There isn't much of this left. Other than personal pronouns, there is only a few words that are different for men and women. Words such as actor/actress, blond/blonde and fiance/fiancee. As someone who is both conscious of the difficulties with language experienced by NBs, and concerned by this kind of intrinsic sexism, I wonder how this should be approached. In some cases, the language has changed. "Actor" can refer to a man or a woman. Do you think it would be best if this happened in all cases?
In my opinion, yes, especially since it won't affect any other part of speech. Unlike Spanish and a few other languages, our verbs and adjectives don't change depending on a person's gender, with a few exceptions, such as how someone may call a man 'handsome,' but a woman 'beautiful.'
Well I speak three other languages which require gendered nouns (French/Spanish/Portuugese). I think that it wouldn't be a problem in some cases. In Spanish, you can drop the subject, and I guess the gender makes it easier as to determining what the gender of the subject is. (Has visto a Sara? Es guapa!/ Have you seen Sara? She's pretty!). But in English we'd just say "she's pretty" thus indicating the gender of the subject. In essence, the gendered nouns host/hostess, steward/stewardess don't really serve any purpose. However, if the gender is not mentioned, then I could see it being used. "My kid just graduated from college and is a stewardess for British Airways". So we can infer that the person's kid works has a degree, works for a prestigious airline, and is most likely a girl. Otherwise, yeah, I think so. Although saying "she's an actor" seems kinda weird to my ears :lol:
Oddly, "handsome" used to be used to refer to women as well. I'd definitely like to see us drop the last vestiges of gendered adjectives and ideally gendered pronouns as well. A person/object distinction as in zie/it has some use, but he/she/it is just silly.
But you see, to my mind, that's the problem with it. Gender can be extremely important to how we interact with the world, and I'm certainly not arguing for the abolition of the concept. But it can also restrict people. These words force people to define themselves primarily by their gender, and accept the limitations imposed by society of that gender. Part of freeing ourselves from that is improving the language to avoid this. Pronouns will take longer to eradicate, but for the few words that I and others have mentioned, it's a simple and easy first step that doesn't require any great mental leap.
I mean, it's not the language that holds gender bias, but its users. Let's see what happens in 200 years. We use flight attendant, server, and police officer in lieu of stewardess, waitress, and policewoman.
True, but they reinforce the bias, and give tools to those who hold it. Yes, we can wait two hundred years, and I'm not expecting change to happen over night. But we can help it along, perhaps stop making a distinction between men and women in words that once had it, as has happened with actor.
I mean, we've seen some change come along, like I stated with flight attendant, server, etc. . So, it may be shorter than that actually.
