What a palaver! What a fuss! All this debate about how to express the male and female forms of words. A debate that is getting worse and worse by the week. And it's causing ugly things to be happening in print and even when being read out.
What am I on about? In English, we say, "The students are in the room." Now, I'm all for being treated just as well as men, but this can make for some clumsiness in expression. The Germans have to write this: "Die Studenten[male form] und Studentinnen [the female form] sind in dem Zimmer." To cut this down in print, they have now started to write it like this instead: "Die Student*innen sind in dem Zimmer." And, so I have read, they now try to make that gap audible when reading out such texts.
English used to have a whole load of words that were different for male and female, such as the following:
manager - manageress - now plain "manager" for both men and women
headmaster - headmistress - now just "head teacher" or just "head"
chairman - chairwoman - now often just "the chair" or "chairperson"
poet - poetess - now just "poet"
steward - stewardess - now "flight attendant"
There are words for people in German that have only one form, such as
der Mensch - the person - why not der Mensch, die Menschin?
die Person - the person - why not der Person - die Personin?
das Kind - the child - why not der Kind, die Kindin?
die Wache - the sentry (even though they're normally men). Why not der Wache, die Wachin?
die Waise - the orphan - why not der Waise, die Waisin?
das Genie- the genius. It's neutral - 'das'.
Maybe that is the way forward in Germany. Make all nouns referring to jobs and people neutral: das.
In English, you can refer to a male student or a female student as just 'student'. Why can't German do the same? If you can refer to a baby as "das Baby", when it could be male or female, or to a child as "das Kind" when it could be male or female, why not just say "das Student", "das Bäcker" [baker] and "das Lehrer" [teacher] and have done with the entire argument?
When I say to people that I am a translator, they don't say, "Oh, you mean translatoress, don't you?" They can see or hear that I am female. Or at least work that out from my name.
I am going to try and start a trend in Germany: in future, whenever anyone asks me what I do, I shall say, "Ich bin Übersetzer"*. And then wait for their reaction. And when they try to correct me, I'll ask if they need the suffix '-in' to figure out that I'm female.
*Normally, though, whenever anyone asks me what I do for a living, I normally say that I translate. I don't like to describe myself in one word such as "translator" because I do and am so much more than one word.
I guess it's all about the suffix, "-ess." It's mostly died out. "Editress" seems to have died out in the 1930's. Does anyone talk about "the shop manageress" these days?
ReplyDeleteThen there's "actress," still going strong, perhaps because the gender of the thespian is relevant. Will the Oscars have awards for Best Male Actor, Best Female Actor? Who can tell?
At least in Germany, every woman is "Frau," unlike English where you choose from Miss/Mrs/Ms. Why not call every woman "Mrs" and be done with it?