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 and/or languages:
“To me, nothing can be more important than giving children books, It’s better to be giving books to children than drug treatment to them when they’re 15 years old. Did it ever occur to anyone that if you put nice libraries in public schools you wouldn’t have to put them in prisons?”
—Fran Lebowitz (20th century)
“The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.”
—Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1934)