Miranda Bryant has an encouraging Guardian story about a Danish dictionary:
The Danish language does not officially carry a male equivalent for the (often pejorative) term “career woman” or a female equivalent for the male-gendered noun “financier”. But after a major review of all keywords ending in -mand (man), -kvinde (woman) and -person (person), soon the terms karrieremand (career man) and finanskvinde (female financier) – as well as many new gender-neutral terms – will officially join the ranks of the Danish spelling dictionary, the Retskrivningsordbogen.
In its first review in 12 years, the Dansk Sprognævn (the Danish Language Council) has embarked on a new edition focusing on gender equality and making words and descriptions more gender neutral and less stereotyped. The council has also analysed the use of he, she, his and hers in the dictionary’s example phrases. The new edition, to be published next year, adds to afholdsmand, the existing word for someone who abstains from drinking alcohol, which has a male-gendered suffix, a female version: afholdskvinde. Financier, finansmand, now also has a female equivalent in the form of finanskvinde. […]
Among the gendered example phrases to be removed from the new edition of the dictionary are pigerne fjantede rundt (the girls fooled around) and han er anklaget for uagtsomt manddrab (he is accused of negligent manslaughter).
Margrethe Heidemann Andersen, a senior researcher at the language council, was one of three editors who combed through the current dictionary looking for sexist inclusions and omissions. “We have made lists of all words that end in -man and -woman and then reviewed them one by one to see if we should create a counterpart with the endings -woman, -man or possibly -person,” she told the Danish public broadcaster DR. “We have also looked through the text examples in the dictionary to ensure that they do not give a stereotypical representation of the genders.”
Heidemann Andersen has not provided an exact figure for the number of words and sentences that have been analysed or changed, but she said there will never be as many words ending with -woman as there are -man. Some words, she said, ending in -mand do not refer to a person, which would make it pointless adding a female equivalent. For example, nordmand, the word for a Norwegian, refers to a human being rather than a man. This is a word that will not be given a female equivalent. […]
Before the editors came up with recommendations, which they presented to an expert council of linguists, they assessed how widespread the words are in day-to-day use. “When we add a new word, we have to get the argument right, and the frequency matters a lot,” said Heidemann Andersen.
Sounds like they’re going about it in a thoughtful way; it won’t stop people from whining about political correctness, but who cares? And just to head off objections from the easily triggered: this doesn’t mandate anything, it doesn’t force people to speak or write any particular way, it just provides good options for people who look things up. Thanks, Trevor!
I am actually somewhat triggered by that last remark. 😉 Over here in Belgium/Netherlands the official spelling rules do dictate how public servants have to write, even if they don’t affect anybody else. I think that’s similar in Denmark. Though I don’t know if public servants write much about offhold-men and women.
I have to correct myself, and sufficiently profoundly that a mere edit would not suffice.
https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_taa014199901_01/_taa014199901_01_0212.php
Ah well, public servants have to obey all sorts of rules; at least these are good ones!
Note the Dutch use of an accent for émphasis. It’s easy to overlook if you aren’t used to it!
I did indeed overlook it — thanks for drawing it to my attention!
Not that it matters for the discussion at hand, but as a Dutch L1 person I can tell you that only the word “emfase” is known in Dutch, without accent. Before the spelling reform of 1947 the word was spelled as “emphase”.
It is hardly used, since we have a native word “nadruk”.
Sources: woordenlijst.org for the current online version of the Groene Boekje (official spelling, see Spellingwet), and Van Dale’s Groot woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal, 4th ed., 1898, for the old spelling. The Spellingwet can be found at wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0018784/
I thought the ís was nicely captured by DeepL. The above is unedited, other than that it said “all kinds of for serious articles” in its initial translation.
Now if they could just get rid of the silly -d on ‘-mann’…
TIL that there is a 1997 law that makes the official orthographic dictionary binding on all civil servants (as well as schools and institutions of higher learning that are at least 50% financed by the state). Until then it was “only” authorized by the Ministry of Education in its various guises since 1889 and could only be binding on the schools.
But using alternative spellings in an official document is not a crime. It may be actionable under employment contracts as a refusal to follow instructions, but it would probably have to be extremely blatant and in non-compliance with repeated written warnings copied to the relevant union representative before anything could happen. (Blatant on the level of repeatedly distributing written responsa to a parliamentary committee of peevers or sending out press releases with widely known solecisms. If your commas in an email would get red pencil marks from your high school Danish teacher, you can probably rest secure in the knowledge that the recipient doesn’t feel certain about the rules either).
I would find it embarrassing if my native language had an “official” dictionary.
In the Danish specifics, I’m puzzled by the controversy over “mandrab.” Has the Danish criminal code been changed to change the technical name of the offense to something that sounds less gendered? If so, has popular usage followed that change or not? Those seem like important bits of context that are missing.
@Jen, yes, the -nd is silly, but it’s been silly since the 13th century or so. Too late to change now. (I’m sure I’ve explicated the merger of -nd, -nt, -nn as [ɲː] spelled -nd- a few times. Length and palatalization were then mislaid, leaving us with a meaningless alternation between -n and -nd and licensing the use of -nd for original short [-n] in some words; it only takes 9 years of primary schooling to learn when to use either).
Some Danish words with silent -d- have been fixed, e.g. the distinction between kunde/skulde/vilde on the one hand and kunne/skulle/ville on the other.
@J.W. Brewer: It is somewhat less than a proper dictionary in that it doesn’t give word senses; it just tells you how to spell words. Basically it’s a list of official spellings rather than a dictionary per se.
Also: No, the Criminal Code hasn’t been amended to rephrase ‘manddrab’ (homicide) as something else. The Danish Language Council is a self-governing body that took this initiative on their own. They do not have any power to change the wording of laws (or indeed do anything with legal implications for people except to change the list of spellings that they publish), so that would require for politicians to agree to pass a law to that effect, but noone has suggested any such thing.
I think it’s actually a slight embarrassment to the academics at Dansk Sprognævn that they have to be normative, they used to say that they were just describing the usage of “accomplished writers” whatever that means.
I missed the memo on manddrab. I don’t think they are removing the headword, which is still a term of art in the penal code and equally applicable to female victims of manslaughter, but only the example phrase that assumes that the perpetrator is male.
An update on an ongoing change, because I haven’t found a better place to bung it in: The voice in the commuter trains now says toget her kører ikke videre — as opposed to dette tog twenty years ago or the transitional det her tog, all with the sense of “this train.”
Also also I was at the dentist the other day and saw the gloriously danified participle retineret from L retineo. = E retained and F retenu, obvs. Probably modelled on G retiniert because Danish and German are partners in crime when it comes to using Latin roots to keep the laity from sussing out what the doctors are talking about.
Re the “mandrab” example sentence, in the U.S. the overwhelming numerical preponderance of males among perpetrators of violent crimes is one of the few such statistical disparities that crusading feminist activists do not seem particularly interesting in correcting. Perhaps Denmark is more progressive?
You feel that feminists should be committing more violent crime?
@David E.: you need to ask yourself what bigoted social/cultural barriers/stereotypes/expectations are holding back today’s young women from achieving statistical parity when it comes to committing violent crimes. It may be relevant that I am old enough in a U.S. context to fully remember the old Virginia Slims “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” advertising campaigns, whose premise was that movement toward female:male parity in a hitherto male-dominated sphere of human activity such as for example cigarette-smoking was an unqualified Victory for Feminism.
@Jenny just get rid of the silly …
And you spell in which orthography? (Glass houses …)
@David E You feel that feminists should be committing more violent crime?
Does English law allow a non-gender-marked term for ‘Manslaughter’ (as technically “homicide … considered less culpable than murder”)? That’s an issue of the victims, not the perpetrators.
And congrats to Tîm rygbi’r undeb cenedlaethol Cymru for their entirely legal slaughter of Australia.
congrats to Tîm rygbi’r undeb cenedlaethol Cymru
Diolch!
you need to ask yourself
I do not.
The Bell Curve fanpersons show surprisingly little interest in the overwhelmingly strongest association between genes and behaviour. You might almost think that they were not completely honest with themselves about their actual motivation, but I repress the uncharitable thought. They tell me that they are just bravely facing uncomfortable facts, and I cannot doubt the word of such respectable folk. Genetic Determinism is Where It’s At.
“The Danish language does not officially carry a male equivalent for the (often pejorative) term “career woman” or a female equivalent for the male-gendered noun “financier”. ”
I proudly declare that masculine Russian kar’yerist “career-ist” is totally (not “frequently”) pejorative.
“it won’t stop people from whining about political correctness, but who cares? And just to head off objections from the easily triggered:”
I think “whining” is here to trigger objections:)
Stepping back a bit, it sounds like the morphological processes in Danish by which you can get from an X-mand into a corresponding X-kvinde or from a Y-kvinde into a corresponding Y-mand are extremely productive and predictable (orthographically and otherwise). So why do you need a spelling dictionary to tell you whether you can apply those processes in a particular context? I mean, unless you’re some loser bureaucrat whose ability to use your own L1 is constrained by what the dictionary does or doesn’t explicitly mention.
It is well known, of course, that men are much more likely to commit violent crimes than women—and that this is true across pretty much all cultures. What is less well known (and, in my experience, the opposite often seems to be believed) is that men are also substantially more likely to be the victims of violent crimes. The sex disparity among victims is not like the overwhelming disparity seen among perpetrators, but nonetheless, most murders, for example, involve men who are angry at other men.
@Brett: True, but even I for rhetorical purposes am not going to suggest that feminist activist groups are hypocrites for not trying to increase female representation in the homicide-victim demographic. Let them start smoking more cigarettes first, and we’ll work up gradually from there.
The Bell Curve fanpersons show surprisingly little interest in the overwhelmingly strongest association between genes and behaviour.
Not my observation. I think they tend to talk a lot about the idea that men are “innately” more violent and aggressive than women. And see it as a positive.
Lars: That is a long time, I suppose you can keep it 🙂
Ant: That’s a jibe from a Norwegian point of view, rather than an English one 🙂
Although the odd thing about -nd (if I’m remembering correctly) is that it’s unetymological, whereas I think English’s besetting sin is hanging on to etymological but unnecessary letters like the b in debt.
All bureaucrats are losers, then. Since there actually is a law, a bureaucrat using afholdskvinde without the sanction of Dansk Sprognævn would risk the censure of the local gentlemen from Tunbridge Wells. (There’s a stereotype for you. Are all peevers male?)
They are behind the curve anyway, we the woke want afholdsperson. (And there are people who will be triggered by the inclusion of such words in Retskrivningsordbogen. The main discussion currently is about student groups trying to deplatform lecturers with culturally conservative opinions because those opinions make them feel unsafe, and the other side telling them to man up and actually engage with the science. But words have power, and reaction sets in far from the central issue when a word is seen as a token of cultural development that cultural conservatives don’t like).
@The other Lars: There was a supposed rationale for kunne (infinitive) vs kunde (preterite) (and the others), as if the preterite originally had an inflectional -d-. Well, it did in PGer (cf G könnte), but in ON it’s kunna/kunna so the rationale is fake anyway, or maybe it was just a calque of German. (However that may be, the distinction was removed in 1948 when plural verb forms and capitalized Nouns were also abandoned and Å was introduced. FWIW, these words are all present-preterites [and modal verbs]). EDIT: Plural verb forms were not mentioned in the 1948 law, maybe they never made it into the first official orthography around 1890 or maybe people just stopped using them. They hadn’t been used in speech for a few hundred years anyway.
Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells is of common gender
@Lars: The plural forms of the verbs were part of the official orthography, see e.g. this executive order: https://www.retsinformation.dk/eli/lta/1892/24
Their usage was later made optional by another executive order in 1900: https://www.retsinformation.dk/eli/lta/1900/184
This ruling was only formally rescinded by the Orthography Act in 1997, but by then, of course, no-one had been using plural forms for ages: https://www.retsinformation.dk/eli/lta/1997/332
I think “whining” is here to trigger objections:)
It’s definitely cheeky!
@Jen, it’s only unetymological when it isn’t etymological. In the current state of the standard there is no difference between the final consonants in mand and hund, but as Swedish mann and hund show, the former originally had /-nː/ and the latter /-nd/. These fell together as /-ɲː/ in Danish (only), and they all got spelled -nd. So it wasn’t exactly a case of “I think a d would look good here.” Unlike for instance Voigt pronounced /foːg̥d̥/ which goes back to status games of German petty nobility.
@Jesper, thanks. I note that kunne was also the plural present of kan. I am now curious if finge and ginge were still in use, even though they are not mentioned. (Those are the old plural preterites of få and gå, where the singular forms fik and gik lost a nasal when the final was devoiced). And not allowing plurals for short-vowelled preterite stems was probably prudent, since the singular preterite stem was never designed for that use. (Mediaeval lays had forms like loge for the plural preterite of le, which is very etymological but clearly not something you wanted to bother late 19th century school children with. The Swedes were more hard core, I’ve seen texts from the 1940s that used {strong] lupo for what is now [weak] löpte).
I believe “landmand” (“farmer”) is gender-neutral, but I’m not quite at home in Danish. DDO/ordnet.dk *seems* to agree … (by the way, an excellent resource)
Danish ginge and gå come from two different proto-Germanic roots, but they merged together just like in German. Presumably the similarity in the meanings and the initial consonants was what drove the merger. I’m not certain to what extent English usage ever really had similar gang words as suppletive past forms for go, but they were ultimately replaced by the even more obviously suppletive past of wend.
I want to say that it’s a very deep derivational relationship. There’s a parallel between gange and gå and the verbs fange “catch” and få “get”. The Scandinavian languages have the preterites gik/gikk/gjekk/gick of gå and fik/fikk/fekk/fick of få. (Archaic Nynorsk also has the presents gjeng ~ feng.)
I’m confused by the grammatical terms as usual, but Scots tends to present ‘gang’, past ‘gaed’, which feels a bit back to front.
In practice, the pair stå/stande works like gå/gange — stande supplies the “strong” preterite stod, like gik, but I haven’t encountered a different plural stem for that. (The vowel is long so maybe stode was felt to be cromulent, whereas something like gikke would look and sound silly letting ginge be preserved. Just guessing here). It may be that the -n- in the present is the nasal infix, in which case there wouldn’t have been a plural preterite stVnde to preserve.
Anyway, this leads to the funky imperatives in archaizing Stat op, min sjæl and Gak til myren og bliv vis. (And no, there is no fak, you rarely need an imperative of that verb). Which is really all I wanted to say, bye.
Yes, stå ~ stande as well.
I meant to add that fakke is an old-fashioned alternative to fange. Å fakke kjeltringer “catching scoundrels”. I believe that must be backformed from the imperative.
Lars M.: These fell together as /-ɲː/ in Danish (only), and they all got spelled -nd.
There”s palatalization of [n:] in Norwegian, but it’s a Northern feature, so not obviously areal with Danish.
…has a strong tendency to go underreported.
Oh, worse.
“lecturers with culturally conservative opinions” – I don’t know what any of my numerous lecturers thinks about gender:/ We discussed many things informally, privately or during lectures, and gender is just not one of them:(((((
The UN website has aggregated reported homicide stats from around the world (obviously with some likely considerable country-to-country variation in data quality), and while a higher male propensity for being a homicide victim is ubiquitous, the M-F ratios vary quite dramatically from place to place. From a quick skim, it looks like the only place in the world where in some-but-not-all-years in the last decade females have outperformed males when it comes to being homicide victims is one specific area of Mitteleuropa: Czechia/Austria/Switzerland. Plus (again only in certain years) Latvia for some reason. (Adding Liechtenstein seems dubious – it has years with 1 female victim and 0 male victims and other years with 1 male victim and 0 female victims.)
It looks like there’s generally more dramatic country-to-country variation in the male-victim rate than in the female-victim rate, so the countries that are closer to parity tend to be those with generally low rates. The countries with notably high female-victim rates (e.g. El Salvador, Jamaica, South Africa …) have much higher male-victim rates and are very far away from male-female parity.
In the U.S., the general consensus seems to be that the homicide stats are pretty good – certainly better than the stats for all other sorts of crime. I don’t think I’ve heard a claim that there’s suspected to be a material M-v-F skew in the U.S. stats in whatever inevitable imperfections remain, but I suppose there could be elsewhere.
https://dataunodc.un.org/dp-intentional-homicide-victims
@LH, I can’t object, I don’t know much about Danish and Danish sexism. I sympathise to wider use of feminine forms in Russian. I normally do not object to adding words to a dictionary:)
So if whining is what people whose views on gender roles are similar but views on language are different should do, I can’t contribute.
“wider use of feminine forms”
First, I don’t like euphemism treadmills. What does it mean?
If you tell me that “Klingon” has certain connotations which I don’t like (I have Klingon wife and children) my reaction is using it more often in a positive way. Coining a new, good word for Klingons sounds like an absolutely horrible idea: like a recognition that something is wrong about Klingons.
Then in my head I’ll have two forms, one euphemistic and one disrespectful.
I do not want to have both Klingonophoby and Klingonophobophoby in my head, I just don’t want to let K-phoby in, and those two forms would exactly provoke having these two phobies.
In the society (which I don’t care much about) the outcome of such a reform also looks horrible: now K-phobes can praise the wonderful richness of the English language which happens to have a disrespectful form for Klingons.
But my reaction is not based on a calculation. I don’t like connotations, so I attack what I don’t like, the connotations. Not the form. Attacking the form feels like (and is) reinforcing what I don’t like.
Second, even if the scheme “teacher(m) can mean Teacher and the feminine word can’t” is not evil, it annoys me.
Combined these two points mean: when someone uses a female form in a context when application of a male form to female referent is expected, I like it.
And I like informal register.
Formal and poetic register represent language of men, and language of men in older more segregated society. Informally when you say “my teacher asked me…” you are thinking about her voice and looks and everything, about her as a person, not function – and gendered words come naturally.
By contrast “teacher” as general name is by definition a function, and “Real Teacher” too is an idealised function (somewhat unlike “genius”).
What happens is that feminine forms are associated with personalised and informal register, where in a gendered langauge we are accustomed to specifying gender.
So if someone uses режиссёрша in a context where a masculine form is expected I’m rather pleased.
But the recent feminist trend is different: режиссёрка. Perhaps for shock value.
@Trond, få = ‘get’ and fange = ‘catch’ do not really overlap in Danish (any more; in 1922 fange is noted as an obsolete/poetic side form of få), unlike the other pairs. I would be willing to believe in fak as the imperative of fange, but it’s not noted in the ODS which goes back to about 1700 in its citations and includes dialectal forms. (And nor are other forms without the -n-, apart from the preterite fik).
It would otherwise be very popular with school boys since the allophony of /a/ makes it pretty close to E fuck. I have actually seen the spelling fak as the nativized form of fuck on occasion; whether anybody actually analysed it into Danish phonemes that way (before ESL was a thing in schools) is a good question.
@jwb
I suspect that in some jurisdictions with low murder rates (maybe also those with high murder rates), the victim and perp genders are skewed by organised crime, i.e., gang or mafia activity, where the gang or mafia structures are even more “traditional” than society at large.
In the U.S., the general consensus seems to be that the homicide stats are pretty good – certainly better than the stats for all other sorts of crime.
For two reasons, neither of them U.S.-specific:
1) Dead bodies are harder to hide than evidence of other violent crimes.
2) The definition of “unlawful homicide” is pretty universal, unlike “assault” or “rape” where there is a lot of variability among different legal systems.
@Lars (& @Trond): Nor does Brøndum-Nielsen’s very comprehensive eight-volume Gammeldansk Grammatik know of any imperative fak.
Do we know for sure that such a form ever existed in any language? It isn’t attested for Old Norse either, as far as I can see, whereas gakk is attested as the imperative of ganga.
The two verbs are different in Proto-Germanic as well, in that ‘gå/gange’ is *gāną & *ganganą, imp. *gai & *gang, whereas ‘få/fange’ is *fanhaną, imp. *fanh. I guess that may well account for the assymetry.
Beyond John C.’s two points* there is a third factor which is certainly not unique to the U.S. but on the other hand is certainly not universal worldwide even in the 21st century, viz. the right combination of institutional capacity/competence and social/cultural norms to ensure that: a) almost all dead bodies that turn up are reported to The Authorities; and b) that The Authorities then investigate rather than ignore and do a typically competent (not 100% perfect) job of assessing cause of death and properly allocating the death among high-level categories like homicide / suicide / accident / “natural causes.” So just skimming the variation in the UN stats one is confronted with fairly obvious questions like “does South Africa really have the highest homicide rate in Africa (out of the subset of countries for which the UN even has numbers) or is it just unusually good at data collection for the region?” or “does Bolivia really have the lowest-or-second-lowest homicide rate in Latin American or is it just unusually bad at ditto.”
*JC’s point 2 is more correct than not – it is obviously easy to get overly focused on the edge cases where different jurisdictions treat them differently and lose sight of how small a percentage of the total universe of killings they may be. But for one genre of edge case where there would be a predictable M-F skew in the stats depending on how local law (either in theory or in practice) treats it, consider the following semi-upbeat wording from wikipedia: “Legislation on this issue varies, but today the vast majority of countries no longer allow a husband to legally murder a wife for adultery …”
Strongly agree with both of JWB’s points.
@Rasmus, I think the conclusion is that it probably didn’t, despite the infinitive side form fakke that Trond reported.
ODS does report the jocular formation at gakke based on the imperative gak (in a paraphrase of Genesis 16:4 from a 1908 slang dictionary): [Sara] siger til Abraham: “Se, Herren haver tillukket mig. Gak til min Pige.” . . Og Abraham gakkede til Pigen – og hun undfik. (“conceive” is normally undfange, not undfå. The form undfik is also a joke).
Thus fakke from †fak is not implausible.
One of the examples in How To Lie with Statistics is that you may be able to get much better information about the rates of disease prevalence by looking at reported death rates, rather than reported infection numbers. The difference is that there may be much better quality and consistency in reporting causes of death.
It seems that what the Danish Language Council is doing is in large part the opposite of gender neutrality. Instead they’re forcing the identification of gender where it’s not required. It’s as if we English-speakers had created firewoman and mailwoman instead of adopting fire fighter and letter carrier, and that instead of abandoning doctress and manageress we’d introduced professoress and paintress.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding. I’d be happy to be corrected.
PS- after I wrote this, it occurred to me that Duh! perhaps Danish has gendered nouns! But a little research advised me that long ago Danish stopped gendering nouns by sex, so that shouldn’t be a problem in the effort to rid the language of stereotypes.
Hence the emphasis on “excess deaths” in estimates of the impact of COVID-19.
It’s as if we English-speakers had created firewoman and mailwoman instead of adopting fire fighter and letter carrier, and that instead of abandoning doctress [var. doctoress] and manageress we’d introduced professoress and paintress.
English had all of these but one: the OED does not record mailwoman, though it does have postwoman. So the question is why women who were able to join these professions in Anglophonia pressed for getting the masculine label rather than a common-gender label or a separate-but-equal feminine label. (Some of these, says the OED, have intermediate ph(r)ases with woman or BrE lady: thus doct(o)ress was replaced first by woman doctor and/or lady doctor before becoming simply doctor. (Of course, woman doctor, with compounding stress, can still mean ‘gynecologist’, and Melvin Belli was once described as a woman lawyer because so many of his personal-injury clients were female.)
Americans tend to be allergic to the whole notion of “separate but equal” because of Brown v. Board of Education and other race-equality cases establishing that separate was inherently unequal, and this pops up by implication in the OED’s 1992 citation for paintress from the Torygraph: “Joan Eardley, a Scottish paintress of splodgy landscapes and slum children”, which is surely meant to be derogatory.
(My HTML Award, please?)
Awarded!
@Bloix: Danish does have gendered nouns, but Danish merged the original masculine and feminine genders into a common gender (contrasting with a neuter gender), so “en mand” and “en kvinde” aren’t distinguished on the basis of grammatical gender (any more), both belonging to the common gender (as opposed to, for instance, “et barn”).
I wouldn’t say that the Danish Language Council is forcing anything, though. They’re just choosing to include in their orthographical dictionary a number of (lesser known, but still attested) female versions of some profession terms that may be construed as inherently semantically male (because they include ‘-mand’). The council is not mandating that these words be used. Most people will still unproblematically continue to refer to a female firefighter using the traditional term ‘brandmand’, the alternative ‘brandkvinde’ probably seeing very little use.
An interesting point that your post made me think of is that this could be said to run counter to an older tendency in mid-twentieth century Danish where gendered professional titles were abolished. In the fifties a female school teacher would be called a ‘lærerinde’ (‘teacher-ess’) and an actress would be a ‘skuespillerinde’, whereas today those terms are seen as old-fashioned and low key sexist, and everyone uses ‘lærer’ (teacher) and ‘skuespiller’ (actor), regardless of sex. This new trend of creating complimentary female terms seems very limited to certain classes of nouns, primarily those that end in ‘-mand’.
Au contraire, there are a number of specific contexts/domains, such as public restrooms and sports competition, where Americans are mostly perfectly fine with overt/complete segregation by sex although they would not be fine with segregation by race (at least unless it was de facto and done surreptitiously with some plausible deniability). This background being-fine-with-it-ness is in fact what makes controversies about comparatively small groups of individuals as to whom there is a lack of overwhelming consensus into which box (or if into any box) they should be sorted so intense. See also the persistence (mostly but not entirely at K-12 level) of single-sex schools: even if much less common than they used to be they do not violate a taboo the way an explicitly single-race school would.
So there are presumably reasons why for most occupations Americans these days do not feel the need for gendered nouns for those engaged in the relevant craft or trade, but I’m not sure that’s it. I do think that historically some of the -ess forms had a pejorative undertone, but not all. A poetess or paintress might well be a dilettante, but the same assumption would not be so present about an aviatrix or lady lawyer, however unusual they might seem. Note also the historical decline in usage/acceptability of “Jewess” and ditto for “Negress” at a time when “Negro” still remained current in mainstream discourse.
@Rasmus, @ Lars M.: I don’t claim a full parallel between få/fange and gå/gange (and stå/stande), just similar mixes of analogical extensions and levelings. I don’t know what to make of it except that the “very deep derivational relationship” must go back to PIE or earlier.
Rasmus- I didn’t say that Danish has no grammatical “genders.” I said that “a long time ago Danish stopped gendering nouns by sex.” As far as I can tell, you agree. And you also agree, I think, that Danish does have nouns that identify human beings by their “gender” in the non-grammatical sense and that it is creating more of such words. And lastly, we agree, I think, that the unusual grammatical gender of Danish, while interesting, is irrelevant to this discussion.
JW Brewer – When I first looked for work, the Washington Post had two sets of ads – Help Wanted-Men and Help Wanted-Women. As a teenaged boy, I didn’t think much of it. I now understand that those ads were discriminatory, and today, if I were an employer who didn’t understand it, a judge would explain it to me.
Today, if your taxes are complicated, you get an accountant. If you manage an apartment building, you look for tenants. If you’re getting married, you find a wedding photographer. It’s not relevant to your needs whether these people are male or female, or if they identify themselves in some other way.
So, in the US, it’s widely agreed by people of good faith that best practice is to omit gender-identifiers when using occupational and similar terminology. We don’t create new words like tenantess, photographress and we get rid of words like doctress, manageress. The Danish “solution” appears to be, at least in some cases, the opposite – to make it necessary to use gender-identifying terminology. I don’t see how this is “gender neutral.” It appears to me that it advances the interests of people who do indeed want to discriminate on the basis of gender.
I’m trying hard not to divert this thread into a discussion of gender as a question of a person’s identity versus gender as an objective biological or psychological fact, a hotly contested question which I’ve concluded is irrelevant to whatever the Danes are up to. The Danish project seems to me to be objectionable wherever you stand on current gender debates. There are lots of terminology disputes arising out of those debates – the shibboleths pile so high that you can’t open your mouth without uttering one – but a putative need for more gendered nouns isn’t one of them.
So I can’t come up with a reason for the Danish project other than “we want to make it easier to discriminate against women and to invoke stereotypes against them.” I feel that this must be wrong, but I can’t see how it’s wrong.
As I said, perhaps I’m misunderstanding. I hope so.
@Bloix, given that we haven’t come up with a equivalent to firefighter (yet), brandmand used to be the only cromulent word for fireman. And as long as brandkvinde was not in the dictionary, a civil servant would in principle be in breach of their employment contract if they used the word. I don’t think many Danes feel any kind of dissonance in kvindelig brandmand (or landmand = ‘farmer’ etc).
Note that DS is not creating new male-gendered words, they are filling gaps where the current state of the lexicon only has a word that is male-gendered on the surface for an occupation or personal characteristic. The actual list is one of possible additions to the next edition that will be considered by an expert committee, and it does not seem to be publicly available. (I actually read the referenced article in Danish now).
Fun fact: The Danish researcher uses the word nullermand = ‘piece of lint’ as an example of words that don’t need a parallel word in -kvinde, as well as nordmand, but the Guardian clearly thought the former was too weird.
Also, personally I do feel a slight cognitive dissonance when calling a Norwegian woman a nordmand, but on the other hand nordkvinde is hard to recognize (the nord morpheme is not specific to Norway) and seems like making a point that doesn’t urgently need to be made; if physical gender is important, there are other means to express it. (Swedish has norsk/norskar and norska/norskor for male/mixed and female Norwegians, respectively (sg/pl), but that’s ancient and applies to most nationalities. IIRC, there are even pairs like amerikan/amerikanska).
Have anyone suggested Semitic second person morphemes for people who don’t identify as male or female?
So, in the US, it’s widely agreed by people of good faith that best practice is to omit gender-identifiers when using occupational and similar terminology.
We anglophones now think of ourselves as omitting them, but we do so by using forms that used to be firmly masculine. If prior to the last few decades[*] a woman-who-acts-a-part were called an actor, she would probably complain of being (what is now called) misgendered, just as much as if a woman-in-general were referred to as a man today. “There are ten men working in this office, five of whom are female”?? I think not. But that’s the reaction a German-speaking woman-who-studies would have if she were called ein Student, whereas her anglophone counterpart would take being called a student for granted, though originally both terms were equally masculine.[**] (How it worked in Imperial Russia.)
We don’t create new words like tenantess, photographress
Both photographeress and photographess are on record.
and we get rid of words like doctress, manageress. The Danish “solution” appears to be, at least in some cases, the opposite – to make it necessary to use gender-identifying terminology
Not necessary, just possible.
[*] Women did not perform on the stage in England until 1660, but after that both actor and actress were current for a while until actor passed out of use for women around 1715. Bailey’s Dictionary (1721) defines actor and actress the same way, whereas Johnson’s (1755) makes a clear distinction of gender, with definitions beginning “He that” and “She that”.
[**] Analogously, freedom of religion allows you to wear any sort of religious symbol at school, where laïcite means that you are not allowed to wear any such symbols.
Women did not perform on the stage in England until 1660
There were plenty roles written for women, usually played by beardless youths.
So was there a distinct term for actor-who-plays-female parts? Or were they merely understudy ‘actors’? (These days we have ‘cross-dresser’. Did Danny La Rue count as an actor? (wikip says ‘entertainer’.) Dame Edna?)
The Grauniad assiduously sticks to a house style of calling actresses “actors” nowadays. It still causes me to double-take, but then I am extremely old.
(Obviously actrix is the only possible correct form for describing a female stage player.)
I get the impression that “actor” carries an air of a Serious Practitioner of the Craft, whereas an “actress” might be that, or might be just a pretty face. Which is why many female actors prefer to be called “actors”.
I get the impression that “actor” carries an air of a Serious Practitioner of the Craft, whereas an “actress” might be that, or might be just a pretty face
I do not, in my native language.
Actually before you wrote that I even wondered, why I dn’t feel anything like this – is it because actor/actress are so strongly associated with (male/female) appearance, voice etc.?
To be clear, I think this is a recent and specific development, distinct from the standard devaluing of women in various professions. It’s the added respect attached to the term “actor”, beyond the masculine default.
If the motive for calling actresses actors is indeed that it’s more dignified-like, it seems to me that people might profitably reflect on just why they suppose that “actress” is a less prestigious term than “actor”, and address that issue rather than going for the Rectification of Names gambit.
If I myself were an actress (sadly, I’ve left it too late now) I should be thinking about reclaiming the term, I think.
It’s not as if “great actress” has ever been regarded as an oxymoron.
I think in the Grauniad’s particular case it’s probably just a manifestation of a general desire to ditch all occupational names which imply sex, regardless of the details of how the differentiation functions on a case-by-case basis. I can see the logic of that, and also the convenience of short-circuiting any deeper consideration of tricky and contentious issues by having a one-size-fits-all policy ready-made.
I have known a number of actresses, and I’m pretty sure they all preferred the term “actor.” There is something dignified-like about it, I must say.
I suppose the proper solution would be to go with whatever the acting-person in question prefers, but unfortunately that is probably unworkable in practice, unless they all adopt a policy of referring to themselves as “Herbert Beerbohm Tree (actor)” or “Sarah Bernhardt (actress)” or something.
It occurs to me that the relevant unions or trade associations may in fact have canvassed their members about this, so the media (at least human-friendly ones like the Guardian) are just using the term that the majority do themselves prefer; if so, quite right too.
Does anybody here Actually Know?
etymonline suggests ‘actrice’ (Fr.) sometimes used as an alternative. Then usages links to
The dignified-like would want to distance themselves from that, methinks. (And why only of female stage/screen professionals?)
I’m always leery of attempts to address real-world problems by tweaking the names we use in talking about them, and I much admire the unbowed awkward squad who fight to reclaim “pejorative” terms for their own use.
I must admit that this is an ivory-tower attitude, though. How we name things does affect how we deal with them, and a rose does not smell as sweet by any other name. (“Bleeding dung-weed” …)
In a world where female actors consistently get paid less than male actors it seems (unfortunately) all too likely that having separate terms for the groups really does exacerbate the problem, even if it would be entirely harmless in my Utopia.
Et sic de similibus.
“To be clear, I think this is a recent and specific development, distinct from the standard devaluing of women in various professions. It’s the added respect attached to the term “actor”, beyond the masculine default.”
@Y, to be clear, what I feel about aktyór and aktrísa (note: the latter is < actrice, not actresse) is also different from what usually happens to names in various professions.
This is why I was wondering why I don't feel any difference.
"Actor" for me in a man in another man's dress, and "actress" is a woman in another woman's dress.
Other than usual slight effects of using masc. for the abstract name of the function (as opposed to a person) I feel no difference.
Meanwhile I'm quite sensitive and usually I do, and it annoys me.
Also if I associate some words for some X (say, teacher) allow an image of a Real X (Real Teacher), no such image for "actor" in my head.
I don't know, maybe because of the competition with artíst
As I pointed above, the scheme “Real [masc. X]” for women is annoying, it just doesn’t work here for me .
Also I think supporters of replacement of names miss something. If you say that saying “you are real/true fem.Freind” is unserious and I should say “real m.Freind” instead, my instinctive reaction is “this guy just insulted my female friends” [well, depends how you say it. If you merely say that the former sounds less serious to you, I won’t feel offended].
What they are missing is that their strategy too can be offensive to people.
It is just two incompatible emotional reactions.
Compare people who sometimes don’t want to discuss traumatic memories, and some other times they talk to someone and find that the trauma has healed. Now if you force the former group to talk and the latter to keep silence, both will suffer.
Actor/actress is a particularly odd candidate for degendering since sex (or perceived gender, or what have you) remains a BFOQ (to use American lawyer jargon) in the relevant industry. When acting-persons are being hired for a movie or tv show or play etc., the script generally dictates that for the more important roles only male ones will be considered for role A and only female ones for role B etc. And making casting decisions on that basis does not (in the U.S.) violate the statutes against sex discrimination in employment. A part where the casting director is genuinely open-minded going in as to whether a male or female will be cast is almost by definition a minor part. Thus, the sex of a particular acting-person is frequently salient in a very concrete way that we would at least like to believe the sex of a particular dentist or deliverer of mail is or or at least ought not be.
To the extent David E. is concerned about pay disparities, this is more likely to be the dynamic that drives that, when combined with different supply:demand ratios on the respective sides of the M/F divide.
To Bloix’s concern about want-ads and the like, I would just say that overtly sex-segregated want-ads (absent a BFOQ situation) became unlawful in the U.S. several decades before the decline of certain gendered occupational descriptors and we managed. E.g. a restaurant would advertise that it was looking to hire “waiters/waitresses.” A few more characters, but workable. I think in more consistently gendered languages like German there are typographical forms like “Lehrer(innen)” or “Lehrer:innen” that are intended to be understood as portmanteaux of the masc and fem plurals.
And of course in the U.S. we somewhere along the way innovated the jargony-but-epicene mass noun “waitstaff” to refer to an undifferentiated lump of waiters and/or waitresses. I don’t know if it has a singulative?
I’m sure similar approaches are available in Danish.
Separately, I assume the motivation for replacing waiter/waitress with “server” rather than just declaring waitresses to be waiters going forward is that, apparently unlike “actor,” “waiter” is not perceived to be all dignified-like.
I think it was here that I saw a report on a study about the (non-negligible) correlation between grammatical gender in German and how animals were depicted in children’s books. Also IIRC, my morning radio recently reported on something similar for Danish profession names and human males and females.
I don’t remember exactly how responses were scored–maybe something like measuring a “surprise signal” with an MRI scanner if the biological gender in a picture was not the same as the traditional majority gender for the profession. I.e., female firefighters, male nurses, female surgeons. (The word kirurg is not gendered on the surface).
My takeaway is that starting to use gender-neutral profession names will not reduce the level of prejudice in people’s mind. I suspect you could set up a similar test and tell people that they will be seeing a male or a female actor, and they will still expect to see Indiana and Bridget Jones respectively.
Does anybody remember “waitron”? (It was an ’80s thing.)
@JWB, of course there are workarounds in Danish, but people still like the dictionary to tell them if the gender-specific words are “permitted”.
And yes, I remember waitron, though I always felt it was not totally serious.
Re “waitron,” the desire to treat low-status human beings like machines is a perennial one, but I suppose the fact that machines are genderless allows one to add a certain progressive/egalitarian spin to it.
drasvi: clearly your Russian usage is different from my English usage… For comparison, to me “movie star” signifies a person who is doing well in the movie acting profession, who may be brilliant, or just very competent, or occasionally neither. “Actor” has connotations of the stage, of Shakespeare, and of deep artistry (1), apart from those of a male acting person (2). Helen Mirren is an actor, sense 1, as well as an actress; Sean Penn is an actor, senses 1 and 2; Tom Cruise is an actor, sense 2.
It seems to be the German practice of Frauen sichtbar machen “making women visible”. Unlike in Danish, all the simple forms (including e.g. Chirurg) are explicitly masculine in German, and Mann has been limited to adult males for centuries*, so treating the masculine as generic sweeps all the women under the carpet.
* except for the few years when a woman was Landeshauptmann “governor” of Styria because the title legally existed only in the male form. That awkward oversight was fixed pretty quickly, and Landeshauptfrau is now unremarkable.
I hear “waitron” used jokingly, to avoid gendering, and to avoid the formal and dull “server”, not to mention the horrible “waitperson”.
There is something very ’80s about it, from the spread of yuppies and pretentious restaurants, to the love of robots.
@dm
Does one hear “Jawohl, Frau Hauptfrau!” in the army?
That’s a good question. If any woman has attained that rank yet, I actually guess “yes”.
I mean, it does strike me as a bit funny, but the military, of course, has no sense of awkwardness whatsoever. The Austrian Bundesheer unblinkingly puts BH “bra” on its numberplates.
@PlasticPaddy:
(Regarding the military of Germany, not Austria.)
It’s “Frau” + Dienstgrad (rank), so the answer to your question depends on whether a Dienstgrad (like “Hauptmann” has a feminine form or not). AFAIK there are no feminine forms, and the correct address is “Frau Hauptmann”.
This solution seems to have the merit of simplicity and practicality, at least, but it’s not hard to see how it can be somewhat jarring in light of the ongoing evolution of language usage (outside the military). So, unsurprisingly, there has been discussion that the Bundeswehr might introduce feminine forms of Dienstgrade. AFAIK it’s still only under discussion. (I didn’t find on-line sources worth quoting, sorry.)
As far as I have followed these things, the practice in the German army is to say Frau Hauptmann . There is a debate about whether to introduce female forms, and while Hauptfrau is a contender, it has the drawback that it usually means “main wife” (in a polygamous marriage). The other option discussed is Hauptmännin.
“Frau Hauptmann” has the same structure as English vocative phrases like “Madam Chairman.” That one has an interesting trendline on the google n-gram viewer – steadily (if not smoothly) increasing as the 20th century went on and the number of women occupying a “chairman” sort of role increased, peaking in the early 1980’s, and then rapidly declining as the -man suffix become more widely viewed as awkward or problematic when applied to a woman.
In Washington, DC, the leader of our local legislature (the DC Council) has the title “chairman”, as defined in the home rule charter. In 1997 a woman, Linda Cropp, was elected to that position and held it until 2007, and I believe the title “chairman” was applied to her in most cases. Over the years, “chair” and “chairperson” have become more common in unofficial use, but the law has never been changed. I assume a charter amendment would be approved by the voters pretty easily, but the council has never bothered. Of course nowadays there’s the risk that Republicans in Congress might take offense to such a “woke” move and interfere.
Of course German (unlike e.g. many, perhaps all, Baltic/Slavic languages) does not inflect surnames for gender, including occupational-by-etymology surnames ending in -mann. So, Frau Hoffmann, Frau Neumann, Frau Zimmermann usw. Is this thought a problem in need of a solution by the “Frauen sichtbar machen” movement, or does it just get slotted into a different conceptual box in people’s minds so the same critique does not arise?
Women did not perform on the stage in England until 1660
But Englishpersons might have witnessed actual female actors abroad, say in Venice. What did they write about that?
“Frau Hauptmann” has the same structure as English vocative phrases like “Madam Chairman.”
In the same sense as “Barry White” has the same structure as “white Barry”?
I’m called David Eddyshaw, yet I am not myself either a he-goat or a ridge (whatever you may have heard.)
https://www.ancestry.com.au/name-origin?surname=hithersay
“Same structure” in the sense that the honorific specifies that the addressee is understood to be female and thus will override any default inference from the immediately-following office-title that the addressee is male-unless-otherwise-specified. Or perhaps for some you should substitute “will create cognitive dissonance given” for “override.”
Lillian Cooperperson.
So was there a distinct term for actor-who-plays-female parts?
Boy, as far as I can make out, though note that player seems (I haven’t counted) to be more usual than actor right up through Johnson’s time if not later (Boswell refers to Garrick as “a great player”).
Actor/actress is a particularly odd candidate for degendering since sex (or perceived gender, or what have you) remains a BFOQ (to use American lawyer jargon) in the relevant industry.
I agree, which is why I have some resistance to calling women actors.
except for the few years when a woman was Landeshauptmann “governor” of Styria because the title legally existed only in the male form
Maria of Anjou was crowned Rex Hungariae in 1382 at age 11, but after several years in and out of power she was forced to marry Sigismund of Luxembourg (later Emperor) who ruled Hungary and Croatia jure uxoris until her death in 1395.
the military, of course, has no sense of awkwardness whatsoever
Carrying guns (or for that matter swords) about seems to do a great deal to compensate for feelings of awkwardness, though it does leave you open to Freudian jokes.
Private Eye used consistently to refer to John Betjeman as John Betjeperson, which always seemed oddly appropriate for some reason.
I think the trouble is that “person” has a sort of air of Winnie-the-Poohness about it which makes it hard to take seriously. English lacks a nice blunt monosyllable for “human being of unspecified sex.”
Maria of Anjou
That excellent female role model (whom I have often recommended to my daughter) the Empress Wu was in fact called 皇帝 “Emperor”, there being no precedent for a regnant empress.
Similarly, the perhaps somewhat less role-modellish (blinded and deposed her son, though I expect he deserved it) Empress Irene called herself βασιλεύς, and quite right too.
Ms. Cooperperson is a fine example of the great American tradition of re-invention and self-invention but does not appear to have inspired a larger trend. Separately I am mildly puzzled by why an immigrant family named Kuppermann or Kupfermann who wanted to Americanize their surname would have stopped at “Cooperman” and not gone all the way to the echt-Anglo-Saxon “Cooper.”
Separately, there are of course creaky old jokes about feminists* who objected to the masculine morpheme they spied in “person” and preferred “perdaughter.” Frauen sichtbar machen!
*Some of which of course were told by feminists who were gently mocking their own faction’s perceived kooks and flakes. I don’t affirmatively know of this objection being raised non-jocularly, but I guess you can’t exclude the possibility that it actually happened. The Seventies, man.
Of course, once upon a time English *did* have a “nice blunt monosyllable for ‘human being of unspecified sex,’” namely “mann.” Unfortunately when the separate nice blunt monosyllable for “explicitly male adult human being” (“wer”) drifted into non-use, the semantic scope of “mann” gobbled up that as well, leading to our present predicament.
The solution is to speak Kusaal instead:
dau “adult male human being”
pu’a “adult female human being”
nid “human being”
Simple. (And all of them monosyllables.)
Women actors (1611).
“Here I observed certaine things that I never saw before. For I saw women acte, a thing that I never saw before, though I have heard that it hath beene sometimes used in London, and they performed it with as good a grace, action, gesture, and whatsoever convenient for a Player, as ever I saw any masculine Actor.”
Or speak koine. It is true that the New Testament’s nominees (aner/gyne/anthropos) are all polysyllabic. Perhaps folks weren’t in so much of a rush in those days?
@David Eddyshaw: Actually, Empress Irene’s charters and coinage used feminine forms of her titles much more frequently than the traditionally male versions.
reflect on just why they suppose that “actress” is a less prestigious term than “actor”
Probably because it still carries a lingering implication of ‘whore’, with which it was explicitly synonymous until the pioneering work of W.S. Gilbert (in between writing and directing the Savoy Operas). Indeed, every word for a female professional, starting with madam (the title of the Queen Regnant, for Ghu’s sake!) is tainted with the implicature that women have only one profession.
I’m called David Eddyshaw, yet I am not myself either a he-goat or a ridge (whatever you may have heard.)
Nor was my father named John.
I think the trouble is that “person” has a sort of air of Winnie-the-Poohness about it which makes it hard to take seriously.
Those Etruscans. Funny fellows, comic men, and clowns of private life, one and all.
I am mildly puzzled
Probably whoever did the anglicization did not understand that in English the word is cooper, and simply adapted it piece by piece.
The solution is to speak Kusaal instead
Using a language that pretty much always drops the final syllable is cheating.
Of course German (unlike e.g. many, perhaps all, Baltic/Slavic languages) does not inflect surnames for gender, including occupational-by-etymology surnames ending in -mann.
Just for the historically interested, it did so at least in parts of Germany into the 19th century. As an example of this cf. Louise Millerin, the original title of Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe.
So, Frau Hoffmann, Frau Neumann, Frau Zimmermann usw. Is this thought a problem in need of a solution by the “Frauen sichtbar machen” movement, or does it just get slotted into a different conceptual box in people’s minds so the same critique does not arise?
The latter, as far as I’m aware.
That’s too rare for “usual” to apply.
Now that is inherently ridiculous.
The latter, as you can see from the fact that I didn’t mention it: it didn’t occur to me. 🙂
manisco > Mensch
Looks like it…
Wrongly, too:
cooper = Küfer
copper = Kupfer
Informally in Vienna into the mid-20th, or so I’ve read.
Re “wrongly” anglicized. It was certainly wrongly calqued – the question is whether you anglicize by sound or by semantics (or cognates if you are philologically sophisticated). “Copperman” would correctly calque the morphemes/cognates, but sounds odd in English just because that was never the occupational noun for either a coppersmith or a dealer in copper. (Do we have a word for that? “Coppermonger” is attested in 19th century sources but so infrequently it might have been a nonce coinage each time.)
Indeed, “Copperman” is so rare as a surname in the U.S. that it does not appear in the Census Bureau’s list of the 88,799 most common surnames as of 1990, where “Cooperman” checks in at #15,224 in descending frequency.*
For whatever reasons, “Smith” as an English surname seems to have dominated all more precise terminology for smiths-by-occupation, so “Coppersmith” as a surname is extant but quite rare, and in fact rarer than the pretty-rare “Coopersmith,” which I’m guessing is an anglicization of Kupferschmidt. Wikipedia tells me that the most prominent bearer of the former I could dredge up from memory, the English record producer Vic Coppersmith-Heaven, was in fact born mere Victor Smith – although it does not explain how and why he chose his professional name and I can’t be bothered to google further.
*To get back to the prior theme, bare “Person”** is the 1680th-most-common surname on the list, but for the less common ones on the list that end in -person, it generally indeed looks like -son rather than -person was the relevant morpheme when they were first compounded, e.g. Casperson and Jepperson.
**Maybe a variant of “Parson(s)”? I dunno.
ETA: If “Küfer” is extant as an occupational-etymology surname in German I take it it’s pretty rare, but apparently there were lots of different regional names for the relevant occupation that aren’t cognates of “cooper,” at least one of which (“Fassbinder,” which would calque-via-cognates to “vatbinder”) is extant as a surname – although maybe that’s rare and I only know of it because of one (in)famous bearer.
That’s too rare for “usual” to apply.
Well, maybe I read too many history books and historical novels… in any case, that’s the only use I have encountered in the wild besides it being proposed as female equivalent to Hauptmann. So we only need to decide whether the main (only one used in practice?) meaning of a rare word can be called its usual meaning.
it has the drawback that it usually means “main wife” (in a polygamous marriage)
Pu’akpɛɛm “senior wife” in Kusaal. As throughout the kinship system, seniority refers to chronological priority, not absolute age, so the pu’akpɛɛm is the one who was married first, even if she is actually younger than other wives. She keeps her position of elder-sisterly authority no matter what, so if you’re planning on having several wives, you should think carefully about which one you marry first, chaps.
Maybe a variant of “Parson(s)”? I dunno
Almost certainly. “Parson” is a clerk/dark/varsity form of “person”; compare “McPherson” (which means the same as “McTaggart.”)
Presumably the semantics is along the same lines as “vicar.”
Some of them could be Petersons, I suppose. After all, my own name is from “Hathersage”, and that was from “Haversedge.” People mumble so. Young people just don’t open their mouths properly when they talk nowadays. (And they say “whom of which” when they mean “who.” Civilisation is doomed. Doomed!)
Ironically enough given the etymology shared with “person,” until the lateish 20th century “parson” was an *extremely* male-specific noun as an occupation-descriptor. To the extent it’s archaic (which it feels in AmEng although maybe not across the water) I guess it still would be.
@JWB:
> ETA: If “Küfer” is extant as an occupational-etymology surname in German I take it it’s pretty rare, but apparently there were lots of different regional names for the relevant occupation that aren’t cognates of “cooper,” at least one of which (“Fassbinder,” which would calque-via-cognates to “vatbinder”) is extant as a surname – although maybe that’s rare and I only know of it because of one (in)famous bearer.
“Böttcher” is moderately common in Germany (in the top-500 or so). It’s (much) less common in Denmark.
They do in England; they actually move their jaws when they speak, and instead of reading just their lips, you can read their tongues!
I actually wonder if a whole chain of borrowings along a chain of dialects is to blame.
There’s also at least one Fassbender out there.
Re “Böttcher,” both “Boettcher” and “Bottcher” are in that lengthy 1990 U.S. Census Bureau surnames list, with the former spelling being significantly more common although both are rare. I hadn’t known about him before seeing his name in a news story yesterday, but one of the newer members of the New York City Council (first elected in 2022) is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Bottcher.
Neither “Kufer” nor “Kuefer” is on the list, but approx 9.5% of the U.S. population as of 1990 had surnames so rare as to not make the “Top 88,799” (a non-round number presumably resulting from some “At Least X Total Occurrences Nationwide” criterion) included in the list.
TIL that Cecil Bødker was a woman. (She wrote a popular YA novel series that I read when I was like 13 and just assumed that Cecil was a male name. TIAL that there are twice as many women as men with that name in Denmark. Cecil was also a cigarette brand with very male-oriented marketing, at least as I remember, that may have skewed my perception).
There are roughly 1000 people with the surname Bødker in Denmark, and 56 with Böttcher.
I too would have assumed Cecil was a male name. How do Danes pronounce it?
/se:sil/ for both sexes (and cigarettes). In Danish usage for females it’s probably short for Cecilie /seˈsiːljə/ which is firmly female (probably from French) and don’t ask me why the vowel lengths.
Perhaps also try Böttger, a spelling that makes sense in northern accents.
Hother Bøttger has a street named after him in my town. He was an architect, teacher of drawing, public servant, mayor, and member of the Storting< in the mid-19th century. Henrik Ibsen* was one of his students.
Bøttger is rare in Norway, with less than 50 people carrying as either last or middle name. Hother Bøttger’s father was born in Copenhagen.
* Art by Henrik Ibsen. The first couple of paintings are from his early teens, presumably while he was taught by Bøttger. He left town for an apprenticeship with an apothecary in Grimstad in 1843.
Here’s an intriguing controversy I just randomly became aware of that fits here as well as anywhere else. It should be unsurprising that there is a controversy in some circles (possibly somewhat marginal/collegetown ones) of the Philippine-American community as to whether to adopt/promote “Filipinx” as an allegedly gender-neutral alternative to the gendered “Filipino/Filipina.” But there has been some interesting pushback from a not-the-usual-suspects angle.
“Filipino” seems obviously gendered-and-masculine (even if it might have other wider-scope uses) if you think of it as a Spanish word, which is certainly where it started (and presumably whence it first entered English). But Tagalog and the other indigenous Austronesian languages of the Philippines lack grammatical gender, not just as to nouns generally but even in their third-person-singular pronouns. So from this viewpoint “Filipino” viewed not as a Spanish word but as a Tagalog-etc. word should be taken to be already gender-neutral like any other noun regardless of whether it originally entered the lexicon as a loanword from Spanish. Now, it is historically the case that sometimes Tagalog (etc.) borrowed from Spanish matched masc/fem pairs of words in ROOT-o/ROOT-a, but then the argument is that it well past time for these leftover grammatical badges of colonialism and imperialism to be disclaimed and discarded, whereas an innovation like “Filipinx” simply presupposes, and would thus further embed, the ongoing relevance and validity of this alien morphological intrusion into the languages of the former colonial subjects.
I like that!
“whereas an innovation like “Filipinx” simply presupposes, and would thus further embed, the ongoing relevance and validity of this alien morphological intrusion into the languages of the former colonial subjects.” – “Filipina” too.
Also you need Russkx. Badly.
How many Russkx will fit in a bokx?
The gender-neutral plural is Russkxs:(((((
PS
“:(((((” because teaching natives basics of English grammar (which I happen not to know confidently enough)….
The proponents of the “‘Filipino’ is already gender-neutral because Austronesian” angle have not sought my advice or shared their strategic thinking with me. I would think the logic of their position would imply a desired end-state where “Filipina” has been relegated to the same lexical category as “Jewess” and “Negress” – a somewhat creepy-vibe archaism that respectable people only use in direct quotes of historical texts or perhaps in writing dialogue in historical-setting fiction.
But it might be hard as a practical matter to get from here to there if (as I think is likely) there are a lot of female members of the relevant community out there (perhaps especially in the U.S. diaspora) who *like* the self-identifier “Filipina,” don’t feel like there’s anything problematic about it, and are unlikely to react positively to the suggestion that by using it they’re internalizing the oppression of their ancestors at the hands of the Spaniards etc.
Speakers in the US are certainly under no obligation to use the same linguistic forms as are preferred by those in the Old Country.
@JWB, what you wrote recembles what I was about to write, that the problem can be reformulated as:
1. Many Tagalog speakers who are not male would still find life easier if it were always “Filipino” in English.
2. Many people prefer to be called Filipina.
But I don’t know how to attach “Filipinx” to this or to your observation.
Fxlxpxnx.
Pl. Fxlxpxnx-fxlxpxnx
Agree that Old-Country consensus even if there were one doesn’t/shouldn’t control diaspora/U.S. practice, but if AmEng isn’t obligated to treat it like a Tagalog word it’s equally unobligated to treat it like a Spanish word and can (if we collectively go along with it) treat it like “aviator” becoming gender-neutral with the obsolescence of “aviatrix.”
One could also remove the mental italics and nativize it. There’s no need for morphological difference between Filipine (or Latin(e)) and the uncontroversial Argentine.
I don’t know to what extent it is “mental italics”, to what extent it is already nativised -o/-a patterns (people learn patterns quickly, and Arabic nisba has already been nativised) and to what extent it is just like cow and bull and niece and nephew.