vendredi 27 août 2010
Battle of the French genders
vendredi 20 août 2010
Writing under sexist rules
Gender specification through language does not pose problems to learners alone. The French authorities are struggling to find accepted, non-sexist forms of nouns to denote certain professions. Following a plan laid down by the French government to combat sexism in the late 1980s, disagreements have arisen with the body governing the use of the French language, l’Académie française.
For professions such as writers and company bosses, the accepted form is a masculine noun, écrivain and chefrespectively. The new initiative proposes that the female forms of these nouns should be écrivaine and chefesse. Here enters rhyming embarrassment. Feminizing the word chef with the suffix -esse has created a word which rhymes with the French word for buttocks, fesses. The added -e on to écrivain has created a word which means vain or empty, vaine.
Feminists are protesting at these proposed changes because they actually reinforce sexism. They say these new words promote connotations of weak, vain women or focus attention on physical attributes of the female body –altogether making a joke out of a proposal which is supposed to make everyone happy and equal.
So, what about the English equivalents? Slowly and subtly we have been doing the opposite of the French, and replacing our gender-specific nouns. For example, television and newspapers seem to have phased out the wordactress to replace it with actor regardless of the sex of the person in question.
Indeed, Collins English Dictionary includes the following note:
‘Use of the word actress to refer to a female who acts is old-fashioned. The gender-neutral form is actor.’
Whereas
lundi 9 août 2010
Grammatical gender processing in romance languages
Evidence from bare noun production in Italian and Spanish
Daniela Paolieri; Lorella Lotto; Luis Morales; Teresa Bajo; Roberto Cubelli; Remo Job
University of Trento, Italy, | |
University of Padova, Italy | |
University of Granada, Spain |
European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, Volume 22, Issue 3 May 2010 , pages 335 - 347
Abstract The selection of grammatical gender in bare noun production is a controversial topic. In two experiments with the picture-word interference paradigm we confirmed a reliable effect of grammatical gender congruency in bare noun production in Italian and we replicated this effect in Spanish, another Romance language with a gender system analogous to the Italian one. In both Experiments, naming times were slower for picture-word pairs sharing grammatical gender. The results of the present study support the notion that grammatical gender is an intrinsic lexical property and not a pure syntactic feature selected only in noun phrase production. We assume that grammatical gender selection is crucial in languages with a complex morphological structure, like Italian and Spanish, in which the ending vowel is itself marked for grammatical gender. |
Keywords: Bare noun production; Grammatical gender; Lexical access; Picture-word paradigm; Speech production |
samedi 7 août 2010
Introduction to noun gender in French
[...] In our imaginary scenario we were looking too hard. We assume that a city might divide people based on some kind of demographic.
[...] What a surprise when we find out that the two groups had actually been divided based on the last letter of their last name.
lundi 2 août 2010
Traquer les pages dédiées au GENRE
Tracking websites about GENDER
The list of masculine and feminine endings is the usual type. As we say "why make it simple, when one can make it complex ?"
MASCULINE Endings: | ||
Ending | Examples | Exception |
-eau | le tableau | l'eau (f.), la peau |
-age | le fromage | la page, une image, la cage, la plage, la nage, la rage |
-isme | le communisme | -- |
-ment | le moment | la dent, la jument |
-et | le poulet | la forêt |
-oir | le couloir | -- |
-ail | le travail, | -- |
FEMININE Endings: | ||
Ending | Examples | Exceptions |
-tion | la nation | le bastion |
-ance/ence | la distance,la patience | le silence |
-té | la maternité | le côté, un été... |
-ie | la vie | le parapluie, l'incendie |
-ette | la recette | le squelette (skeleton) |
-elle | la vaiselle | le mille... |
-aison | la maison | -- |
-tude | une attitude | -- |
-ure | la nature | ... |
-esse | la jeunesse | -- |
Wouldn't it be simpler to present it this way: Feminine nouns end with: - final e, - suffixes -ion/-aison, -ité and -eur(qualities) (These 2 rules cover more than 90% of feminine nouns) Masculine nouns end with - no specific marker, - suffixes -age, -isme, -aire and -oire - endings -asme, -acle, -ome, -ème, -ège, -ile (These 3 rules cover round about 80% of masculine nouns) |