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Many words in the English vocabulary are of French origin, most coming from the Anglo-Norman spoken by the upper classes in England for several hundred years after the Norman Conquest, before the language settled into what became Modern English. English words of French origin, such as art, competition, force, money, and table are pronounced ...
LGBT+ rights advocates and feminists have argued in favour of the pronoun's use, arguing that it makes the language more inclusive and less sexist. [15] [16] [17] Some advocates have also raised concerns that lack of gender neutral options in French might force non-binary people to turn towards languages that do have more prominent gender neutral options instead, notably the English language.
During the 19th century, attempts to overlay Latin grammar rules onto English required the use of feminine endings in nouns ending with -ess. [13] This produced words like doctress and professoress and even lawyeress , [ 13 ] all of which have fallen out of use; though waitress , stewardess , and actress are in modern use.
The Oxford English Dictionary dates written examples of calling ships she to at least 1308 (in the Middle English period), in materials translated from French, which has grammatical gender. [19] One modern source claims that ships were treated as masculine in early English, and that this changed to feminine by the sixteenth century.
Some languages without noun class may have noun classifiers instead. This is common in East Asian languages.. American Sign Language; Bengali (Indo-European); Burmese; Modern written Chinese (Sino-Tibetan) has gendered pronouns introduced in the 1920s to accommodate the translation of Western literature (see Chinese pronouns), which do not appear in spoken Chinese.
A hendiadys is a phrase that contains two complementary words, and a gender-neutral hendiadys will include a feminine word and a masculine word, e.g. toutes et tous, citoyennes et citoyens. Within France, this gender-inclusive language has been met with some harsh resistance from the Académie Française and French conservatives .
Feminist language reform seeks to remove words like this because they help to sustain unhealthy gender norms. [20] Some modern feminists, like Sergio Bolaños Cuellar, argue that feminist language reforms need to reverse the generic masculine forms and create a generic feminine form with words like he or man being replaced with she or woman. [39]
A Chinese word is thus inherently gender-neutral, and any given word can be preceded by an morpheme indicating masculinity or femininity. For example, the word for "doctor" is yīshēng (Traditional: 醫生, Simplified: 医生). To specify the gender of the doctor, the speaker can add the morpheme for "male" or "female" to the front of it.