Re: Brit sociologits' banned words list

jerry_friedman@xxxxxxxxx <jerry_friedman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 25, 8:25?pm, Chris Malcolm <c...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Donna Richoux <t...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Young women growing up in the 1960s had to wonder whether "Early man
lived in caves" meant women, too, and whether "All men are created
equal" meant women, too, and whether they could become spacemen, or
firemen, or chairmen, and whether "I am master of my fate, I am captain
of my soul" was talking to everybody or just half of the audience. Every
darned time these sexist uses came up, the female half of the audience
had to wonder "Was that meant to apply to me, too?" The young men didn't
have to think twice, and tended to deny there was any problem.

This problem did not apply to young women who'd had a good classical
education involving Latin and the explicit distinction between "homo"
and "vir".

English has no such distinction. I don't see how the distinction in
Latin is supposed to help with English.

Because you can't translate from the Latin without being aware of the
distinction, and without being aware that although English doesn't
have specific words correspoing to "homo" and "vir" in Latin, English
uses the word "man" in two different senses corresponding to those
differences.

It shouldn't have applied to young women who'd been taught
English at school, but it was somewhere around that time that many
schools in Anglophone countries gave up the formal teaching of
English, allowing all kinds of uneducated nonsense to flourish
unchecked.

No amount of knowledge of English would have told a young woman
whether "All men are created equal" included her.

Because that's an isolated sentence taken out of context. What she
would have known is that such a sentence in complete isolation is
ambiguous and she couldn't possibly know whether it excluded or
included her without further information.

Were you thinking
that a well-educated person would have known it did or it didn't?

A well educated person would have known that this was one of English's
classic ambiguities which couldn't be resolved without further
information.

The
historical evidence suggests it didn't, since as far as I know the men
who adopted the Declaration of Independence didn't even consider the
possibility that women could vote.

You're quite right. It's also well known to have been the case that
some translators of Latin religious texts used an unqualified
inclusive generic "man" to translate a Latin "homo", and other later
more ignorant commentators assumed the "man" to be exclusive. I also
think it quite likely that some misogynists, who knew perfectly well
what they were doing, exploited the ambiguity in their general
campaign to keep women down. It's also the case that the ancient
Greeks whom we look back to as the inventors of democracy not only
excluded women and children but the great bulk of the men of their
society too.

Likewise no amount of knowledge of English would have helped her know
that there were chairwomen but, at the time, no firewomen (or few),
and no spacewomen in the free world.

You're quite right. Languages are spoken by people in a complex
context of circumstance, culture, and context. When the words of
people who made different natural default assumptions are interpreted
by a modern person without knowing that context it's very easy to make
mistakes, quite apart from the fact that the meanings of words change
over time. To interpret the language of past ages needs historical as
well as linguistic knowledge.

--
Chris Malcolm, IPAB, School of Informatics,
Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB


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