when
it comes to learn classical languages, like Latin, Greek and Sanskrit,
as well as their 3 billion descendents. Oh, we also don't have the
neutral, so, I guess we are really sexist, even with furniture!

Well, you know that I am in the opposite politcal in relation to you,
but this PC with language also bothers me because it just makes such
minorities blind to places where their activism could really help,
instead of whre their rights are already mostly guaranteed. It's
ridiculous to worry about things as nominal gender concordance whereas
in several places of the world women are treated like trash. Why don't
these feminists camp in front of embassies of such countries instead of
complaining they are not still not called wymyn?

Daniel Rocha | 06/09/09 | 10:27 AM

Dear Daniel, thanks for your funny answer: your word "already" indicates that despite agreements mentioned later, we may have the opposite ideas about the arrow of time and progress. ;-) Let me mention that life and reproduction began asexually, and sex (plus sexes) were an immense, relatively modern invention of Nature that made the creation of new DNA codes fancier and lovelier. So the proponents of an asexual society are ultrareactionary beings, intending to return life a few billion years to the past.

Languages were already born when sex existed, and I would say that their genders just reflect the immense new achievement of sex.

The Czech words for furniture are mostly masculine or feminime, too. Furniture itself is male, much like a table (desk), while chairs, cabinets are female. Well, yes, arm-chairs are neutral.

Your opinion is remotely attractive to me, and reminds me e.g. Marcos Marino (with Che Guevara on his T-shirt). You're the old-fashioned kinds of leftists who actually wanted to see some actual, material progress. The postmodern leftists are confused, they remain superficial, care about language details and similar irrelevant things, and want the technological and professional progress to be negative (in their own definition).

Luboš Motl (not verified) | 06/09/09 | 12:20 PM

Thanks, Tommaso. We appreciate your support. It all seems so innocent and well meaning, until one tries to imagine a small comittee discussing whether or not to include the disclaimer. And I have overheard all too many of THOSE discussions - you know - along the lines of 'let's keep the pretty things happy - what can it hurt? They're mostly harmless, after all.....'

Kea (not verified) | 06/09/09 | 08:36 AM

Thanks Luboš. I thoroughly enjoyed your Czech language lessons. I like the fact that "bone" is one of the templates for the feminine nouns. I would also have thought that "sea" would be classified as feminine rather than neutral. For the future world, will all robots be classified as male due to "engine" as one of the templates for male nouns?

Fred (not verified) | 06/09/09 | 12:35 PM

Dear Fred, great to hear that you happily read it. And I hope you will learn the rest of the language, too. ;-) You know, Czech is very poetic, flexible, and emotionally creative.

I think that your feminime proposal for the "sea" is sensible - and my guess is that the neuter gender has only "won" in the old Slavic grammar disputes because of phonetic reasons. It seems that sea ("moře") in Slavic tongues (it's neutral in all of them, AFAIK) could have been obtained from some proto-Indo-European version of "mare", meaning the same thing, and "-re" or "-ře" at the end just sounds way too similar to e.g. the chicken ("kuře") which had to be obviously neutral because it is a baby, similar to a child ("dítě").

So the other possible template for the sea would be the feminime rose ("růže"), formerly replaced by the "now archaic" word hamper/dosser/back-basket ("nůše"), a template learned by our grandparents instead of the rose. But I think that there's no feminime word that has "r" in front of the "e" at the end - the feminime words with "e" at the end usually have things like "š" and "ž" before it. So the sea had to be neutral.

My understanding is that in English, the non-neutral genders are somewhat rare for inanimate objects, and ships, countries, homelands etc. are the exceptions that are often female. They're female in Slavic languages, too - probably to emphasize that we should love them, by a similarity to a mother or wife. (Of course, countries ending with "ie" like "Francie" are feminime but those ending with "o", like "Rusko" or "Česko", are neutral. There are also many masculine country names, usually those ending with consonants.) Most of these things have emotional or phonetic reasons, and the more sensible the reason is, the more likely it is that the "rationally explainable" gender will agree with the actual gender in the language.

Finally, "robots" surely have engines in them, and as long as they're universal and they're called robot, they must obviously remain masculine: details will follow. You know, engines are male - but machines ("mašina") which is almost the same thing are female, so there's not much polarization here. But for "robots", the polarization is much stronger simply because the word "robot" has already been defined in this way. It's the only famous word that was produced by a Czech author, namely writer Karel Čapek in his 1921 play, R.U.R. (Rossum's Univesal Robots):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.

He invented the word by shortening the Slavic word for labor/work - robota (which is female by itself, and which only means drudgery in Czech while it's any work in Russian or Slovak - you know, the Czechs will often be dissatisfied with some kinds of work haha) and defined all of its grammar attributes. It sounded well enough to be used internationally - no unusual consonants or vowels, a good sequence of ordinary and alternating vowels and consonants. Of course, it was exported without the gender and declined forms.

Only if universal robots are constructed to look female on one sunny day in the future, they could acquire feminime gender. But in that case, they would also be called differently - probably "robotka" (robotess). In Czech grammar, such an assertion is a theorem. You can't decline "robot" as a feminime noun because only the "bone" template ("kost") ends with a consonant, and its "hard" nature is only a result of simplifications in the past. For "robot" to be feminime, it would have to originate from "robot'" with a soft "tj" ("t" with the "háček") at the end - which it didn't.

But even if this detail were overlooked, it would be declined completely differently than the masculine "robot" - so in this sense, it would be a different word because most of the cases would differ from the current "robot". There's just no peaceful way for Czech to allow words like "robot" to become feminime. The correlation between the genders of nouns, endings, and genders of verbs is a very subtle mechanism that carries some information and consistency checks, and attacking its structure would make the language ambiguous and nonsensical.

That's why we insist on transforming and declining all male and female names, including the foreign names, unless the names are so Chinese that the combinations with the Czech endings. For example, the Secretary of State is called Hillary Clintonová. The surname sounds like an adjective (feminime form, the same suffix as for H2SO4 acid) derived from Clinton, or a accuted version of "Clinton's", meaning that she belongs to Clinton. Be sure that this ownership-to-men rule is applied even to the most hardcore feminists :-). After all, this ending just confirms the fact that women usually take the surnames from fathers or husbands.

Everyone knows it's in this way but no sensible person in Czechia protests against this rule of grammar because it would be silly - it's just a rule of a language that can't hurt anyone. I am pretty sure that a hypothetical Czech feminist who would propose to change the way how we derive female surnames from male surnames would be put into a mental asylum. She would deserve it, too.

Luboš Motl (not verified) | 06/09/09 | 13:42 PM

By the way, this "possessive" form of female surnames has been the topic of many newspaper articles that I find immensely funny. First, you can check 50,000 or 100,000 pages about Hillary Clintonová.

http://www.google.cz/search?q="hillary+clintonová"

If you omit the accent above "a", you will get 1,000 pages only. The first one is a funny 2009 article

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/czech-republic/090319/the-czechs-shes...

arguing that the grammar rules to create the female name came "under increased scrutiny". Not sure whether Mr Bruce Konviser is joking, but if he were Czech, it would surely be the case. His reason to think that the basic rules of grammar came under "scrutiny" is that a 29-year-old woman (athlete), Ms Zuzana Kocumová, truncated the female surnames of all female contestants in a live broadcast of some skiing competition or whatever that occurred on TV once.

Needless to say, hordes of TV viewers (sport fans) were offended by a TV commentator speaking like a foreigner with a broken Czech or a complete moron unfamiliar with the rules that most kids learn before they enter the elementary school. So she was fired to please the viewers of the public TV, in order to be re-hired later when their anger disappeared. ;-)

Konviser likes to imagine Ms Kocumová (or at least he pretends so) as a representative of a big Czech feminist movement trying to change the basic rules of grammar. The reality is that Ms Kocumová is lazy, she has lost her good knowledge of her mother tongue by living among foreign athletes, and wanted to look "international" by using a broken Czech on public TV. Much like Ivan Lendl (the ex tennis star) who loved to speak in Czech with a heavy American accent. In my humble opinion, he mostly played this game, in order to show how better a person he became by emigrating to the U.S.

There's no discernible feminist movement in the Czech Republic. There are about five million women in the Czech Republic and about five million Czech women despise feminism and the feminists themselves - consider them to be women who have to compensate some problems of theirs by frigid and hostile attitudes. Most Czech women are straight, they realize the importance of men, they're attracted to them, and they realize that certain activities are pretty naturally divided between the two sexes. The ideas in some Western media about the new rules of grammar are completely ludicrous, and not even a new network of Gestapo stations could modify the actual language in this brutal way.

Hitler has certainly failed to make any change of the Czech language of a similar magnitude - the only thing he could do was to suppress the Czech language as such - which would be an entirely different discussion today, one in which grammar would look unimportant again.

Best wishes
Lubos

Luboš Motl (not verified) | 06/09/09 | 14:29 PM

It might be appropriate to point out here that the problem Tommasso
describes is particularly acute in English, because it is a specially gender-discriminating language. When referring to a person, every verb must be preceded by "he" of "she", even if the action described has nothing to do with the gender of the subject. The best solution to that problem is just using a tacit subject, as done in several Latin languages.

Anonymous (not verified) | 06/09/09 | 12:51 PM

Sorry but shouldn't the tacit subject in Romance languages be combined with a gender-specific form of the verb, just like in Czech? You know, we may omit "he" or "she" in the sentences (unlike the Russians), but the verb will reveal the gender, anyway. I suspect it could be the same thing in English, so you don't really solve anything. Instead of pronouns, the offending parts of the sentences are the verbs (which are innocent in English, to compensate for the offending pronouns). ;-)

Are "gender-sensitive" pronouns more offensive than "gender-sensitive" verbs? If so, what's the explanation of such a conclusion? ;-)

Luboš Motl (not verified) | 06/09/09 | 13:12 PM

Dear all,

I see that this thread has developed a life of its own. I do not want to interfere, and only point out that I feel unequipped to discuss the matter you have ended up taking on -which is quite interesting by the way.
I can only say I thank everybody who is contributing here.

Cheers,
T.

Tommaso Dorigo | 06/09/09 | 13:15 PM

Yes, sexism in Italy is terrible. I remember a few years ago there was this Italian physicist who talked about Lisa Randall in a most....... oops.

Anonymous (not verified) | 06/09/09 | 20:13 PM

Dear Anon, I had a very nice dinner with Lisa Randall two weeks ago,
and we laughed at the bigots who enacted the reaction you are
mentioning.

Anyways, a most what ? Please continue the sentence - I mentioned the fact above in the comments thread, which you have probably skipped - I do not blame you, this thread has diverged a bit too much even for my own taste.

Cheers,
T.

Tommaso Dorigo | 06/10/09 | 04:34 AM

Hi Lubos, in answer to your question, conjugation in all Romance languages I know a little bit is person-, number-, and tense-specific, but gender-independent.

But there may well be some in which conjugation is also gender specific, just like there is at least one Romance language (French) in which there is no tacit subject. Thence the famous sexism of the French... :)

Anonymous (not verified) | 06/10/09 | 12:15 PM

Thanks, that's very interesting. I would love to see the first moments when Skavic languages were separating from the Romance languages etc. - when kids were "kakal" and "kakala" depending on the gender. ;-) This had to be quite a change to suddenly treat boys' and girls' poos differently, or - on the contrary - equally, depending on what was the rule of the previous common language. ;-)

In Slavic languages, it simply looks hard to imagine that the verbs related to "him" or "her" would never reveal the gender.

Luboš Motl (not verified) | 06/10/09 | 13:39 PM

Luboš,

There is a book Russian and the Slavonic languages / by W.J. Entwistle and W.A. Morison, which I read some time ago, and from this it appears that the past verb form which inflects for gender is in fact derived from a participial adjective. (I think these also inflected for gender in Latin.) It also postulates, or derives from ancient literature, a form where "the good woman" would be Dobra ja žena, with the ja being an article in the middle, which has now grafted itself onto the adjective in Russian.

The book covers the known history of the Slavonic languages from the present to way back when. It is one of the Great Languages Series, of which I have read most.

Link to the book, Alibris.

Robert H Olley | 06/10/09 | 14:02 PM

"Anyways, a most what ? Please continue the sentence - "

I can't --- after reading all that stuff about Slavonic declensions and Romance transmogrifications I have forgotten what I was going to say......

"I mentioned the fact above in the comments thread, which you have probably skipped - I do not blame you, this thread has diverged a bit too much even for my own taste."

Oh no, I read every word of it. It's totally fascinating, almost as interesting as analysing my sensations while pulling all of the hairs out of my nose.

Anonymous (not verified) | 06/10/09 | 20:25 PM

It doesn't seem to be widely known, but there are many gender-neutral languages: georgian, farsi and all languages
of the turkic family (turkish, uzbek, kazakh, kirghiz, etc.)

I think it allows us to draw the conclusion that gender-neutrality of the language doesn't have a big impact on the equality
between sexes in society.

Martin Ouwehand (not verified) | 06/11/09 | 02:47 AM

Oh come on now. I'm a woman and I've always been annoyed by the hypocrisy lying in making a point of using both genders when speaking generally. If I were in a committee to decide about this disclaimer, I'd vote in favour of omitting it and just using "he" etc. And if there are homo/bi/transsexuals who can afford to put so much emphasis on this kind of stuff, they clearly belong to that small percentage who don't have to give a day-to-day struggle for their rights.
All this political correctness reminds me of medieval gallantry according to Umberto Eco; it's there only to prove the lack of real equality.

tulpoeid (not verified) | 06/13/09 | 07:51 AM

Now I disagree with that Tulpoeid. Different languages, as many pointed out in the thread above, have different ways to address the issue of gender equality in gender-generic speech; but there is an issue. I think we can shrug our shoulders about it only if we live in a non-discriminating society; but since the discrimination against women is becoming stronger -at least I feel it happening in Italy- one needs to be very careful not to lose ground.

Cheers,
T.

Tommaso Dorigo | 06/13/09 | 08:10 AM

Disclaimer: I'm sure to offend some but it's not personal.

A bit late, I apologize. Still, I wanted to throw my two cents in.

I'm an American woman. I'm not (have never) had a lasting impact of noticeable discrimination as such. My first language has never kept me from anything. Quite the extreme opposite.

Woman have evolved traits of manipulation. Perhaps its that child rearing thing. We tend to always be manipulating children into becoming adults. I try to remember to respect this gift and use it wisely.

This compulsion to flesh out all nuance of perceived discrimination is very telling. It's a desire to live in a hen pecked society or a corresponding response to being hen pecked.

If one is confronted with discrimination it hardly is reasonable to respond with discrimination.

Preferably, be happy and don't sweat the small to non-existent. At other times, she can lighten up and he can toughen up.

Kiss, kiss, hug.

Anna (not verified) | 09/12/09 | 21:26 PM

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