Feminism out of control?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

What's sexist, let alone inherently sexist here?

Equivocating on grammatical gender is a bad idea.

Also, it is plainly false to say all words in all languages have gendered roots.

Vagina - a sword-sheath.

Persona - a mask, a character - feminine.

"Persona non grata" is as sexisst as "homocide".

The fact is gender-neutral language is a crock.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

As far as Rory's story goes, I think it's sad and unfair, and not uncommon because of the assumption men are more violent than women. Nothing to do with parenting specifically, just basic sexism.

[Montmorency]

Vagina - a sword-sheath.

Persona - a mask, a character - feminine.

"Persona non grata" is as sexisst as "homocide".

The fact is gender-neutral language is a crock.

Vagina: Argument from distant etymology (meaning) is irrelevant to the living. You'd be better off focusing on the word's nature as the label of a sex feature.

Persona: I just warned you about equivocating on grammatical gender.

Homo: An inclusive word, like anthropos.

The fact is gender-neutral language is a crock.

Language is certainly not neutral - but that has to do with speakers and nothing to do with etymology or grammar.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Vagina: Argument from distant etymology (meaning) is irrelevant to the living. You'd be better off focusing on the word's nature as the label of a sex feature.

Persona: I just warned you about equivocating on grammatical gender.

Homo: An inclusive word, like anthropos.



Language is certainly not neutral - but that has to do with speakers and nothing to do with etymology or grammar.

It's not a distant etymology, and "homo" isn't an inclusive word, it means "man" in exactly the same way that "man" means "man."

So if "Homocide" has no gender then neither does "chairman" and this is my point.

I am not the one equivocating here.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

It's not a distant etymology, and "homo" isn't an inclusive word, it means "man" in exactly the same way that "man" means "man."

So if "Homocide" has no gender then neither does "chairman" and this is my point.

I am not the one equivocating here.

I wasn't much of a fan of the PC languaging thing at first, as I have always trended toward traditionalist. Over the years, saying "chair" instead of chairman, or firefighter instead of fireman etc. has become almost second nature. I find that it encumbers me very little while doing...perhaps...some good.

What yanks my chain is grammar and writing skills. Be PC all you wish, but please learn to write a grammatically sound sentence and...dare I hope...put 3 or 4 of them together in a paragraph that is a more or less connected thought. THAT is what this university teacher truly desires most, that the language be CORRECT, and as politically correct as you will in addition.


P.S. The modern English term 'cunt' is closest to the correct Latin cunnus term for what some label the vulva. That term, however closer to its Latin roots, is likely to cause someone to take umbrage. To a modern audience, the etymological considerations are of less note than the current connotations of any of these terms. Languages change as their users dictate. After all, the symbols we use -- words -- only have meaning because we ascribe meaning to them.

P.P.S When I was a young lad, the word 'disrespect' had no verb form.

[Beskar]

It's not a distant etymology, and "homo" isn't an inclusive word, it means "man" in exactly the same way that "man" means "man."

So if "Homocide" has no gender then neither does "chairman" and this is my point.

I am not the one equivocating here.

The 'Homo' prefix is greek and it means same. So Homosexual means Same-sexual.
Homicide means the the killing of one human by another. The homi/homo meaning we are from the same species.

Man means Man/Male. So Chairman, Fireman, Policeman, etc are roles of a male. Chair, Firefighter, Police Officer, etc are gender-neutral in the role, as the person being ascribed is not directly assumed as being a male.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

The 'Homo' prefix is greek and it means same. So Homosexual means Same-sexual.
Homicide means the the killing of one human by another. The homi/homo meaning we are from the same species.

Man means Man/Male. So Chairman, Fireman, Policeman, etc are roles of a male. Chair, Firefighter, Police Officer, etc are gender-neutral in the role, as the person being ascribed is not directly assumed as being a male.

I made the effort to check the Oxford Latin Dictionary and you're definitely wrong - your etymologies are the result of the "false friend" phenomenon. You might want to consider that I'm a Classicist and a Medievalist who spends all day doing Latin next time, I don't just make this stuff up, I actually had to learn it.

Homo is Latin for "man", cognate with the English goom with it displaced and the Hebrew adam. Without qualification is can mean either "a man" or " a human", depending on context.

The word "human" and thence "man" come from the Latin humanus which is literally "a thing a man holds" from homo and manus. Your derivation for "homocide" and "hominem" are also wrong because they are Latin words.

As far as "homosexual" is a relatively modern word formed from two parts and it may actually be derived from the Greco-Latin "homo-sexual" meaning "same-sex" but it might also have been "man-sex" because likely when the term was coined there was little interest in the sexuality of women.

Compare discus from the Greek diskos "a quoit" and Latin discus "a learning".

Edit: Homo isn't a prefix, it's a noun.

[Beskar]

Your reply is supporting an earlier comment I made which you quoted which was "Are you discussing gender-neutral in how language is biased against women and the movement to make it gender-neutral as not to imply a preference?". Your examples from classic latin reinforce this point being made.

Where I disagree is where I agree with Montmorency in the changing nature and evolution of language, so whilst some words do have origins in latin such as the vagina, it has now sufficiently changed to represent the physiological terminology labelling, losing its original concoctions of sword-sheath.

However, there are still words in play which have not evolved or their meanings changed. It is this aspect of the language which should be modified reflect the equality of the different sexes.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

God God, man, are you now completely incapable of admitting you're wrong?

This is now the second time in one thread.

My point was that the word "homocide" was no more or no less sexist that the word "chairman".

You argued that I was wrong in this point because my etymology for the word "homocide" was wrong, your evidence for this was a faulty etymology from Greek, you argued that "homocide" was not "man killing" but "same killing" and likewise that "hominids" are not "man like" but "like us."

All language is inherently gendered with reference to people, all "gender-neutral" language tends to take a different word (usually from another language) and use that to replace the supposedly sexist word.

Then "Chairman" becomes not "chairman/chairwoman" but "chairperson" even though "person" is a feminine gender noun and "human" is a masculine gender noun. So we're not really any better off, we just think we are.

However, there are gender-neutral words, those that are derived from verbs instead of nouns.

In the case of "Chairman" you have two options -

1. "The (one who is) Sitting (in the) Chair"

2. "president" - from Latin "Presidi" - one who presides.

As regards the word Vagina, in the Iberian Peninsula (except Basque country) the word for "scabbard" is "vaina" and their word for "vagina" is, shockingly "vagina"; the difference in pronunciation is a half-sounded "h", essentially a glottal. So your argument there only really holds up in a monoglot English context. It doesn't work in Iberia, or for anyone who learns Latin - which is still a lot of people in Classics, Medieval history, the Church or Law.

[Montmorency]

Peeves, you hold a pretty strange view, so as a trained hermeneute of the Latin language back it up with some exegetics and explain why it is wrong to consider homo a substantively inclusive word, and rightly a synonym of vir.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

An interesting tidbit from an essay on femina vs. mulier:

In Republican prose and comedy it is almost exclusively mulier
that is used to place emphasis on the sex of a woman, both in
explicit and implied contrasts with vir.

[Quintilian] comments on viri et feminae in terms which imply that it had
become a fixed phrase

The use of homo here in opposition to mulier wnere vir is expected
well illustrates the decline which vir underwent in vulgar Latin in favour
of homo, which alone enters the Romance languages. The use of homo to
designate a man as distinguished from a woman is found as early as Plautus
(Cist. 723 mi homo et mea mulier, vos saluto), but first occurs with frequency
in late vulgar Latin

Assumed in another paper:

Homo and femina are not parallel terms etymologically. The usage arises from the mis-translation of homo as man
in English. Homo in Latin, derived from the same root as the Latin humanus meaning human, signifies human being in
the generic sense. Thus homo faber, homo sapiens, etc. should include femina, or Latin for woman, female gender,just as
they would include vir, the Latin for man, male gender. English, in translating both homo and vir as man, erases the
distinction made in Latin, thereby incorporating the male gender meaning into the English usage of homo

I don't think many support your version of humanus as a portmanteau of homo + manus; they're just cognate, distinct. They've meant a few things, but not that.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

It seems to me that you both (at least PFH) mix up grammatical gender and gender as a social construct. In the case of the former languages don't manifest a universal pattern. There are languages which don't have this grammatical category (like modern English which has lost it as an aftermath of the Norman conquest) while others have it. The number of genders also differs - some languages have a three member gender opposition (Ukrainian or German -
feminine::masculine::neuter) others only two (like in Spanish - feminine::masculine). Moreover, the term "grammatical category" is erroneously applied in relation to nouns while it is quite accurate in relation to adjectives.

Well, most languages I'm aware of originally have three genders, they tend to lose Neuter first irrc - like Spanish. The point I am arguing is that in the fight for "gender neutral language" we inconsistently apply the rules of grammatical and semantic gender. In general terms, it's often the word of which the people are more ignorant which is found to be more acceptable.

Seamus made this point above - really we should be more offended by "vagina" than by **** but I can't even bring myself to type the latter word.

My bugbear is, these arguments annoy me because they are almost always trivial, made over small gramatical or linguistic points and the basis for the argument is fundamentally wrong.

Peeves, you hold a pretty strange view, so as a trained hermeneute of the Latin language back it up with some exegetics and explain why it is wrong to consider homo a substantively inclusive word, and rightly a synonym of vir.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

An interesting tidbit from an essay on femina vs. mulier:

Assumed in another paper:

I don't think many support your version of humanus as a portmanteau of homo + manus; they're just cognate, distinct. They've meant a few things, but not that.

I apologise, I got a little over-excited replying to Beskar and took is a step too far deriving "humanus" directly from "homo-manus", which I had read somewhere. However, it remains true that "humanus" is the adjective form of "homo" just as "feminine" is the adjective for "muelier" and "masculine" for "vir". I was correct in the meaning "the thing a man holds/the quality of a man" because it's an adjective, not a noun, in Latin.

So in any case, Beskar's derivation for "homocide" etc. was still utterly wrong.

The original English word for "man" was "wer" cognate Latin "vir", hence "werrior", also "werewolf".

If "homo" is found in Plautus in the context of "man" as a gendered person than that put the usage as far back as the Middle Republic, which supports my point that "homo" had the same meaning in Rome as "man" does today, it depends on the context.

"Mankind" is in no way a gendered term, although some like to argue that it is, it simply means "all of humanity" - both words ultimately derived from the same Latin root, except that the first is more anglicised than the latter and as a result has acquired more baggage through longer usage.

[Gilrandir]

There is, in fact, no such thing as a "Gender-Neutral" word because all words, in all languages, have gendered roots.

Also, it is plainly false to say all words in all languages have gendered roots.

The fact is gender-neutral language is a crock.

Language is certainly not neutral - but that has to do with speakers and nothing to do with etymology or grammar.

It seems to me that you both (at least PFH) mix up grammatical gender and gender as a social construct. In the case of the former languages don't manifest a universal pattern. There are languages which don't have this grammatical category (like modern English which has lost it as an aftermath of the Norman conquest) while others have it. The number of genders also differs - some languages have a three member gender opposition (Ukrainian or German -
feminine::masculine::neuter) others only two (like in Spanish - feminine::masculine). Moreover, the term "grammatical category" is erroneously applied in relation to nouns while it is quite accurate in relation to adjectives.