On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:30:13 +0100 Krister Svanlund <adsumm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 2:12 PM, arne anka > <openm...@ginguppin.de> wrote: [...] > > what exactly has one's value to do with the gender or the > > pronoun you are using to refer to him or her? > > your proposition is based on the assumption that one gender is > > less valueable than the other, hence, using the male or female > > pronoun would express a judgement. > > To me it seems obvious that ones own impression of something is > heavily based on the language you use (see > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity and the > Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). > If you make a difference between two persons (by assigning them > different genders) you will also put values on the difference > even if it isn't your intention. [...] This is getting way off-topic, but love the discussion. I will make two observations: o Arne, I do agree with the point that you are making, but English (and other languages) uses the male pronoun by default, and I sympathise with people unhappy with that status quo. o I am not quite sure what to make of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. On one hand, I think that Chomsky, and people like Steven Pinker demonstrate quite conclusively that language is a basic human instinct, and not a cultural construct. On the other hand, it would seem obvious that the ideas, and language one grows up with influence one's outlook. On the whole, I lean towards Chomsky. Regards, Gora (who is still pondering the influence of languages like Hindi, which assign gender not only to animals, but also to inanimate objects) _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
