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From: acli@byron.net4.io.org (Ambrose Li)
Subject: Re: sexist language in German, Chinese and English
Message-ID: <Dy7MD1.2yy@byron.net4.io.org>
Organization: somewhere in Scarborough, Canada running C News CR.E and some assorted hacks for NNTP (including a hacked nntpxmit derived from NNTP 1.5.12)
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 23:53:24 GMT
References: <324216F6.3DA@xtra.co.nz>
Lines: 45

On Thu, 19 Sep 1996 21:00:54 -0700, in article <324216F6.3DA@xtra.co.nz>, Peter D. Zohrab <zohrab@xtra.co.nz> wrote:
>4.	Sexist Language in Chinese
[...]
>In Chinese, occupational terms are mostly constructed by
>adding a gender-neutral suffix (such as "yuan", "ren", or
>"jia") onto the end of a word that names the activity or
>sphere that the job involves.  For example,
>
>
>ACTIVITY					OCCUPATION
>
>shou huo (sell goods)		shouhuoyuan (shop assistant)
>gong     (labour, industry)	gongren     (manual worker)
>zuo      (do, compose) 		zuojia      (author)
>
>
>If you want to specify the sex of the person concered, in
>Chinese, you actually have to add an extra word.

You can't blame the Chinese for this; you'll have to blame the Europeans.
Until very recently (the last 100 years or so), there is no such distinction.
This kind of distinction (and similar distinctions in pronouns that used to
be gender-neutral) are only introduced after the Chinese found that other
peoples are making the distinction.

Not to mention that

1  the "extra word" is really optional,

2  you can add an "extra word" to such nouns to indicate "male" (this
   is not really uncommon), and

3  a counterexample:

   "nurse" is expected to be female, unless an "extra word" is added
   to indicate male.

One counterexample is enough to defeat a theory.

Again (like someone else has said), good luck.

-- 
Ambrose Li ~{@h>tHY~} UW Math/CS '93 (uwuserid acli) WYK '86 (5A2)
Official email address: <URL:mailto:ai337@freenet.toronto.on.ca>
Personal home page: <URL:http://www.io.org/~acli/acli-index.html>
