Kate Wheeler has a little cartoon essay in the Washington Post (archived) in which she asks:
How does language interact with culture, or vice versa? How is one’s view on LGBTQIA rights affected by their mother tongue? What if a country doesn’t have a word for nonbinary? I formed hypotheses based on conversations with patient native speakers willing to answer my many questions, but found that my theories weren’t always correct.
Needless to say, she doesn’t solve these weighty questions, but I found her piece enjoyable and I hope you will too. I might not have posted it except that it won me over by 1) using a Georgian example (“ის არის ავად he/she/it is sick [no gender]”) and 2) actually citing a reference in a footnote, asterisk and all. She says “change in linguistic norms is a step toward gender equality,” and while I hope that can be the case, I won’t hold my breath for proof either in theory or on the ground. (Thanks, Bonnie!)
Nice of her to use Georgian as her example of genderless language rather than the more customary Hungarian. No doubt because (unlike Hungary) Georgia is famously more progressive than benighted backwaters like Italy on gender-identity issues?
Of course binary-gender-obsessed languages like most modern Romance ones are great for illustrating the seeming arbitrariness of gender assignment, which is a fairly modern or “progressive” take. Don’t think it makes sense that Italian has masculine spoons and feminine forks? In Spanish, it’s the other way around.
Separate question – I know that some Caucasian languages do have gender systems dividing nouns among two or four or five different buckets but based on an animacy hierarchy, so all human beings of whatever sex are the same “gender” (or “noun class” if you prefer). Is Georgian one of those, or is that a feature it has completely lost?
I wonder what languages Prewitt-Freilino et al actually investigated: the summaries talk of 111 countries, but I suspect the languages are the usual suspects. I can think of endless ways such a study could go wrong, but perhaps the researchers were canny enough to avoid some of them.
The WP article itself is pretty sensible, not least in implying that any relevant language aspects probably follow rather than cause attitude changes, and the actual differences may have more to do with how readily the language system lends itself to innovation in things like pronominal systems.
The take on the Italian gender system is unfortunately the usual anglocentric one. The Italians amongst us can say whether they perceive forks as at all female. As we’ve formerly agreed, it’s great pity that the labels “masculine” and “feminine” ever got attached to grammatical gender agreement classes in the first place, but it’s too late to do anything about it now.
(I do protest feebly about the inappropriateness of the term “gender” for sg/pl pairs of NIger-Congo noun classes in my Oti-Volta magnum opus, but then knuckle under and use it anyway: that ship has sailed too.)
Is Georgian one of those, or is that a feature it has completely lost?
No. That’s a a Northeast Caucasian thing (a family unrelated to the Kartvelian family to which Georgian belongs. ) NEC languages in fact consistently put male and female persons in different genders. Niger-Congo is pretty unusual in having exuberant “gender” systems in which sex is completely irrelevant, though as there are so many Niger-Congo languages, the family does a lot to redress the balance numerically.
The WP article itself is pretty sensible, not least in implying that any relevant language aspects probably follow rather than cause attitude changes, and the actual differences may have more to do with how readily the language system lends itself to innovation in things like pronominal systems.
Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised by that. Maybe journalism is emerging from the Dark Ages?
I agree with David E. that certain sorts of language changes are more empirically likely to be consequences than causes of attitude changes, but I’m not sure the article quite “implies” that given the “step toward” quote hat extracted. “X is a step toward Y” to me has an implicature of some assumed causal role of X in bringing about Y.
Finnish has no grammatical gender, but so many Finnish young people consume a steady diet of English-language media and internet content, that they too can get up in arms about pronouns and “misgendering” in English. Any discussion of the way people use their own language, these days has to consider that people are possibly also using a lot of English and taking sides in the anglosphere’s cultural polemics.
It was obviously sloppy of me to treat “Caucasian” languages as a lump, but this wiki thing can be read to suggest that Laz (a Kartvelian language) has traces of a vestigial noun-class system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laz_grammar#Nouns Or maybe that’s just a one-off feature that’s not the historical residue of anything more elaborate in Proto-Kartvelian or what have you?
Animate vs inanimate is very common as a bipartite “natural” gender system (Kusaal, having sensibly ditched grammatical gender, now works like that), but pretty rare as a “grammatical” gender system, i.e. a system in which you can’t just read off the gender of a noun from the real-world properties of its referent. Algonquian is the only example that springs to mind. Algonquian potatoes are animate (but cars are inanimate.)
I think that strictly speaking a language like Kusaal actually lacks gender in nouns altogether. Whether a pronoun referring to a noun is animate or inanimate depends on how the speaker is conceptualising the referent at that moment, and may not be a fixed thing. In the Kusaal translation of 1 Corithinthians 12, where body parts are represented as potentially speaking, they are referred to with animate pronouns.
There seem to be few languages that don’t make a distinction between “who?” and “what?”, but I think it is actually a mistake in analysis to take this as evidence that nouns themselves have a covert grammatical animate/inanimate gender distinction. It certainly is a mistake to do this in Kusaal; Laz, I know from nothing.
As counterexamples to gendered society ⇔ gendered language, Farsi and Icelandic come to mind.
[ETA: I think David E. edited his post to which I was replying while I was drafting, but I will let this stand anyway since I do think many people talk of Algonquin animate/inanimate gender as “natural”.]
Examples like Algonquin potatoes may show that it’s a “natural” system only within a particular cultural context and worldview, since perceptions of the animacy/inanimacy of potatoes are apparently not uniform cross-culturally. There’s some Algonquin language (this example is from my memory of Greville Corbett’s book just titled _Gender_ which I don’t have immediately to hand) where a particular fruit (the raspberry, I think?) is animate but other fruits including those a Western-educated botanist would think closely related are not, but that particular distinction is not found in all or most other Algonquin languages but seems to be a local quirk. Maybe the way in which one learns in childhood with that L1 that raspberries are animate but strawberries aren’t is similar to the way an Italian child learns that spoons are masc. but forks are fem.; maybe it’s different?
There’s an abstract by Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee in the latest ICHL (26), extending earlier ideas of hers, which suggest that the Semitic nominal feminine marker *-(a)t previously functioned as a singulative marker.
(I was waiting for a good topic to attach that to.)
Algonquian potatoes are animate: More detail please! Does this refer to the white potato, or some other kind of tuber that was eaten in North America, or both? And is it consistent between different Algonquian languages? Since the white potato Solanum tuberosum was domesticated in South America and not (as far as I can find out) cultivated in North America until Anglo colonists brought it, Algonquian words for it would have to be either loanwords or transferred usage from something else.
The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary includes opin, animate, glossed as ‘potato’ not further specified. It’s unsurprising to me that a word for a plant, esp. a food plant, would be animate — but from the same source, ode’imin ‘strawberry’ and manoomin ‘wild rice’ are inanimate. So there’s either some arbitrariness, or some not-obvious-to-us-WEIRDos conceptualization of animacy (as JWB was just saying).
“Georgian language has no gender prejudice, get it out of your head! – This is the key message of UN Women Georgia’s new social campaign focused on promoting gender equality and empowering women through sport.”
The first link in Google (Georgian gender).
PS And an excerpt from boogle gooks:
“The energetic eleventh- and twelfth-century Georgian translators of Greek patristic texts occasionally remarked on differences between their language and Greek (Sardžveladze 1983), in particular on the absence of grammatical gender in Georgian (Ephrem Mcire went so far as to attempt to create distinct feminine forms for Georgian).”
@JWB:
[I did indeed write the stuff about Kusaal before your now-preceding post appeared, by the miracle of Hattic time travel, but left it in place as it accidentally seemed relevant. Accidental relevance is all I can aspire to …]
Algonquian knees are animate, but elbows are inanimate. It’s not a “natural” gender system.
I have read some rants by actual speakers of Algonquian languages making the very point you mention: that the idea that it is a grammatical gender system is a wicked Western misapprehension, and it’s all in the Culture, man. Somehow, the issue seems to have got politicised: presumably this is a step further along the path of regarding your mother tongue as your inalienable intellectual property to regarding all analyses of your language by outsiders that don’t match your own superficial impressions of its structure as illegitimate.
One not-unhinged rant, by an actually quite sophisticated speaker, pointed out that normally-inanimate nouns can get treated as grammatically animate in stories etc (rather along the lines of my Kusaal example above.) That’s a good point, but even to describe the phenomenon, you have to be able to say that this a deviation from a usage that has to be described in terms of grammatical gender.
“How is one’s view on [X] affected by their mother tongue?”
(for any X, obviously)
I’m glad that someone is actually asking this question. Or well, some question.
This is what I always thought is the reason behind all the reforms. Alas, to my horror instead of naïve people who would theorise that a form X makes people Y have, say, lower self-esteem without testing the hypothesis – which is naïve, it is always easy to come up with a hypothesis (with a pair of mutually exclusive hypotheses, if you like) that some form has some effect – I see activists who just declare various X offensive.
@David E.: I recall some prior posts of yours about Bible translation into Kusaal about the challenge of finding words for e.g. ψυχή and πνεῦμα, because of differences of cultural worldview and (IIRC, which I may not) the difficulty that the closest thingamabob in the Kusaal lexicon was also typically possessed by trees. If you grow up thinking of trees as animate (or presumptively animate, modulo some specific discourse context where they aren’t), then treating them as such grammatically in a language where the animate/inanimate distinction has morphosyntactic relevance seems like “natural gender” rather than “grammatical gender,” as long as we keep in mind that “natural” does not actually mean “flowing unmediated by culture from Capital-N Nature Herself.” Or, um, Whateverself.
This grammatical/natural thing is not really an absolute dichotomy, but a cline, of course.
There seem to be no languages with grammatical gender which is completely divorced from meaning, and languages with natural gender can have systematic exceptions to normal usage which need to be learnt as “grammatical” rules, like English “she” for ships.
L1 speakers tend to overestimate the “naturalness” of their gender systems; they inevitably seem more “natural” to somebody who has grown up with them. There’s quite a cottage industry of papers by L1 speakers of Bantu languages which overstate the (real but unreliable) semantic associations of the noun classes. It’s a case where L1 speakers’ insights are actually particularly likely to be wrong.
Does this refer to the white potato, or some other kind of tuber that was eaten in North America, or both?
I think the original referent of this family of Algonquian words (PA *oxpenya, *wexpenya?), is Apios americana. See for example here, here, here, and Siebert, page 301 (*xp, no. 1) here.
The topic has come up before (here) on LH.
Short comment because I am on the road. Maybe someone else can find some better links.
There’s an abstract by Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee in the latest ICHL (26), extending earlier ideas of hers, which suggest that the Semitic nominal feminine marker *-(a)t previously functioned as a singulative marker.a
I attended that. Ingenious, but I’m not convinced. For one thing, feminine singular *-t is shared with Berber and Egyptian, so I’d want to reconstruct it for well before proto-Semitic. For another, it matches suspiciously well with 3fsg *t- in the prefix conjugation of verbs, which really is proto-Afroasiatic. Still, Cushitic has some singulative t-suffixes, so maybe that function is even older than feminine marking.
Lameen, did anyone raise the AA argument in the question period after the talk?
It could also be that we are dealing with one, two, or three unrelated morphemes (nominal and verbal f., plus singulative), which happen to be the same single commonplace consonant. I should take a look at her papers.
I did; her reply was that, while she agrees that these -t’s are probably cognate, she doesn’t think they necessarily originally had the function of marking feminine gender either.
She has a paper in ZDMG making the case that proto-Semitic didn’t mark gender on nouns yet; that seems to outline an important part of her argument.
@JWB:
Trees are indeed traditionally regarded as animate in the Kusaasi worldview, and pronouns reflect this; in this particular case, you’d have to say that this is not actually a grammatical matter at all.
The word you’re remembering is win, for which I think the best rendering is something like “spiritual individuality.” In the case of people, it’s definitely the nearest thing in the traditional worldview to “soul”: it’s what makes you, you.
It was not available for “soul” to the Bible translators, partly because (I think because of misunderstanding of traditional culture/religion) it had been taken to mean (pagan) “god”; so siig “life force” was press-ganged into that role instead.
To be fair, there are other problems with using win for “soul”: in particular, everything has a win, and not only animates like animals and trees but inanimates, notably places. Latin “genius” is a better fit than “god” or “soul”, really. In the traditional “animist” worldview that’s not a problem, of course, but you can see why Christian missionaries would be unhappy with a choice that seems to imply that everything has a “soul.” And it’s really only the wina of people that are much like the European idea of “soul.”
To make life even more complex, the Creator is also traditionally called Win (e.g. in greetings and proverbs.) The translators dodged that one by importing the neologism Wina’am for “God”, which proclaims its foreignness by being phonologically and morphologically impossible for a home-grown Agolle Kusaal word.
the abstract
2014, part I jstor
sci-hub.
both parts academia
2014, part II jstor
sci-hub
Some Slavic languages (and it seems some very modern Russian feminists – they did not do it a few years ago) use -ka to feminize professions. Russian uses many suffixes for this (-ka usually is added to -ist), which changes nothing. What we do NOT do or consider doing is just adding -a:
German (sic) Regisseur > Russian rezhissyor, colloquial for females specifically rezhissyorsha, very-modern for females specifically rezhissyorka, but not *rezhissyora.
(Latvian, conversely, systematicall adds -a to surnames of foreign women)
PS -ka is not singulative specifically, though it can be used this way among other (like diminution – also the case with AA t) things: trava “grass”, trav-in-ka “a single blade of grass”. I think -in- here is singulative suffix proper (though also can form abstract and mass nouns), *travina must occur in children language for particularly large blades.
-ka is just a feminine nominal suffix that says “its a feminine countable noun”, and some other things too.
But there is apparently an overlap.
>the actual differences may have more to do with how readily the language system lends itself to innovation in things like pronominal systems.
Like Hat, I was happy to see that. I initially had trouble even making sense of the clip Hat posted:
>How does language interact with culture, or vice versa? How is one’s view on LGBTQIA rights affected by their mother tongue? What if a country doesn’t have a word for nonbinary?
I wondered what she meant by no word for nonbinary. In the definition meant, English didn’t have a word for nonbinary before [insert accurate date; in my experience, maybe 2013 but when was it really first used? 2000? 1967?] Could she mean languages with no words for the concepts of duality and non-duality? Could such a language exist?
Or are there languages that have always had words for gender-nonbinary, and she was including English in the no-word-for-nonbinary class because we didn’t have one a generation or two ago?
My general epistemology would dictate that concepts are always available, in any language, but that coinage of a word helps immensely with proliferation. But I think conscious adoption is different from what she’s getting at — the possibility that unconscious predilections are driven by linguistic features.
It seems to be generally accepted that the agreeable Hausa habit of ending (almost) all feminine nouns with -a is a secondary development, and that proto-Chadic nouns had no overt gender marking (they did have grammatical gender, masculine/feminine: it’s just that you couldn’t deduce it from the form of the noun at all.)
Chinese, too.
That’s actually interesting, because it’s also been proposed that the Indo-Tocharian feminine marker *-h₂ is the same as the Indo-Anatolian possibly vaguely individuating marker *-h₂ (e.g. in Latin masculines like -cola and nauta, Greek -ης, and a few Anatolian examples likewise denoting men) rather than, as seemed obvious but couldn’t be made to make semantic sense, the Indo-Anatolian set plural marker *-h₂ ( < neuter plural). Unfortunately, the difference in meaning between individuating *-h₂ and individuating *-n- (the *n stems) is wholly unclear, and so is the question of whether the other Indo-Tocharian feminine suffix, *-ih₂, contains this *-h₂ (from *i-stem adjectives perhaps) or not. It is also the case that *h₂ was a pretty common consonant – but there is a bit of evidence that it has two or more separate origins: it corresponds to both *k and *š in Proto-Uralic, so if at least some of these correspondences are cognates or at least sufficiently early loans, we could be looking at **q > **χ and **ʂ > **x, followed by a practically inevitable merger of **x into **χ.
(Phonemic distinctions of /x/ from /χ/ are more or less limited to languages with very large consonant systems, i.e. in the Caucasus and the Pacific Northwest.)
How similar is this to the feminine trees in Latin? (Most of them o-stems in -us, so they look masculine but aren’t. Schoolbooks waffle about fertility and dryads.)
Genius loci?
Pirahã, the One-or-Very-Few Unexpected Language.
As counterexamples to gendered society ⇔ gendered language, Farsi and Icelandic come to mind.
Nobody’s saying that gendered society ⇔ gendered language; that would be ridiculous, not least because there are no ungendered societies. The question is whether a certain kind of language system might make it easier to reduce gender bias in society at large.
@ David Eddyshaw:
With the statistically decisive sample size of one Italian, I don’t perceive forks as gendered in any way. However, that seems pretty specific to inanimate objects.
The Italian grammatical gender of abstract nouns lending themselves to personification is almost always feminine, and all those personifications (and Roman goddesses) happen to be female too: fortune, justice, liberty, peace, truth, victory … But love and time are masculine words, and have male personifications. Coincidence?
Likewise, Death is almost always a female character in Italy, France, Spain and Portugal (cf. Saramago; I have no idea about Romania). It seems to be typically male in countries speaking Germanic languages, including English. Then again, Guthke (1999) has a whole book on The Gender of Death, whose blurb reports that it “often contradict[s] the grammatical gender of the word ‘death’ in the language concerned.”
Whether it explains or not all those female personifications, the fact that qualities are overwhelmingly feminine nouns in Italian leads Italian grammar into an interesting tight spot. Honorific styles are all feminine too: Your Eminence/Excellency/Grace/Highness/Holiness/Lordship/Majesty … As a result, so is the mere courtesy pronoun Lei. When addressing a male, there has always been fluctuation between agreement with grammatical gender or with natural gender.
It’s hard to have a sense of which agreement is now most used with honorific styles, which are hardly used any longer. A formal official invitation will certainly say: “La S.V. è invitata” (“Your Lordship is invited,” but such is honorific inflation in Italian that any commoner deserving such a pompous invitation is self-evidently Signoria Vostra) and not invitato. Pink slips in the Roman Curia have been reported as reading: “Vostra Eminenza è sollevata da questo oneroso incarico” (“Your Eminence is relieved of this burdensome appointment”).
With mere Lei one generally has female pronouns only, but I also retain feminine agreement of past participles following a weak object pronoun: whether I’m addressing a man or a woman, “I would have called you tomorrow” is “l’avrei chiamata domani” and not “l’avrei chiamato domani”.
Is this the shining path that will lead Italy to the vanguard of gender equity when politeness requires universal second-person feminine gender agreement?
Sure, I was speaking in abbreviations. My point is, especially, that Iceland has been relatively very gender-equal for a long time, without the benefit of a genderless language, and that Iran, unburdened by linguistic gender, needs unrelated strategies to let women live as freely as men.
Lei
All Jarawara personal pronouns take feminine agreement, regardless of the sex of the referent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad%C3%AD_language#Gender
How similar is this to the feminine trees in Latin?
I don’t think there’s any idea of trees being male/female, though as that wouldn’t be reflected in the language any way it’s difficult to be categorical. (Even basic family relationship words are often gender-neutral in Kusaal.)
Trees often seem to be treated as a morphosyntactically distinctive group cross-linguistically. A natural kind.
In proto-Oti-Volta, there was an entire “gender” of which trees were the prototypical members, along always with “bow/war” and “porridge” (no, I don’t know what it is about bows and porridge) and many deverbal action nouns. In Western Oti-Volta (apart from Boulba) all the words referring to trees, but no others, have been transferred over to the “child” gender; this has also happened in Moba, which participates in a number of areal changes with its WOV neighbours, but also, much more surprisingly, in Byali, which is only remotedly related to WOV within Oti-Volta and spoken way over in Benin. It’s tempting to attribute this to some sort of personification (or “animatisation”, or something) relating to the traditional cultural take on trees.
In Bantu, trees usually belong to the Bleek/Meinhof 3/4 gender: the cognate Oti-Volta gender doesn’t contain tree names, but is quite strongly associated with “long thin things” (as is Bleek-Meinhof 3/4), which I suppose is close enough. I presume that the speakers of proto-Bantu were less enthusiastic about trees than the savanna-dwelling proto-Oti-Volta lot. I dare say you get sick of trees after a bit while migrating through the rain forest.
“The question is whether a certain kind of language system might make it easier to reduce gender bias in society at large.”
I definitely support research of any possible ways language affects our attitudes.
I’m not sure I like your wording. I can support changing our ways when some causal relationship is found (and I would support more radical reforms than anything I heard discussed, just not in language), but “would be easier” (as applied to gender) is different.
It is when someone has a plan – and evaluates various aspects the world from the position “is it a hindrance or help in implementing it?” If the earth were flat, it would be easier for me to bake pancakes, but it is good that I can’t flatten the Earth.
I am hostile to the idea of treating language like a tool. I’m thoroughly fed up with “let’s defeat inequality by forcing people to look and behave identically” (common in context of school: think about arguments for banning hijabs… or even for enforcing them). And words “make it easier to reduce” (with implied: “no gender distinction makes it easier to reduce the bias”) are reminiscent of this logic. I have seen enough ugly things that were supposed to make beautiful things “easier to” achieve and gender prejudice itself is one such thing.
Surely language is a tool? Other things too, maybe, but certainly a tool. It is distinctive above all among tools for its great flexibility and malleability. Swiss Army knives, nothing.
There’s nothing bad about that: it’s a question of what you mean to do with the tool.
I doubt whether attempts to change behaviour by changing language alone are really feasible: what’s really going on is that the language reflects the changes that people are attempting to achieve by all kinds of other means as well. If the language didn’t reflect that in some way, it would be dead.
I’m thoroughly fed up with “let’s defeat inequality by forcing people to look and behave identically”
Good lord, I have no interest in forcing people to do anything at all.
@DE … completely divorced from meaning … need to be learnt as “grammatical” rules, like English “she” for ships.
Ships (I mean the wooden ones with canvas sails) are clearly animate: they creak, they groan, they buck and swerve, they’re cantankerous and moody. The only question is which gender? And in the mentality of (male) sailors before these enlightened times, I don’t think there’s any doubt. OTOH genderising motorised ships — or road vehicles — by some sort of analogy is highly dubious.
Accidental relevance is all I can aspire to …
And so we all. Thank you. And more accidentalism please!
When such change is enforced angrily or prematurely treated as if everyone is saying it this way and you’re out of it if you don’t, can prompt reactions like Drasvi’s. A lot of people rolll their eyes at Latinx or laugh, and some get upset. Sometimes these efforts are forced and awkward. I’m not a fan of singular they because I think it sounds awkward and clouds a distinction that is present in most languages — between singular and plural. I get there are reasons for figuring out a way to express the concept. I even played with using singular verb agreement with singular they once or twice but instead of sounding cutting edge it made me sound like a white guy failing in an attempt to speak AAVE.
I suspect that men spending years at sea are apt to think of something they lavish care of as a she.
The take on the Italian gender system is unfortunately the usual anglocentric one.
Above all, pronouns are the last thing that matters in Italian, because they’re barely used. As someone who hangs out with a lot of Italian translators, editors, and so on – the vast majority of whom are women, because translation in particular is a very gendered profession here – I can assure Wheeler that endings are a big issue among people who work in publishing. But when those endings refer to people, of course, not to forks. I would say that the three major questions are: whether to use female forms for women holding certain jobs (medico, avvocato, architetto, ecc.) and what forms to use; what ending to use for non-binary people or for someone of unknown gender (* and ə are fairly common online at this point, but not in print or speech); and the related question of what ending to use for mixed-gender groups (the usual overextended masculine, or masculine-plus-feminine, or one of the options I just mentioned).
When it comes to female professions, translators have often been early adopters because you quickly see the logic of them when you’re dealing, say, with a crime novel full of female judges, police commissioners, lawyers, etc. Although dialogue has to remain realistic, of course, and in some spheres that continue to be overwhelmingly male, women are sometimes the first to insist on the masculine term because they see it as conveying gravitas. Still, habit is everything, and now that many newspapers have started to use “sindaca” and “ministra,” they no longer look so weird to the general public.
The second problem is much harder to solve. Asterisks are, of course, not pronounceable, and although the sociolinguist who brought the schwa proposal to public attention insists that it’s easy to say – just ask any Neapolitan! – a lot of non-Neapolitans beg to differ. I know people who use it all the time online and others who are sympathetic to the idea but would feel silly, and it looks to me like their embarrassment is largely a generational thing. Of course, many don’t even take it into consideration because they don’t believe that the problem exists.
As for the third issue, I’ve seen a major shift in the last fifteen years when it comes to discomfort with the overextended masculine. It’s increasingly avoided, especially in direct address and in institutional settings. A translators’ group I belong to has even experimented with the overextended feminine, given that membership is 90% female! But that’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, an intentional provocation that definitely succeeded in getting a few male goats. In general, one tends to see “un saluto ai nostri amici e alle nostre amiche,” “gli allievi e le allieve,” that sort of thing. I can’t say I’m fond of it, because it’s clunky and underscores the binary language, but as an L2 speaker I’m not going to be the one solving any of this. And I have to say I occasionally wish I could fast-forward to the point where everyone’s made up their minds.
The weirdest statement in her article has to be this: “In fact, natural gender language countries like English actually show the highest correlation with gender equity.”
I assume she meant countries where English is a de jure official language. But I am guessing whatever studies came up with this correlation ignored Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Jamaica, Kenya etc.
@Giacomo Ponzetto,
Death is also a female character in Romanian (specifically an old woman), although death is not that commonly mentioned in traditional Romanian culture, almost never directly by name. It’s very likely one of those name avoiding strategy for bad things.
Abstract nouns are never construed as animate in Kusaal, though the matter is slightly complicated by the fact that the distinction seems to be in the process of breaking down. When not thinking about it, people often use animate pronouns for inanimate in informal speech (if you ask them to repeat, they “correct” the pronouns to inanimate without noticing that they’ve done it.) Only “it” as a dummy subject (“it’s hot”, “it’s necessary” etc) remains consistently inanimate. A grammar of Agolle Kusaal by a L1 speaker manages to miss the fact that there even is an inanimate third person singular object pronoun “it”, though this may be more because it’s normally ellipted after verbs which are obligatorily transitive, so actual appearances are quite rare.
But I am guessing whatever studies came up with this correlation ignored Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Jamaica, Kenya etc.
Yes, the paper she references is paywalled and the summaries contain no useful information. They mention “111 countries”, which suggests that Ghana etc were counted: this in turn suggests, however, that the paper may have been working with a concept of language and nation so unsophisticated as to make their conclusions worthless. But perhaps I am doing them an injustice; I hope so.
All of the (forty-plus) indigenous languages of Ghana make no grammatical distinction at all between male and female. This carries over into local English, in which “he” and “she” are often in free variation. It probably reveals a lot about my own cultural preconceptions that I found “she” for males much more discombobulating than “he” for females.
Ghanaian Hausa is gender-free too, unlike most Nigerian L1 Hausa.
Sigh.
If you want to know whether lack of a masculine/feminine gender distinction makes it easier to reduce gender inequality or not, just have a look at the comparative history of neighboring/culturally similar societies where languages with and without a masculine/feminine gender system exist: Estonia versus Latvia (comparable size, similar histories, Lutheran Protestant societies, but Estonian has never had a masculine/feminine gender system whereas in Latvian it goes back to late Indo-European); Hungarian speakers in central Europe and their Slavic-, Romanian-, and (Bavarian) German-speaking neighbors (Again, the former language has never had a masculine/feminine gender system, the latter ones all have such a system and have had it since late Indo-European times); or Basque speakers and their Romance-speaking neighbors (No ancient religious divide, the former has lacked a grammaticized gender-marking system, and the latter languages have had one, for as long as they have been in contact, i.e. two thousand years).
If, as I strongly suspect, there is no credible evidence in any of these three case studies for Basque-, Hungarian- and Estonian-speaking as having ever had greater gender equality than their neighbors, then the conclusion should be that language structure has no impact upon gender relations within a given society.
@Vanya: separately, the idea that a “natural gender language” would for that reason be *more* conducive to gender equality or whatnot than a genderless language is counterintuitive to the point of being bonkers, and thus tends to confirm that non-linguistic cultural/historical factors are of sufficiently greater magnitude than the impact of morphosyntax that any attempt to correlate grammar with that sort of thing is unlikely to yield meaningful results unless you somehow manage to statistically control for all of those other variables.
As to the point re “flexibility,” it is not at all inconsistent with a “natural gender” system for human occupation titles to be mandatorily gendered, with one word for male practitioners of the occupation and another for female practitioners. That English happens to have both lots of epicene job titles and some pairs of gendered job titles and also has the “flexibility” to shift from one approach to the other for a given occupation is an additional feature that does not inevitably flow from “natural gender.”
EDITED TO ADD: Consider also how English traditionally deals with “natural gender” in common largeish and/or domesticated animals: plenty of examples of trios like sheep/ram/ewe, deer/buck/doe, or chicken/rooster/hen where gendered terms coexist with an epicene term embracing both, with the epicene term equally usable when: a) the word is used in the plural for a mixed-sex group; b) the sex of the specific animal is unknown to the speaker; or c) the sex of the specific animal is known to the speaker but not thought salient in context. Again, flexibility.
“Surely language is a tool? Other things too, maybe, but certainly a tool. ”
DE, yes, the formulation was not good. But well, is not the world a tool? We use it.
I’m hostile to subordination of language to a specific plan. LH wrote:
‘“change in linguistic norms is a step toward gender equality,” and while I hope that can be the case‘
I do not hope that language shapes my thinking in matters of gender. LH does.
I do not hope that language shapes my thinking in matters of gender. LH does.
That is a false and rather odd reading of what I wrote.
the idea that a “natural gender language” would for that reason be *more* conducive to gender equality or whatnot than a genderless language is counterintuitive to the point of being bonkers
Not so counterintuitive if one supposes that the language change is predominantly the result, rather than the cause, of the broader attitude changes, which is what I (perhaps overgenerously) took TFA to be implying.
It easier to tweak the sex-referring aspects of your language when they’re not also part of a whole ramifying system of otherwise “grammatical” gender that pervades the whole language, both because it involves more limited formal changes and conceptually, because you’re used to, and conscious of, the sex-referring aspects of the system being quite separate from everything else in the grammar.
However, if the language doesn’t mark any sex distinctions grammatically anyway, you wouldn’t actually have any way of telling from the grammar alone that the speakers were so enlightened in these matters that they had changed their whole way of talking about them.
So the (obvious, grammatical as opposed to lexical) language changes would only be visible in a language like English, and if you mistake cause and effect, as these papers are practically set up to do, you will be able to prove rigorously, in the best Bayesian manner, that languages like English are more “conducive” to gender equality than languages like Kusaal or Persian.
It would be interesting to see the actual Prewitt-Freilino paper: it’s possible that the authors were actually aware of all the methodological landmines they were endangered by and took appropriate (very careful) steps. Just because most papers purporting to find correlations between grammar (in the narrow sense) and culture are bollocks, it doesn’t mean that they have to be.
I’m hostile to subordination of language to a specific plan.
Nobody is talking about “subordination of language to a specific plan”; you made that up and are now obsessing about it. It is a theoretical question about how language interacts with culture: does the presence or absence of gender in a language have any effect on how the related culture treats gender? It is an interesting question that has nothing to do with your imagined inquisitions and indoctrinations.
Oy.
I found the paper (doi 10.1007/s11199-011-0083-5). They started with 134 countries from the 2009 World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, for each one looked up the predominant language in the 2010 Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Factbook, and omitted ones where the predominant language accounted for less than 70% of the population. In their table of the remaining 111, they don’t bother to list the languages, only their characterization as gendered/genderless/neutral (based on Ethnologue and on Hellinger & Bußmann’s Gender across languages). The “natural gender” countries are few: Anglophone (Australia, Bahamas, Barbados, Gambia, Guyana [?], Jamaica, USA; Canada not listed), and Scandinavia. The gendered ones include Saudi Arabia and Germany. The genderless ones include Brunei and Finland.
The statistics show—are you ready?—that for the economic participation index (the variable with the most spread) the gendered countries have a score of .59 (out of 1.00), genderless have 0.71, and natural gender have 0.68 (that is with covariates. Without shows a simiar pattern.)
Face slap emoji.
I’m also not sure that “economic participation index” is a very reliable metric when applied to countries with radically dissimilar economies, levels of material development, etc. It probably works best for countries where very few people “work” outside the formal cash economy (and thus lack quantifiable “wages” etc.) and even then it systematically ignores household production. It probably works poorly for countries where many people still strive to live lives that are “illegible” (in James Scott’s terminology) to the bureaucrats, tax collectors, and statisticians.
I’m actually surprised that 111 of the world’s 134 countries are said to possess a language spoken by at least 70% of the population. I suspect that this figure could do with being broken down a bit …
Start with Eurocentric assumptions, find European-like data …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_Gambia
So because “English is the official language” the fact that most Gambians have L1s in which sex is irrelevant to any noun classification (Pulaar) or absent altogether as a grammatical feature (Mandinka), the Gambia is a “natural gender country.” Pitiful stuff.
But do they have a “future”? Can they plan for tomorrow? (I’ve forgotten which way round that other piece of pseudoscientific drivel was supposed to work. Did having a “future tense” make you more or less Protestant-work-ethic-y?)
There are a lot more than 134 “countries” in the world even without getting into debates about semi-autonomous things like the Faroe Islands or de facto entities like Taiwan or Northern Cyprus or what have you. The United Nations, for example, has 193 “Member States.” Whether they cut 60 or so in getting down to 134 because they couldn’t get good enough data or because the excluded polities fell below some sort of minimum population threshold or what is not clear to me – maybe it’s explained in the paper.
Oy indeed. It sounds like they (unsurprisingly) did a slapdash job. This sort of topic certainly seems to cause people to forget everything they ever learned about scientific procedures…
So, sadly, the Revolution will not, after all, be achieved simply by speaking English or Danish and using the correct pronouns.
I must say that I am both surprised and disappointed. They got my hopes up, there.
Economic participation among genderless,
Mongolia: .83
Mozambique: .81
Uzbekistan .77
“That is a false and rather odd reading of what I wrote.”
LH, I know that that is false. I do not think that you hope for this.
But it is what you wrote. I think I merely reformulated it.
Less, because German “does not have a future tense” for a rather specific value of “having a future tense” but English does.
“It is a theoretical question about how language interacts with culture: does the presence or absence of gender in a language have any effect on how the related culture treats gender? ”
No, the question whether a certain kind of language system might make it easier to reduce gender bias is NOT a theoretical question.
“Easeir to” is not theoretical.
Oh, and the UK is not on the list either, for some reason .
The covariates considered are geographical regions, religion, human development index, and system of government.
For Gambia (Zimbabwe, too), I assume the “major language” is English, but I didn’t check the CIA book to make sure, and I am not going to, because this is just stupid.
@Biscia:
Nor do I expect L1 speakers to within my lifetime, but time will tell.
Someone in Spain appears to have recently hit upon the useful realization that absolutely everyone seems to be happy with long-standing epicene nouns so long as they’re grammatically feminine: “Un saluto a tutte le guardie, sentinelle e vedette …”
Unfortunately such universally pleasing words are few and far between. Fortunately they include a gem: persona. Nobody minds being reminded they’re a person, and not even the most reactionary male chauvinist minds having feminine agreement then.
This helpful realization opens up the sunny horizons of “Un saluto a tutte le persone cui ci legano i vincoli della solidarietà e dell’amicizia / che studiano ed hanno studiato in questo istituto / qui riunite / …” They easily tend to flowery rhetoric (or might it be that I do?) but on the whole I find them no clunkier than twice gendered reduplication, and at least they overcome binary language instead of gratingly underscoring it.
In Spanish political usage, I have the impression that los trabajadores (“the workers”) is being replaced not by las trabajadoras (goat-goading usage adopted by Podemos), not by l@s trabajador@s (unpronounceable and starting to look dated), nor even by las trabajadoras y los trabajadores (clunky and arguably divisive), but by las personas trabajadoras.
This may have the entertaining side effect of moving the political spectrum to the left socially (inclusive language and all that) and to the right economically, since the Socialist Party is officially moving from representing “Spanish workers” to representing “hard-working Spaniards.”
This sort of topic certainly seems to cause people to forget everything they ever learned about scientific procedures
All it takes to set a reviewer’s heart aflutter are the three most beautiful words in the world: “p”, “<“, “.001”.
Oh, and the UK is not on the list either, for some reason
Probably the fault of the Welsh. We don’t have a future tense, which is why Wales is so prosperous. Throws off the statistics.
(Unfortunately we do have grammatical gender*, but at least we distinguish male from female grammatically, so there is probably hope for our womenfolk.)
* Weather is feminine, but this is of course an instance of natural gender, as you would agree if you understood my culture.
>“Surely language is a tool? Other things too, maybe, but certainly a tool. ”
I suspect you guys mean somewhat different things by tool. Hat, I think you mean that language is a tool for communication, and that as new (or renewed) ideas like non-binary gender identity, people using that concept necessarily and inevitably create or repurpose words to express them. They need a word as a tool for communicating about the concept and about themselves. You see this, as I do, as natural and good, (though I sometimes feel people are using the wrong tool, the wrong word.)
Drasvi, I think you mean that some people try to leverage language as a tool in an attempt to change the way others think by pressing and even policing the use of certain terms. Terms which entered the discourse not through the natural upsurge of people in conversation with each other who needed a term, but rather by conscious political policy. The sudden replacement of terms like violence with gun violence and immigrants with migrants are examples that come to mind. I believe in gun control and would be fine with higher levels of immigration. Yet I still find this overnight change in language policy jarring and manipulative.
In a different way, I remember in the early 2000’s when I suddenly went from living in the US or the United States to living in “America”. The 9/11 “Attacks on America” seemed to change the way media spoke about the country, and I found this jarring and odd. I didn’t encounter the term America much in my daily life. We’d always been Americans, but it had been, and in colloquial use remained rare to refer to the country that way, but for nearly a decade the media spoke differently than normal people, and it seemed an attempt to enforce a certain reference on us, a certain way of looking at 9/11.
Weather is a bitch?
@dm
I think not promiscuity (more commonly associated with the male) but capricious changeability (more commonly associated with the female), is the personality trait here.
@Ryan, LH, I mean something different (and less brutal) than what LH believes I mean.
I mean starting with a Plan, and then treating something like langauge or language typology from this perspective: does it hinder or helps our efforts?
That’s, in my view, a cart before the horse.
But when LH says “I hope” I have no other explanation for this hope than that there is an ongoing lnaguage reform and LH wishes it success not only in changing language, but also in changing minds.
If “changing language” is the Best idea we have for achieving equality (definitely it is very prominent), I’m sorry. It does not look like the best idea possible at all, and I hope we can come up with many other ideas and plans.
“Makes it easier to” are words that imply evaluating langauage from the perspective: “does language help us in what we are doing?”
The proper thing to do in my view is studying langauge (and studying society and inequality too) and identifying issues. As for plans – as I said, we can invent many of them, and we can create many different types of society.
But when LH says “I hope” I have no other explanation for this hope than that there is an ongoing lnaguage reform and LH wishes it success not only in changing language, but also in changing minds.
Well, you need to work harder. Nothing of that is in what I said, it is all in your mind.
How in my mind?
“change in linguistic norms is a step toward gender equality,” and while I hope that can be the case is right here.
The “natural gender” countries are few: Anglophone (Australia, Bahamas, Barbados, Gambia, Guyana [?], Jamaica, USA; Canada not listed), and Scandinavia
In fact, Scandinavian languages have grammatical gender:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish
They have “natural gender” only for people. On the same basis, Swahili (and many other Bantu languages) have “natural gender” too (animacy trumps class-based agreement); Russian too, has “natural” gender based on animacy.
So the difference between (say) Danish and (say) French does not reside at all (well, apart from marginal cases like vedette) in the way that the languages allocate people to genders, but only in the way they treat nouns that do not refer to people. And this is supposed to correlate with how society treats women?
I’d say this was incoherent, but that would be an insult to honest incoherent people everywhere.
There’s a whole culture of this junk pseudolinguistic crap, it seems to me. The MO is pretty uniform: you take a big list of data, ignore the details of how the data was collected and any issues with how it has been categorised, and trawl for correlations with whatever is you own particular obsession or whatever seems likely to be publishable. If you can’t find a nice publishable “correlation” try a different set of data or a slightly different obsession. You will eventually succeed.
The reviewers will not understand the statistical tests you use (you probably don’t, either), and will probably not be aware of the way even statistically valid results can be completely meaningless because of the way you have set up your study and the way you have chosen (without explicit acknowledgment of the processes involved) your database and your criteria.
Then PROFIT!
I’d say this was incoherent, but that would be an insult to honest incoherent people everywhere.
Yes, I just now was tempted to insult such an honestly incoherent contributor. Then I thought no, there’s no point if the incoherence is honest.
To paraphrase Spinoza:
#
You’ve got to know when to hold ’em
Know when to fold ’em
Know when to walk away
And know when to run
You never count your money
When you’re sittin’ at the table
There’ll be time enough for countin’
When the dealin’s done
#
I just now was tempted to insult such an honestly incoherent contributor
You could have, Stu. I don’t hold grudges.
There’s a whole culture of this junk pseudolinguistic crap, it seems to me. The MO is pretty uniform: you take a big list of data, ignore the details of how the data was collected and any issues with how it has been categorised, and trawl for correlations with whatever is you own particular obsession or whatever seems likely to be publishable. If you can’t find a nice publishable “correlation” try a different set of data or a slightly different obsession. You will eventually succeed.
My outsider impression at this point – hopefully jaundiced rather than realistic – is that this MO is standard across vast swathes of psychology and economics, not to mention nutrition “science”, is more peripheral but gaining ground in linguistics, and is the most reliable way to get press coverage. If your data is so noisy that you need complicated statistics to spot the correlation, was it real in the first place?
Nice try, David. You want to tempt me into revealing who it was, by a process of gradual elimination starting with yourself. Well, in me old Sorites Sam has met his match.
If your data is so noisy that you need complicated statistics to spot the correlation, was it real in the first place?
I say no. A metastatistical analysis might bring more insight, things being as dire as they are regarding insight.
Somewhat to my surprise, “karma is a bitch” only has 0.708 Mghits. I suspect there are twice that many lightly disguised occurrences out there, though “karma is a b!tch” gets only 0.0109, and “karma is a b*tch” still just 0.0374.
The Italians amongst us can say whether they perceive forks as at all female.
Forks are feminine in German, too, and that at least influences how they are treated when they are personified: Herr Löffel und Frau Gabel.
One of their references is:
Wasserman, B. D., & Weseley, A. J. (2009). ¿Qué? Quoi? Do languages with grammatical gender promote sexist attitudes? Sex Roles, 61, 634–643. (link).
W&W asked students to complete a questionaire (questions like “In 2006, it is more difficult for women to get and keep a job than in past years.” * – the stronger you disagree, the less sexist you are) in one of three langauges – after having read an excerpt from or about Harry Potter in one of three languages – and concluded: “This study suggests that languages with grammatical gender promote sexist attitudes and have particular impact on females.”
Is this a joke?
(
Or am I again not working hard enough and the joke is in my mind?)___
*There is also a question “Women should not go where they are not wanted.” – whose wording indeed implies certain hostility to women.
Particularly the passive “not wanted” both implies a reference to the community/society and exclusion of women from it – even though the question itself is about segregation (which allows women-only spaces too).
Yours for only £29.95.
I wonder if Sex Roles would be interested in my paper Do serial verb constructions promote polygamy?
If they don’t bite, I also have a study confirming the overwhelmingly strong correlation between polygamy and doubly articulated stops.
In fact, I reckon I can come up with a whole series of these things. These folk who only think to look at European-style gender systems when rooting out linguistic sexism are (to be frank) displaying colonialist cultural bias. There is no place for such attitudes in modern academia. Anyone up for an open letter calling this out?
Is it not true that languages without gender promote asexuality?
Anyone up for an open letter calling this out?
You haven’t spent much time in that weedy field, have you? This is one of thousands of its ilk, which we heard about because it deals with language.
Even Nabokov gave up at some point on railing against Freudians, except for fun.
Even Nabokov gave up at some point on railing against Freudians, except for fun.
Same here! It gets tiring…
Speaking of fun, in countries where they speak ergative languages, worker productivity is higher.
Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?
@dm
Das Glück ist eine leichte Dirne…
https://de.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Das_Gl%C3%BCck_ist_eine_leichte_Dirne
People who speak agglutinating languages are more gregarious than those who speak isolating languages, and people who speak synthetic languages are less trustworthy.
Never buy a used car from a speaker of a polysynthetic language. (Especially not if you don’t want your car incorporated.)
People who speak tone languages are more high-class.
And those who speak guttural languages are more… well, I don’t want to open up an old dispute.
DE, is this a joke?
(this is)
Pehraps it is some sort of Bayesian reasoning. Bayes is conditional probability:I expect N. to be a man with a likelyhood 0.78, N. does something that women do 4 times more often then men, now how I should update my expectation? – the formula tells what to do with these two figures (0.78 and 4) and one observation.
But the reasoning itself is what people do all the time, it models rather well probabilistic problems that you encounter daily.
So in bayesian terms, one could say that these idiots have a strong a priori expectation that gendered languages may (50%) promote sexism so strongly that the signal will be detectable even in a single pair of langauges – in 80% of pairwise comparisons speakers of the gendered language will be more sexist or “sexist” – or, which is the same, there are not other factors that contribite more.
Again, it is just modelling of human reasoning, not the actual mess happening in human heads. Maybe not so good a model in this case.
Many 4-year-olds will be able to see the problem (or several of them, because there are others, e.g. their measure of sexism is indistinguishable from misanthropy* here and recembles a measure of agreement with a certain (feminist? Is there something feminist about jobs in 2006 compared to previous years?) narrative there) with their publication.
Perhaps I expect too much from publications in English, because Russian usually publish absolute crap in Russian.
___
* I mean, it is not all right to ask people questions like “aren’t many women bitches?”, “aren’t many women silly?”, “are some women promiscuous” etc., and then call the degree of agreement ‘sexism’.
@drasvi:
Yes. I did not mean to alarm you …
I am, in all seriousness, pretty certain that polygamy as a traditional cultural practice does indeed correlate quite well with speaking languages which have doubly-articulated stops, but I meant to deploy this presumed factoid to illustrate the elemental fatuity of papers like these. And the writers are so bad at it: if I ever turned to the dark side and decided to perpetrate such atrocities myself, I’d do it much better than they do. Most Hatters probably could. But we are too ethical …
And I actually do think that their approach is (ironically, given what I imagine their self-image is) definitely Eurocentric, though that is largely a matter of their being pig-ignorant about actual linguistics and ethnology.
However, I shall not in fact be soliciting signatures for an open letter …
Georgia, with mainly split-ergative languages, did have 10% economy growth last year…
(…due to sudden immigration from Russia.)
Quite so. Simply dividing the p-value threshold by the number of hypotheses you’re actually testing will take care of that, but that’s not widely known, it seems.
…
Nonononono, you can’t buy it. Das Glück ist ein Vogerl, a flighty little birdie, diminutive and therefore neuter.
The trick here is to find a polysynthetic language that does not incorporate. Navajo has had a full set of car terminology since the 1930s, taken from animal anatomy.
DE, yes, apart of making research of such questions* (which as I and LH both believe can and should be studied) impossible – I’m not claiming that no one will ever study them, but serious people won’t notice such studies – and destroying reputation of feminism, making the cause appear farcical and feminism aggressive to people from barbarian countries – such bullshit is absolutely harmless.
___
* I mean, the effect of language. I don’t mean grammatical gender specifically.
Are you now saying it’s immoral to make jokes?
Austronesian languages generally lack male vs. female pronouns, but quite a few have acquired them, thanks to the influence of their Papuan-speaking neighbors (Papuan = a catchall for not Austronesian). Some in New Britain even have different pronouns for married individuals (considered productive adults) vs. unmarried youths or even widows. Some Papuan languages even have noun-class gender a bit like Bantu languages.
Most Papuan languages lack the nearly pan-Austronesian inclusive vs. exclusive pronoun distinctions, but some have come up with ways to make the distinction, as their Austronesian-speaking neighbors do. In Tok Pisin, it’s exclusive mipela vs. inclusive yumi. (Some Papuan languages have created calques of ‘yumi’ or adapted their “emphatic” pronouns for that purpose.) Are people who make inclusive vs. exclusive distinctions in their pronouns supposed to be more inclusive or more exclusive than people who don’t?
Kinship terms are heavily keyed on whether relations cross sex categories. Same-sex siblings in some areas have birth-order names, while cross-sex siblings don’t. Parallel cousins (father’s brother’s or mother’s sister’s kids) are not marriageable and are ranked by the birth-order of their parents: whether elder or younger than one’s own father or mother. Cross-cousin relationships are considered the most free-and-easy (unranked by age). It’s hard to imagine how anyone nonbinary could find a place in such a system, beyond opting out and not talking to or about their closest relatives. In archaic Tok Pisin brata meant ‘same-sex sibling/parallel cousin’ while susa meant ‘cross-sex sibling/cross-cousin’ (male’s sister or female’s brother). Sista meant a nun.
@drasvi:
My beef with things like these papers (apart from the Bad Science itself) is that (insofar as they have any real-world effect at all) they actually undermine the struggle against the oppression of women. They don’t mean to, but they do, and in this context “good intentions” are not any kind of excuse. Nor is ignorance an excuse when you have the intelligence and opportunity to be properly informed if you want to be and can be bothered to be.
As I have often attempted to explain to both fellow-Socialists and (even more so) co-religionists, it is very damaging to push bad reasons in support of a true proposition. Quite apart from the way it rots your own brain, it gives aid and comfort to the enemy, who can then claim (or indeed believe) that you push bad reasons because you haven’t got any good ones.
In the present case, the more junk-science vaguely-feminist papers get churned out, the more ammunition it gives to the Jordan Petersons and similar fascist bozos that feminism and concern for justice in general are intellectually incoherent fantasies that proper grown-ups can mock and ignore.
That matters because although in a rational world the Jordan Petersons would be harmless laughing-stocks, in the world we actually live in, their ideas play a key role in legitimising the plutocrat strategy of getting people to vote for their shill parties by stoking xenophobia and bigotry.
The more crap pretend-scholarship the good guys nod through, the more effective we make these bastards’ efforts.
Kinship terms are heavily keyed on whether relations cross sex categories.
The Kusaal words for “sibling” work like that: bier “elder sibling of the same sex”, pitu “younger sibling of the same sex”, taun “sibling of opposite sex (regardless of seniority.)”
This was probably true of proto-Oti-Volta too, but it’s difficult to be sure: even closely related Oti-Volta languages often not only use unrelated words for even basic family relationships, but have entire systems that don’t correspond one-to-one. Part of this may be Muslim influence, but a lot of it is difficult to explain on any grounds.
The only family relationship words that I can reasonably confidently reconstruct to POV currently are “grandparent” (sex-neutral), “child”, “husband”, “mother’s brother” and “father’s sister”, along (probably) with “opposite-sex sibling.” It’s all very odd from a PIE or proto-Semitic standpoint.
DE: Very well put. And it’s not just that junk science gives ammunition to the enemy (and Peterson is an enemy): they use that ammunition, and then so do their foot soldiers.
Junk science, junk arguments, junk debates over junk issues. I’d take an honest opponent over a dishonest ally any day. When nobody knows anything but junk, science or religon or politics or whatever ceases to be real and meaningful and becomes junk TV — a reality show or a wrestling match — and you pick a team by the name or the color of the T-shirt or the sense of community, and you peddle junk for that team, and the more junk you peddle for your junk team, the more worthy you are as a member of your junk community.
Not to make a junk show of balance, but this is not an inherently Left/Right issue. It’s just that a certain brand of Cynic Conservatism was able to gain control of some unprecedentedly advanced mass media when the time was ripe for junk fear. There are certainly cultures on the left with the same honest contempt for informed opinion, and they have not always and everywhere been without power.
but this is not an inherently Left/Right issue
Indeed not. As I say, I have spent a lot of time trying to explain these things to my own side(s).
I’d take an honest opponent over a dishonest ally any day
A thing that political activists discover is that they often have more in common in many respects with activists from the opposing side than with Normal People, who can’t understand why any of us bother.
I remember campaigning with an MP (who was not given to only telling the electors what they wanted to hear, let’s say) who clearly enjoyed a good doorstep argument (we often had to backtrack to collect him and prise him away); the only thing that really pissed him off was young people who couldn’t be bothered to vote at all.
There used to be plenty of decent Tories, who might be wrong, but were at least honourably wrong (and even, on occasion, right.) There are few now, and I suspect things will get worse when they are in opposition. They are likely to go full-on fascist rather than repent and tack back to decency. The signs don’t look good.
“this is not an inherently Left/Right issue.”
Of course not, but I’m much more likely to criticise people who claim to have views similar to mine.
Also “progressive” ideologies are dominant.
When Christianity took power in Europe did everyone love her neighbour?
It seems to me worth explicitly separating the questions of whether simply having different styles of gender in language has an effect on gender in society, and whether consciously changing the way we use language in relation to gender can have an effect.
Everyone here seems rightly sceptical of the former, but when it comes to the latter language changes are one of many tools that people try to use to encourage their way of thinking. Having the ability to make a language change is far from necessary or sufficient for the wider changes to happen, but surely it’s a small part of the range of possibly mutually reinforcing tools, rather than only reflecting everything else that’s going on.
True.
In Spanish political usage
Meaning the political usage in Spain, or in Spanish/Castilian generally?
I have the impression that los trabajadores (“the workers”) is being replaced not by las trabajadoras (goat-goading usage adopted by Podemos), not by l@s trabajador@s (unpronounceable and starting to look dated),
Well, at least not lxs trabadorxs nor yet lxs trxbxjxdxrxs. (Pronounceability? What’s that?)
nor even by las trabajadoras y los trabajadores (clunky and arguably divisive)
And of course leading to the question of which is to be preferred, las t. y los t. or los t. y las t.
It’s understandable in the Romance languages, where masculine and feminine role markers are morphologically equal, that such paired constructions seem natural. But German, where the masculine ending is zero, people likewise say Studenten und Studentinnen, whereas in English, where the masculine marker is likewise zero, the normal form is students, not *students and studentesses (though actors and actresses competes with actors). Per contra, German has grammatical gender, like the Romance languages and unlike English: whether this is in any way relevant is a question.
the Socialist Party is officially moving from representing “Spanish workers” to representing “hard-working Spaniards.”
The Wobblies, I am glad to say, are quite reactionary on this point. There is no doubt that a great many managers are hard-working, but that does not make them workers in the political sense (and as such ineligible for Wobblyhood). Inclusivity is one thing, but are socialists to be allowed to claim that worker excludes only pure coupon-clippers who, like Natelys, have never done anything for their money?
We don’t have a future tense
No more do the English. In the UK, future tenses are the province of Highlanders, of whom there will only be one.
I think not promiscuity (more commonly associated with the male)
So much so, indeed, that there is no need to have a word meaning ‘promiscuous male’.
Russian too, has “natural” gender based on animacy.
But only in the masculine.
Never buy a used car from a speaker of a polysynthetic language.
This follows, of course, from the setting of the Polydactyly Parameter.
I mean, it is not all right to ask people questions like “aren’t many women bitches?”, “aren’t many women silly?”, “are some women promiscuous” etc., and then call the degree of agreement ‘sexism’.
But at least those are subjective questions. If someone asked me whether I agreed or disagreed with “In 2006, it is more difficult for women to get and keep a job than in past years”, I would look up hiring and retention statistics and reply accordingly. What else would I do? Or if I can’t be bothered to do that, I would reply honestly “I don’t know” and be merged with the well-known 10% of pollees who have no opinions about anything. On the occasions when I take a telephone or Internet poll, I am always bewildered when I am asked questions of fact like this. “Are cats or dogs more popular pets?”: if I reply “dogs” (I would), am I pro-dog? (No.)
The trick here is to find a polysynthetic language that does not incorporate.
French.
Are you now saying it’s immoral to make jokes?
It depends on the jokes.
There is no doubt that a great many managers are hard-working, …
Also that they do not own the means of production. So why ineligible for Wobblyhood?
Because they might own a small fraction of a property, otherwise held by the rapining banks?
(They might exhibit ‘false consciousness’, aligning themselves to/aspiring to be the owners, but there’d be plenty of Workers aspiring to the same: my plumber, for instance, always claiming the ‘Socialist’ government (not!) is interfering with the proceeds from his rental portfolio.)
But German, where the masculine ending is zero, people likewise say Studenten und Studentinnen, whereas in English, where the masculine
The current preferred approach among those trying to use gender inclusive language is the co-called Genderstern; you write Student*innen and say it with a short pause before the -innen. This is supposed to also include non-binary people. In this specific case, another option is to use Studierende, which as a participle has the same form for all genders in the plural.
“This is supposed to also include…”
Like masculine forms are supposed to also include girls?
So why ineligible for Wobblyhood?
Because they might own a small fraction of a property, otherwise held by the rapining banks?
No. The criterion is the possession of hire-and-fire authority, which owners always have by virtue of their ownership, even if the execution of this power is delegated to managers.
my plumber, for instance, always claiming the ‘Socialist’ government (not!) is interfering with the proceeds from his rental portfolio
The mere fact that he deals with physical rather than metaphorical pipes does not make him more or less a worker. If your plumber is like most, he is a sole proprietor, and ipso facto not a worker. Your plumber in particular is also part of the landed interest.
(For myself, I have no objection whatsoever to honest capitalists: it is monopolists, whether of land or other resources, who earn my special ire.)
Looking at the WWW constitution it seems a bit vague on what “hiring and firing authority” actually consists of.
In medicine in the UK, it’s usual for consultants to be coopted onto interview committees for other consultants even when they have no formal managerial position in the department (the major qualification for being selected to such a committee is “couldn’t come up with a plausible excuse for being unavailable.”)
You have no role in the actual contracting, do not formally offer the job yourself, and do not employ the successful colleague-to-be. Nor can you sack them, even if you are the actual department head: if you subsequently discover that they are a menace, you have to approach the top-level hospital management with your concerns (and are then quite likely to find yourself regarded as the problem, not the menace himself.*)
It seems to me that a lot of people are in grey areas like this. I get a distinct impression that this sort of radical oversimplification of complex dynamics is highly characteristic of WWW’s general outlook.
Again, the US seems to like a brutalist capitalist system in which bosses can freely sack anybody they take a scunner to at will, so long as they provide no actual reason (like “too pregnant”), but in the civilised world (even semibrutalised Tory Brexit Britain) there are stringent limits on such behaviour**, so the majority of bosses have only quite limited firing power (this is of course the reason for the current proliferation of zero-hours contracts and the “gig” economy, designed to avoid law and basic humanity and attain purified capitalist brutality despite all the best efforts of those horrid Socialists.)
* Usually “himself” rather than “herself.”
** In a hospital I worked in in Another Country, sacking people could lead to perfectly credible death threats. This also works quite well as a limitation on the unchecked powers of employers, but I must admit that the system has its downsides from a practical and possibly ethical standpoint.
Re himself rather than herself a certain Lucy Letby springs to mind, although a certain Harold Shipman achieved much more in their chosen field of endeavour, possibly showing that there are institutional and attitude issues needing to be addressed before women can achieve full equality in this field, in which it appears that the UK is the undisputed world leader, a fact which the present Government has unaccountably not highlighted.
The government response to the Shipman thing actually made this kind of catastrophe more likely, by disempowering medical staff by making their continuing license to practice contingent on the approval of local management. This makes raising concerns of any kind with management much more high-stakes and has had a noticeable chilling effect on the willingness of senior staff to do so. (I know whereof I speak: I’ve seen the dynamic in action.)
This was clearly a significant part of the problem in the Letby case (about which, however, I only know what’s been in the media reports.)
The purpose of the revalidation scheme imposed after Shipman was to deprofessionalise and disempower medical staff, and it has succeeded in this, its true objective. It has not addressed any of its ostensible purposes and never had any prospect of doing so. Shipman would have aced his appraisals (again, I know whereof I speak: I used to be actively involved in conducting these things.) He was a good GP according to all the metrics these things assess, and he would have had no problems at all with the patient feedback side. (Some of his erstwhile patients for years believed that he was framed.) The boring but useful measures that would actually have helped (like more regular and systematic scrutiny of prescriptions) were not taken. It was much more expedient to pretend that the problem was “arrogant doctors.” There are certainly plenty of arrogant doctors, but that was not the problem that needed addressing.
The Bristol heart scandal was the other pretext for the revalidation scheme. In that case, the proper effective changes to make such things much less likely had (I’m glad to say) already been made by the relevant Colleges of Surgeons. Revalidation added nothing of any value at all.
(Skin in the game: one of my own children benefited from the actual practical changes in the regulation of paediatric cardiac surgery instituted by the College of Surgeons, as a patient in the very same hospital.)
I agree that the current government, which is guided by Daily Mail headlines and editorials in place of either rational thought or ethics, is unlikely to take any steps that will actually improve things. Even less toxic governments screw these things up: this one long since lost any interest in actually solving governance problems at all. Probably the best we can hope for is inaction.
“enemy”
:/
DE, Y, I do not understand why you speak about “enemy”.
You can, if you like, designate so people who both hold views inacceptable for you and strive/compete with you for influence.
But then there is a plenty of other people, many more people, who may simply have lifestyles different from yours or too have views inacceptable for you, whose hearts or support or understanding you want to win – or whose will you want to manipulate – or who you want to obey – or who you want to shut up – if you’re a politician.
They are not your enemy.
Do not they deserve more attention than the “enemy”?
They too read junk science and its products and make conclusions. Not only “leaders” do.
____
Speaking of feminism – lots of people don’t give a shit about gendered language (and many other, more obviously real, feminist concerns).
Many have old-fashioned personal preferences (ideals, lifestyle) quite different from those strongly associated with feminism (and indeed some things are strongly associated with it). As long as they don’t impose them on others, I’m not hostile to them- no one can dictate one’s dreams.
They likely won’t like everything that feminism promotes. They are not interested in letting others arrange their marriage and they do want and have access to education, but they are not interested in what feminism offers today either.
Many do want to impose their preferences, and yet I’m not hostile to them.
“Giving comfort to the enemy” is a set expression, an idiom. It doesn’t say anything about my personal feelings towards the enemies in question.
I’m quite fond of some of my ideological enemies. especially the ones I’m actually related to,
There are also not a few sound Comrades and excellent churchgoing folk that I can’t abide.
Really the whole trick of an effective political movement is learning to work well with people who you don’t necessarily like all that much. Apart from the effectiveness angle, you can learn things by working together with people you wouldn’t normally want to spend time with. Broadens the mind no end …
“Enemy” has quite a semantic range. Like “friend” …
DE, all right. Not enemy.
Fascist bozos.
I’ll reformulate:
“But then there is a plenty of other people, many more people, who may simply have lifestyles different from yours or too have views inacceptable for you, whose hearts or support or understanding you want to win – or whose will you want to manipulate – or who you want to obey – or who you want to shut up – if you’re a politician.
They are not fascist bozos.
Do not they deserve more attention than the “fascist bozos”?”
I mean, look, I know a very modern in every respect (if you don’t count elements of culture as antiquity) female Jordanian professor who once discussed feminists with me. “I hate feminists” she said.
Lots of people may disagree with you for many reasons.
Does not the effect junk science has on them (without mediation of fascist bozos) matter?
I’m saying this not because you said something disagreable, you were agreeing with me. But I hear a lot of confrontational or even “holy war” rhetorics in european political discourse when left and right are being discussed – and my impression is that such people (normal people who disagree with either side) are routinely forgotten. Their are just masses manipulated by lefties or fascists or both.
This impression is not very pleasant.
The only fascist bozo I identified as such was specifically Jordan Peterson. You may (if you wish) quibble over my loose use of “fascist”, but personally I’m getting tired these days over quibbles that the f-word is only appropriate if the F in question supports corporatism and likes shiny uniforms, or whatever.
Would you settle for “deliberate and conscious enabler of classically fascist social attitudes”?
“Bozo” is just the correct term, though. No definitional issue arises there.
DE, he may very well be a fascist (I do use this word), I’m not telling you that you can’t call him your enemy! I’m just disappointed with absence of an ordinary person who happens to dislike one’s party from discourse. Just no sociology and no respect to people who support one’s opponents either.
Many things can be done: you can try to understand what this person is defending (and whether it is actualy in conflict with your goals) or why she disagrees, and whether you can convince her.
This applies to junk science too.
P.S., again, I’m not telling that you personally are wrong somewhere.
But this “european political discourse” is difficult to me. Endless bor’ba bobra s oslom (“struggle of a beaver with donkey” – a Russian pun on … dobra so zlom “…good with evil”) and no people.
I complained before – the debate was particularly heated in 2015 and later, in the context of refugees. And I DO want something to be done about those refugees, and not only those in Europe. I’m obviously on their side.
But nothing meaningful was done. Instead it was a question of what political force will dominate Europe. And of course people from the left did not discuss concerns of supporters of the right and people from the right did not discuss or respect concerns fo people from the left – European people were absent from the debate too.
___
Anyway, i just wnat to note that such junk science may affect people like me.
And me matters.
absence of an ordinary person who happens to dislike one’s party
You have a point. It is indeed a fault of mine. I don’t really understand neutrals emotionally. I am probably homozygous for the Wake Up Sheeple gene (like my daughter.)
I am improving, however. I may in time be able to be quite courteous even to Liberal Democrats.
@DE, it is just a complaint.
I understand how my freind N. will react at W&W’s paper (no, she is not right wing and generally she is just very apolitical) but I don’t even care how some political leader will.
Anyway, we both conclude that such papers can do some damage (not in N’s case I think) though I honestly don’t know if honesty is more efficient than manipulation. I just know that I need the truth:)
Also self-deception and manipulation will definitely make the road to the goal (if the goal is not just power) windy.
Originally, it seems, a slightly rearranged quote from the big-C Constitution, Article III, Section 3:
In other words, it’s a snippet of flowery 18th-century language that is perfect for use in half-joking ways in the 21st.
By the standard used in the infamous paper, they have two, even though neither just means “future” the way the two German past tenses just mean “past”.
Womanizer.
Touché.
That was yesterday – i.e. three years ago. Since then, the Scandinavian colon has been flooding the zone: Student:innen. It’s still pronounced like all the earlier alternatives: with a glottal stop (a postpausal voice onset – no need to declare the glottal stop a phoneme juuuuuuust yet).
BTW, I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard a Gendersternchen referred to in full size.
No. The form that’s interpreted as theoretically excluding nonbinary people is StudentInnen with a capital i in the middle, the much-discussed Binnen-I. (It’s also pronounced as above.)
That is so much better than Blue-and-Orange Morality!
And meanwhile, Merkel in particular just let them in, and all the doomsaying has… disappeared. No jump in unemployment, nothing. Basically all that has changed since 2015 is that there are places you can buy Syrian sweets now (nuts glued together with sugar).
The people who hated Merkel then still hate Merkel now, but she’s retired. See also: Hillary Clinton.
drasvi, I called Jordan Peterson explicitly my enemy, because he hurts people: directly, verbally, and indirectly, also physically. And he does this for his aggrandisement and bullying joy. Transphobia is his specialty (though he’s probably diversified), and there are trans people I like and respect (including here), but that’s beside the point. He’s my enemy just as Putin is my enemy.
I suspect drasvi knows nothing about Jordan Peterson and is just reflexively opposing the idea of having enemies. Perhaps he thinks we should all just hold hands and sing songs and everything would be all right.
I have strong sympathies for certain ideas for society, I believe those sympathies are firmly grounded in both ethical considerations and competent socio-economic reasoning, and I vote accordingly, but I generally get annoyed by political debating by supporters of those ideas. I may get even more annoyed by the supporters of different ideas, but that just adds to the misery. I much prefer arguing actual issues and economic mechanisms and the way different approaches will take society in different directions when they are not steeped in media hype and false dichotomies. It’s much easier to find common ground when problems of party sympathies and personal dislikes for politicians are eliminated. I think that’s why my engagement has been channeled into volunteer youth leadership (off work) and union leadership (at work). In one I work to make young people believe in cooperation and common solutions to common problems but I don’t preach anything more controversial than human decency and mutual respect. In the other I can put my ethical considerations, socio-economic reasoning, and seeking for common ground, to use for a common good.
RationalWiki article on Jordan Peterson. Long.
I don’t preach anything more controversial than human decency and mutual respect
That is good. But what do you call a party whose deputy chairman says that asylum seekers [the great majority of whom, by the government’s own figures, are entirely legitimate seekers of asylum] should “fuck off back to France”? Ignoring the bastards leaves them in power to wreck more lives and cause more deaths.
Our enemies (yes, drasvi) care nothing for human decency or mutual respect. The reason that this moral imbecile is a high functionary of the Conservative Party is that the leadership of that party believes this kind of public pronouncement will win them votes. That is not bad manners: it’s evil. He was not even reprimanded for this. We need rid of these people.
Incidentally, the reason that there are desperate people falling into the clutches of criminals and making the dangerous channel crossing is Brexit, beloved totem of Fascist Bozos like Anderson.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/15/small-boats-industry-science-brexit-made-our-lives-worse
Sorry. This is not PoliticsHat, I know. But we were discussing spades. I believe in calling a spade a bloody shovel. (I also appreciate that this is pretty small potatoes compared to living in a country where opposing the leader gets you poisoned or shot. But this is my country, and these bastards are shitting on it in the name of patriotism.)
That RationalWiki page was… something. You get the impression that it was written by people who believe there is one and only one correct opinion on every question moral, factual, or interpretative; that they, along with all sensible people, know precisely which one it is; and that all those who (by some willful blindness) do not share this one true opinion should be mocked for that. I’ve never had much time for Jordan Peterson, but I find myself more sympathetic to him after skimming that page than before.
Sorry. This is not PoliticsHat, I know. …
But this is my country, and these bastards are shitting on it in the name of patriotism.
Thank you David for your forthrightness. My rellies back there seem resigned to politicians behaving atrociously as if it’s inevitable. When I say I can barely recognise the country I grew up in, they can only agree.
It was an earlier call to patriotism (the Falklands War coming at the same time as Thatcher sold Hong Kong down the river) that showed me British jingoism and racism has always been just below the surface.
resigned to politicians behaving atrociously as if it’s inevitable
That may well prove to be the most lasting damage these people do; nor is it accidental.
Every time someone says “politicians are all the same”, the kleptocrats funding these parties have won another victory over democracy. In the end, their project is incompatible with a functioning democracy, so damaging its working by undermining faith in its validity is a key part of the strategy. Here, a shamelessly corrupt Supreme Court is just as useful as a Supreme Court packed with extremist right-wingers.
I find myself more sympathetic to him after skimming that page than before
Yes: the article just comes across as a personal attack, which is all very well but unlikely to impress anyone who doesn’t already have a low opinion of Peterson.
It also rather gives the impression that he’s basically just a major-league bullshitter, and doesn’t look much further. I think that is naive; muddying the waters by shameless bullshitting is part of the right-wing playbook: as their actual doctrines are false and and their actual objectives repellent to normal people, loosening people’s grip on truth is essential. Buffoonishness, another common characteristic of such people, serves a similar purpose.
Interesting. It gives me a very different impression: it points out the numerous times where Peterson appears not to have thought his arguments through. The mockery is just lightly sprinkled over it.
And, frankly, mockery is the appropriate response to every single use of biology by Peterson that I’ve yet seen.
Ouch! I must find an opportunity to borrow that.
‘Deepity’ a coinage of Daniel Dennett. Respect!
mockery is the appropriate response
Appropriate, surely.
However, I think it’s necessary, but not sufficient. I don’t think Peterson does this because he’s stupid (at least, not stupid in the limited “low IQ” sense that people like him mistake for the entire meaning of the word.)
Mockery is perhaps enough in the face of Bad Science that doesn’t actually hurt anyone. That’s not Peterson’s shtick: indeed, part of his game is precisely in pretending that “science” is exactly what is at issue.* It’s good to call out the Bad Science: but that risks missing that the Bad Science is not the point, but the means to an end. It’s window-dressing, which is why (to him and his ilk and their followers) its incoherence qua science is quite unimportant.
* That’s when he doesn’t claim to be defending “Christianity.” This is blasphemy in the strict theological sense of falsely claiming God’s authority for what you are saying. In general, I don’t think unbelievers like Peterson actually can commit blasphemy (the Biblical prohibitions of it are all aimed at believers) but (like Trump) he has found a way. Quite an achievement, really.
@Y, thank you!
But you can call your enemy whoever you want. I meant something very different:
If you have a cause, you must be concerned with how ordinary people see it.
In our context (junk science) too.
RationalWiki and other publications/websites which use words like “rational”, “skeptical”, etc., do tend to have self-righteous air that is off-putting.
“opposing the idea of having enemies”
@LH, I wrote:
“DE, he may very well be a fascist (I do use this word), I’m not telling you that you can’t call him your enemy!”
This is clear enough. I don’t understand the point of mocking a hypothecal drasvi-2 who is not here.
But I understand that if I start responding, I’l be more destructive for the hattery than I am.
“Perhaps he thinks we should all just hold hands and sing songs and everything would be all right.”
If people in Yemen do that, I will be glad.
Well, I know a guy who belongs to this sect (rational etc) and he is a nice guy.
But of course, any nice guy can join any sect.
Sure. I have relatives, whom I love and respect, who espouse political positions that I think are wholly immoral. Perhaps naively, I think this is because they have not seriously taken on board the actual human consequences of such politics, and intellectually I know very well that to normal people politics is a kind of entertainment or spectator sport (if that), though I myself find such insouciance unfathomable.
Rationalists, though, I actually quite like; I feel something of an emotional affinity with all extremists, and their determination to think all complex issues are really quite simple.* Damn braces! Bless relaxes!
* There’s a reason Lucretius is my favourite Latin poet.
If you have a cause, you must be concerned with how ordinary people see it
This is profoundly true (and an issue of considerable concern to the UK Labour Party at present.)
But I understand that if I start responding, I’l be more destructive for the hattery than I am
I don’t think anyone here takes your comments as “destructive.” (Personally, I think you’re often wrong, but generally interestingly wrong, which is more than many of us can manage.)
I usually imagine that they meet and partake in rational rites and mysticism.
But maybe they just meet and…
wait, wait.
I can say “the purpose of their gatherings is just being rational (for a while, together)”.
Now how do I say it in the form “they meet and [verb] rational”?
But I understand that if I start responding, I’l be more destructive for the hattery than I am
Oh, you’re not at all destructive. I sometimes get annoyed with what I perceive to be your rote contrarianism (“If everybody else is attacking this guy, he must be worth defending!”), but that’s no big deal. I definitely enjoy your presence here. The fact that I didn’t get enough sleep last night may have made me more irritable than usual.
Or am I just transferreing my Russian habits (I can’t say it in Russian) to English and “they be rational” (< "are being rational") is just fine?
@DE I don’t think unbelievers like Peterson actually can commit blasphemy (the Biblical prohibitions of it are all aimed at believers) but (like Trump) he has found a way.
Trump’s favourite Bible passages.
@Y RationalWiki and other publications/websites which use words like “rational”, “skeptical”, etc., do tend to have self-righteous air that is off-putting.
Yes-ish. But have you gone to the websites of the religious-inspired political parties?
I guess the Interweb and news TV have promoted a race to the bottom of one-liners/coupla words with zero rational content. At least Trump isn’t (yet) using “rational” as a term of abuse. “skeptical” he probably doesn’t know how to pronounce. (Googling gives me only people skeptical about Trump.)
“Muddying the waters” seems particularly appropriate for Peterson, what with all his blathering about how witch women “live in the swamp.”
Yes-ish. But have you gone to the websites of the religious-inspired political parties?
Oh, compared to the lunatics, sure, the “rationalists” are gold. But for people who are supposed to be on the good side, they are noxious enough to have turned Lameen off.
I’ve never had much time for Jordan Peterson, but I find myself more sympathetic to him after skimming that page than before.
There was one extraordinarily disparaging claim on that page I thought they must be making up/taking very much out of context. I had to track it down. (And yes I know this isn’t crank pseudo-psychologist Hat.)
How can anybody claiming to be socially aware be surprised at the culture/orientation of his own following?
Why so few women?
Why not ?
… extraordinarily disparaging claim
I’m open to any kind of disparagement, but I don’t see any there.
Originally, it seems, a slightly rearranged quote from the big-C Constitution
Not originally. The original Anglo-Normand text of the Treason Act 1351 says:
I’m not sure when it was Englished, but certainly before 1787:
See also Roger Casement, who was hanged on a comma and sentenced to a full stop.
Womanizer.
I do but jest.
I suspect drasvi knows nothing about Jordan Peterson and is just reflexively opposing the idea of having enemies.
I don’t know if that’s true of drasvi or not. I think having enemies (as opposed to adversaries) is a Bad Thing. (Note that the linked article is ten years old.)
Damn braces!
Damn them indeed.
But for people who are supposed to be on the good side
The good side, yes; the goody-goody side, no. Whereas Wikipedia has NPOV (“neutral point of view”), RationalWiki has SPOV, which can be interpreted as “scientific point of view (with snark)” or “snarky point of view (with science)”.
That was yesterday – i.e. three years ago. Since then, the Scandinavian colon has been flooding the zone: Student:innen.
I was still so yesterday until this morning, when those waves lapped at my door for the first time. Sez DHL in an email:
#
*Bitte beachten: Sie können ODD weiterhin ohne Konto zur Verwaltung Ihrer zukünftigen Sendungen verwenden, es kann aber sein, dass manche Funktionen oder Dienste Benutzer:innen, die nicht aktiv registriert sind, nicht zur Verfügung stehen.
#
For reasons not clear to me, I find that less annoying than the capital eye and the little star.
Why not ?
Peterson’s shtick is misogynistic [**] as well even if “Transphobia is his specialty” (@Y above).
I mean: if it had been RationalWiki attributing (or quoting another’s accusation of) misogyny, that would have been disparagement.
If Peterson had some meaningful observation of the human condition (as you’d expect from a qualified/widely-published psychologist), there’d be a diverse audience. (Not saying they’d necessarily agree with him, but they’d listen.) There isn’t a diverse audience — by his own observation; and the reason is bleedin’ obvious. Why is it a surprise to him — if he has any insight?
[**] From the NPOV wikip
… meaningful … human condition … diverse audience … surprise …insight
That’s one helluva loaded train of thought. I have a simpler take, namely that P’s twitter question is faux surprise. It’s a “rhetorical”, snark-n-coconuts dig at women: they don’t follow me because they can’t follow an argument.
It’s the old Freudian “dissent proves the claim” routine.
I see plenty of good reason not to follow P. And even more good reason to minimize discussion of him. But boys will be boys.
David E.: That is good. But what do you call a party whose deputy chairman says that asylum seekers [the great majority of whom, by the government’s own figures, are entirely legitimate seekers of asylum] should “fuck off back to France”? Ignoring the bastards leaves them in power to wreck more lives and cause more deaths.
I must have come through in a very different way than I intended. Of course you oppose that. I just find it more meaningful (or maybe personally rewarding) to discuss the issue than promote a different political party, since it will have jingoists and bullshitters of its own and often a dismaying lack of courage to take an opposing stand — if they’re not busy promoting themselves as the somewhat more pragmatic and humane version of evil. The Syrian refugee crisis is very much a case in point. It took a sudden burst of refugees on bike from Russia to turn it from a humanitarian crisis to an immediate threat to Norway, for most parties to vote for tougher asylum rules without normal parliamentary procedure, and for the most prominent anti-immigrationist of the right wing populist party to be appointed to Minister of Immigration in the center-right government. Well played, Putin.
@Trond, wow, I did not know about those polar refugees!
“Well played, Putin” – I don’t think that presenting Syrians as a conspiracy by enemies of Norway is terribly nice.
__
PS
* This is actually what your situation is. Most people on the left, just as most people on the right, are ready to accept only a very limited number of people. This number (N) is much smaller than the number of people who want to immigrate. Meanwhile refugees are not the same as just immigrants, they don’t just want better life, they need help.
“We will let a few in, and we will be nice to them” does not work as a solution if your goal is being a good person.
And whether one is left or right, one doesn’t want them because one fears some social catastrophe (which for people on the left means rise of racism at home too, but anyway).
The right is different from the left in their attitude to Syrians who are already here, also N is different for the left and the right – but both are similar in that they don’t want any refugees.
You’re facing an objectively difficult moral dilemma, in other words. Whatever the solution, to stay a good person, you start from thinking about refugees (still) outside the country as people in desperate situation who need help, and not a scourge, a threat, an enemy plot or something.
Ooops,
PS footnote above referred to this:
This is how we explain this scourge: it is all a plot to destroy good old Europe.
We do so because we are against refugees.
Also you have a wide selection of countries who let refugees cross to Europe (and usually helped them with reaching and crossing the border with the next EU country, so they spent as little time as possible in countries from that wide selection). Blaming them for letting refugees in and helping them to get out and calling it a plot aiming at corrupting that next country by making it more right politicially (instead of a cozy welcoming country which that just…. doesn’t want any refugees because it fears that those will provoke a slide to right?) would be just as ugly.
For one thing, that would be an anti-refugee stance that tries to sell itself as an anti-anti-refugee* stance.
But Russia specifically was rather difficult to enter for a refugee and as result the number of people who crossed to Norway was simply very small.
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PPS, perhaps a comparision (for Europe and say 100-times less populous Lebanon who took the same number of refugees as Europe) would be a rich house that helped one girl, providing her with a cozy room and a job of a housemaid – and a small appartment of a poor person, who (willingly or not I don’t know) is having a hungry family crowded in one of his two rooms and is yelling at them:)
I’d say that depends on what exactly you mean by that word. I’m reminded of the people on teh intarwebz who insist they don’t “hate” anyone and will at most admit they “dislike” someone; apparently by “hate” they mean “plotting their revenge for 20 years nonstop”…
Absolutely. I bet that in most cases where he hasn’t thought things through (as listed in the RationalWiki article), he’s not incapable of thinking them through, he just has no interest in doing so because it’s more fun and profit for him if he doesn’t.
That may be precisely where pointing and laughing may be most effective.
No, but Lukashenko has been trying to do this for years: flying desperate people out of Iraq and dumping them on the Polish border in order to start a controversy in Poland in particular and the EU in general.
Given what the current Polish government is like, people have died in the no man’s land in the last few winters.
To Peterson, culture is “symbolically, archetypally, mythically male,” while “chaos—the unknown—is symbolically associated with the feminine.”[141][142]
But in almost every language* “culture” is a feminine noun, therefore it’s symbolically female. Checkmate, Peterson.
* by which I mean, of course, Arabic and French; actually checking this stuff in languages I don’t know would be against the rules of the game.
@drasvi: The Syrian refugee crisis was not a conspiracy. The Syrian, Afghan, Iraqi etc. refugees who came by that route were not fake. It started as a slow trickle of single individuals, and it was generally acknowledged at the time that when the numbers increased, it couldn’t have happened without some sort of approval and logistic support by the Russian government. It was also well known that Russia supported illiberal and eurosceptic populist movements all over Europe with money and trolls, not because of any particular sympathy but because they were useful idiots that could stem a consensus on concern for the illiberal development and inpredictability of Russia.
But it shouldn’t really matter. My point was that the Norwegian political system responded as if the refugees themselves were the problem and that returning them to Russia would make Russia close down the route. The government bussed refugees back to Russia in a high-profile media stunt, the newly appointed minister of immigration maintained a high profile, and no politician of a major party ever dared questioning the fate of the refugees again.
I don’t think the particular outcome was particularly interesting to Russia, but the general development away from common European solutions certainly was.
Norway, of course, stands firmly on the side of the common European non-solution: leaving asylum seekers and refugees at the point of entry to Europe, or in camps outside its borders, and criticizing the local governments for the conditions in those camps. For some reason that has nothing to do with racism or islamophobia, this does not apply to refugees from Ukraine.
@DM, yes, Lukashenko.
But not Putin in 2015 and not the chthonic forces that according to our propaganda tried to destroy Europe by destabilising the ME in order to flood poor Europe with refugees.
And not even Putin who bombed Syria in order to flood Europe with refugees, as I learn from some internte comment.
And with L. you are still in an objectively difficult moral situation.
When you have a hungry person by your door, you are in some moral situation. Blame your neighbour who led that person to your door or not.
@drasvi: I gave background but forgot to make explicit that “Well, played, Putin” was meant to mock the Norwegian response, which amounted to moving exactly the way that Russia’s (supposed) game was (supposedly) meant to achieve.
Sorry, Lameen, but I don’t think this is right. For instance, in English, culture is a non-binary noun.
“which amounted to moving exactly the way that Russia’s (supposed) game was (supposedly) meant to achieve.”
@Trond, here I agree and I understood this.
I just want to note that thinking of refugees as a part of someone’s evil plot is not very nice to refugees themselves above all. It means evading the moral dilemma by assigning the role of evil to them (and blaming someone else for this evil).
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That alliance with the european right (which reached oru TV in 2015) seemingly (based on timing) also led to the alliance with the Russian right. Anti-immigration movement has been prominent here since 90s (and the concern was popular among populist right-wing politicians). For Kremlin those were rivals.
Since 2015 it became a part of the ideology promoted by TV – with a specific focus on events abroad though.
I just want to note that thinking of refugees as a part of someone’s evil plot is not very nice to refugees themselves above all. It means evading the moral dilemma by assigning the role of evil to them (and blaming someone else for this evil).
That’s ridiculous. Nobody who’s blaming Putin or Lukashenko is thereby blaming the refugees; why would you think that? Do you really not see that it’s possible (and common) for bad people to use innocent people as pawns? I know you don’t mean to, but you come across as defending dictators (“Why are you blaming Putin?”).
“chaos—the unknown—is symbolically associated with the feminine.”[141][142]
Recently, out walking the dog, I have stopped for dinner at tables outside various restaurants. Overhearing conversations nearby, I am struck by how stereotyped they are. Bad stereotypes, according to the opinion-makers, but that doesn’t stop these young folks. One talks on and on, the other, looking glassy-eyed and hopeful, says very little – perhaps a gentle protest now and again.
@Trond, also numbers are really small.
EU: half a billion.
Lebanon: 4 millions.
The number of refugees this huge EU received in 2015 is… more or less the same as for (more than 100 times smaller) Lebanon. Most went to Germany, but sadly, Germany too is much larger than Lebanon.
And we are speaking about 5 thousands here:/
Syria is 23 millions, most were displaced, several million were abroad. War refugees are generally REALLY huge crowds. If some country considers helping them, it is not like “let’s take in one thousand families, and if every country does the same, the problem is solved!”.
Logistic support:
I was specifically interested in Syrians in towns around Moscow – that is a different story. I don’t see why people who did not want to let Syrians in and were deporting asylum seekers would hinder movement of people to Norway, but I would be surprised if there was actual help.
Yes, tehnically the architects of this alliance between Russian government and xenophobes could organise such an event. But given the number it is in line with the natural course of events as well.
@LH, what is so difficult?
When you see a hungry man by your door and urgently need someone to blame for letting this man reach your door – then you are seeing this man himself as a problem.
Don’t you see that Russian propaganda which also (just as this Putin-refugee connection) portrays refugees as some tool used by conspirators to weaken Europe does harm to refugees – and not any conspirators?
Why is it different when Putin is blamed isntead?
Putin hardly has anything to do with those 5500 people at Storskog. These pawns came there because they have war at home, because Russia does not want them and because Norway is a nice country.
And no, I do not follow the principle that if you say something bad about an asshole, i should not correct you.
@drasvi: I know the numbers are small. That makes the political panic even more embarrassing.
For my “acknowledged” up there, read “supposed”.
For instance, in English, culture is a non-binary noun.
And in Kabyle, it’s either masculine “idles” or feminine “tadelsa”, clearly indicating that the genius of the language is groping for a way to recognise the fundamentally non-binary archetypal nature of culture. Good point.
Norwegian kultur is masculine, naturally. It’s also a borrowing from French. Other borrowings from French are also mostly masculine in Norwegian, independent of their gender in French. This proves that the semantic realms of fashion, beauty, fine arts, etc. are naturally masculine.
As for me, and with full knowledge that I’m sticking some extremity or other into a hornet’s nest, my immediate English-teacher response to Jordan Peterson’s “observation” is: Symbolically associated by whom?
I must have come through in a very different way than I intended
Rather, I misinterpreted you (the more foolishly, as I know you are solidly on the side of the angels.) Apologies.
χάος is, of course, neuter, and thus symbolically associated with incels.
@Rodger C.: Oh, that reminds me: I saw an actual hornets’ nest last weekend. The hornet (geithams) is on full way back in Norway after having gone extinct for a long time. I saw my first hornet two years ago in the ceiling of the hallway of a cottage just outside of town. We just let it be with the door open, and the next morning it was gone. Back this year there were six of them after the windows had been open all night. They weren’t aggressive, so when we couldn’t convince them to leave the way they came, we just left them to themselves. Except that one of them had settled between the mattress and the sleeping bag of one of us… I was out meeting a late arrival, so I lost the scream, but I did get to see my first hornet’s sting and to take part in the eventual hunt-and-kill of the remaining five.
The next morning we found the nest between the roots of a birch tree just outside the cottage. They shared it with some tortoiseshell butterflies who couldn’t care less about the hornets trying to chase them away. Irony, I suppose.
Of course I’m firmly on the side of the angels. That’s how I know they’re angels.
In Nietzsche’s case, the misogyny would appear to be connected with having been brought up by aunts (maybe also his granny). Mr Petersen does not say this explicitly, but it would seem that his mother’s sisters may have taken on a share of his parenting. This type of misogyny, based on feelings of a small boy whose desire to eat dirt, harm other children, small animals or insects, and come home with dirty or torn clothing, or mud on his shoes is frustrated by powerful women (maybe these powerful women also kiss and pinch him, dress him up like a girl or laugh at his fantasies) is something I find comical in a grown man, even if his trauma was increased by a busy and tired father telling him not to be a crybaby, when he complained about his treatment by the harridans.
@LH, one can put it differently. Repeat it to a Syrian refugee.
Tell him that you hate Putin for allowing him reach Norwegian border, so now you’re having to see his bearded face in your cozy little Norway.
Do you expect understanding?
“Oh, you’re just a pawn! It is not YOUR fault that you are here and are not ‘fucking off back to France’.”
You seem to think there is only one angle from which to view any issue.
Aha, that’s why I “come across as defending dictators” this time and say I hate some of them otehr time:)
I just prefer not to think about you what I can’t say in your face.
Also is not it obvious that if it were Russia, I would not think bad of our government just because it helped some Syrians reach Norwegian border?
I would prefer Russia to help those Syrians who want to live here. Russia is LARGE and multinational and not because of immigrants. But helping them get to Norway is orthogonal to my wishes – and likely good for them.
Norwegians were guided by fear. European countries were blaming each other that time, they said the same about Putin as what Austria was saying about Slovenia etc.
But speaking about an Evil plot… Sorry, maybe you’re right and it was presented in a way wich does not damage interests of refugees, but the scheme “5k refugees are here because evil forces want to harm Norway” does not sound very supportive of them.
The differnece with Lukashenko is that in case of Putin I see no idnication that this might be true. But are Poles – who blame Lukashenko – nicer to refugees because they perceive them as “pawns”?
the scheme “5k refugees are here because evil forces want to harm Norway” does not sound very supportive of them.
That’s because it wasn’t. It was a panic act by weak Norwegian politicians, and not because of fear of immigrants but because of fear of the populist right. So they decided that Russia had to be fought with her own weapon, the refugees. A few thousand out of a total number in millions reached the Norwegian borders, where they became the responsibility of Norway according to Norwegian and international law, and that was enough for a broad majority in the Norwegian parliament to throw humanitarian principles out the door and hide behind the Russian facilitation. I find that deeply disturbing. That’s what I’m trying to express in disturbing terms.
I also don’t think it was a Russian plot all along, but someone in Russian intelligence saw the potential when the situation arrived. What we can say is that it didn’t really work, since Norwegian politicians broke down before there was much political turmoil at all.
It reminds me of this particularly low point for the UK Labour party:
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/03/labours-anti-immigrant-mug-worst-part-it-isnt-gaffe
The thing about this is that quite apart from being wrong, it doesn’t bloody work.
The Labour party can’t outflank the Tories on the right: the party still has the kind of reputation among the punters that the racists whom the Tories rely on for their core vote will never actually believe us if we try. Thank God. I don’t see the point of having a Labour party at all if it’s going to pull this kind of shit.
C’est plus qu’un crime, c’est une faute.
I’d say that depends on what exactly you mean by that word [enemy].
If you follow the link, you’ll see that an adversary is someone who’s against you now, but who may be your ally in the past, the future, or both. You want to defeat your adversary, but all you can do with your enemy is destroy them.
For instance, in English, culture is a non-binary noun.
As are most nouns, which shows that non-binaries are the dominant sex in Anglophonia.
This type of misogyny, based on feelings of a small boy whose desire to eat dirt, harm other children, small animals or insects, and come home with dirty or torn clothing, or mud on his shoes is frustrated by powerful women
I was raised mostly by a powerful woman, but I never had any desire to do these things except to come home dirty (and she never complained of that). Consequently. I am a feminist by right of birth. As for Peterson, I mostly feel sorry for him.
What we can say is that it didn’t really work, since Norwegian politicians broke down before there was much political turmoil at all.
Well, I’d count that as working, because it confirmed the usual claim of the Russian troll farms that all those high-minded Western ideals are only for show and break down if they are tested.
I’m with drasvi on this, the fact that expediting refugees to the West can be described as an “evil plot” by despots like Putin or Lukashenko is much more shameful for our European societies than for them. Even if they expose our hypocrisy for their gain, it’s still our hypocrisy that gives them their fuel.
No objections.
@John Cowan: Sorry for my delayed reply: I was traveling.
I meant in Spain. I really have no idea if the same development may also be happening in other Spanish-speaking countries.
The Mexican government appears to have the official usage personas trabajadoras del hogar. I suspect that is coming from a slightly different direction, namely unease at calling them just trabajadoras del hogar, though I don’t doubt the workers in question are overwhelmingly female. This page seems telling.
In my Romance understanding, the question is what word you use for an all-female group. In Italian (and I presume in all Romance languages) I count three alternatives.
1. A different gender-marked form. Just as in German, a male student is uno studente but a female student is una studentessa. Hence, the explicitly inclusive plural must be le studentesse e gli studenti.
2. The same form with different gender agreement. A male headmaster is officially un dirigente scolastico and unofficially un preside, but a female school manager is una dirigente scolastica or una preside. Hence, the explicitly inclusive plural must be le presidi e i presidi or the full bureaucratic blow of le dirigenti scolastiche e i dirigenti scolastici. I’d expect German to have the same problem too.
3. A truly epicene noun, which retains its own grammatical gender regardless of referent. An engineer is always un ingegnere and a victim is always una vittima. Hence, the traditional plural is inclusive already: gli ingegneri, le vittime
Agreed. Hence the irony. My guess is that the (overwhelmingly left-wing) politicians who started speaking of las personas trabajadoras were trying to change the language and get this to mean “workers of any gender orientation.” But since the expression already means “hard-working people” and our left-wing politicians are already social-democrats with little taste for class warfare, I reckon there’s a fair chance it’s going to be the language that changes the meaning of party slogans, rather than party slogans that change the meaning of the language.
Loosely tied to a couple of strands of the discussion above: boasting of having enemies is an Original Fascist™ thing.
Original Original Fascist™ image here, Akismet allowing. CC.NN. abbreviates Camicie Nere, namely Blackshirts.
It’s much older than any kind of fascism, though.
No, because German does not have gender agreement in the plural at all. (Some even count the plural as the fourth gender, and I can’t say they’re wrong.) The plural of either or both of der Studierende and die Studierende is die Studierenden.
@Trond, well, I apologise. I did not mean to attack you, I understood that the connection to Putin is Norway, not you. But I think I misunderstood your tone.
Regarding Putin, I think we don’t need Putin to explain appearance of Syrians there in 2015. You say they couldn’t reach it without government assistence, I don’t see why. The only problem I see is getting the visa.
A problem indeed, but how do they tell if a Syrian is going to go to Norway? And the number 5000 does not make it clear if there was any relaxation regarding visas.
I would help a Syrian to get to Norway myself, if I could, but Russian government?
Also one must be a genius to predict a major shift just because of 5500 people. A large wave would have caused panic in Russia. And Norway returned many. On bicycles.
Russia was blamed for insisting on bicycles (Norway was blamed for sending them on bicycles in -30C.).
@Hans, my thought was different.
I just think if a Pole happens to hate refugees for some reason, then she is likely to hate them more if she learns that it is an evil plot by Lukashenko. (I don’t mean to say Poles are anyhow different from anyone else, of course, it is just that the events involving L take place at Polish border).
What you are saying reminds me of an argument with my friend, about Lukashenko.
But there is a difference between me and my friend. I still care more about the situation of refugees, because it is… shittier. And because I’m interested in languages of some of them:)
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That time (October and November) I was watching news about Slovenian support in crossing Austrian border (involved guides leading small groups in the night).
Buses were presented as nice people helping refugees, though when they were provided not by foreign organisations but by local governments it was understood that this help is selfish.