Treatment in Various Languages
Many languages share the following issue with English: the generic antecedent is a representative individual of a class, whose gender is unknown or irrelevant, but pronouns are gender-specific. In languages such as English that distinguish natural gender in pronouns but not grammatical gender in nouns, normally masculine, but sometimes feminine, forms of pronouns are used for the generic reference, in what is called the generic usage of the pronoun. The context makes the generic intent of the usage clear in communication.
- Example: An ambitious academic will publish as soon as she can.
Unless there is reason to believe the speaker thinks ambitious academics are always female, the use of she in this sentence must be interpreted as a generic use. Traditionally in English the singular generic pronoun has been the otherwise masculine he, but in recent decades a strand of thought has held that such usage subtly biases the listener to assume the antecedent is masculine; so various alternatives given later in this article have been proposed.
Read more about this topic: Generic Antecedent
Famous quotes containing the words treatment in, treatment and/or languages:
“The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“Ambivalence reaches the level of schizophrenia in our treatment of violence among the young. Parents do not encourage violence, but neither do they take up arms against the industries which encourage it. Parents hide their eyes from the books and comics, slasher films, videos and lyrics which form the texture of an adolescent culture. While all successful societies have inhibited instinct, ours encourages it. Or at least we profess ourselves powerless to interfere with it.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“The trouble with foreign languages is, you have to think before your speak.”
—Swedish proverb, trans. by Verne Moberg.