French President Emmanuel Macron looked to cement his legacy, and take on political opponents, with the inauguration on Monday of a monument to the French language deep in far-right heartland.
Macron used the occasion to wade into a culture war debate, backing a right-wing bill to ban the use of “inclusive language” – a popular trend for using both masculine and feminine versions of words when writing.
France must “not give in to fashionable trends,” he said as he inaugurated the Cite Internationale de la Langue Francaise just hours before the Senate was due to debate the proposed law.
Modern French presidents love a cultural “grand projet” – an imposing monument to “scratch” their name on history, as ex-leader Francois Mitterrand put it in the 1980s.
Mitterrand was an avid and controversial legacy-builder, transforming the Louvre museum with a glass pyramid, and erecting the vast Opera Bastille and National Library.
Georges Pompidou built a famous modern art museum in Paris, and Jacques Chirac created the Quai Branly global culture museum on the banks of the Seine.
The practice fell out of fashion this century, but has been revived by Macron, who was already eyeing up a crumbling chateau in the small town of Villers-Cotterets while still a presidential candidate in 2017.
He has overseen the renovation of the Renaissance castle, completed in 1539 under King Francois I, and its transformation into an international centre for the French language.
It hopes to attract 200,000 visitors a year to its large library (replete with AI-supported suggestion engine), interactive exhibits and cultural events.
Perhaps fittingly, the website seems determinedly uninterested in the quality of its English translations, describing the castle as a “high place of the French history and architecture”.
The issue, I’d assume, is that you end up replacing generic masculine words with two words. ‘Dear bakers and female-bakers’ for example. When the more logical approach is to simply turn the generic masculine into the generic it’s being used as anyway. In English, for example, a fireman or policeman does not need to be male, and it suffices to say ‘he is a fireman, she is a fireman’.
That’s still causing the issue of “man as the default,” now it’s just “we consider women men too.” The more logical way would be to use language akin to “firefighter,” “officer,” or “pig,” all naturally neutral words.
Latin derived languages can’t simply use “words like officer, firefighter” to solve the problem because all nouns are gendered, including those not related to living beings at all. You could create a gender-neutral title, but it would still be masculine or feminine in a sentence.
This is not true, as Latin itself carries a neuter form for nouns. Sure, you’d have to gender of the noun, but it has existed for literally 2000 years.
Latin itself carried a neutral form for nouns. It was abandoned and absorbed into the masculine form, which is now the “neutral” form.
This happened centuries ago - and is also why every modern Latin based language follows the same pattern.
Using the masculine form as a neutral form is quite literally the entire point being debated here.
Well if one of the forms is going to become the neutral, how about making the feminine form the default neutral instead, eh?
I have nothing against that. I also have nothing against gender neutrality in language. In fact, I wish Latin never lost its gender neutrality in the first place.
I was just explaining why it doesn’t magically work with romantic languages like it does with English - we can’t just say “police officer” and “singular they” and go be happy.
Sure we can. I’d posit the people who aren’t happy with the quite reasonable compromise that naturally occurs are the problematic ones. Fireman is a gender neutral.
Yeah, well, “they” was exclusively a plural pronoun in English until some people started using it in the singular as a gender-neutral pronoun, and everyone eventually got over it. Well, most everyone.
Languages evolve. I realize this example isn’t as complicated as what is required for using gender-inclusive language in a romance language, but my point remains valid.
“They” as a gender neutral singular pronoun is not a new phenomenon.
But you’re still not understanding my point - I’m not saying people can’t adapt or that language never changes. I’m talking about how the entire grammatical structure of a sentence in Latin languages will force a gender - there’s no way to avoid it. You’d have to modify pretty much all classes of words in order to achieve gender neutrality (apart from masculine neutral) and even then, it would have some irregular ambiguities. This type of change doesn’t happen - you can’t wave your prescriptivism wand and suddenly make everyone change 80% of the words on their vocabulary.
Different language, but I’ve seen some interesting experimental Latine gender neutral verbage. Instead of a/o they just use e.
It definitely requires a fundamental change to language, though, and I don’t know if it can ever take off. Maybe as its own dialect?
It absolutely can be integrated into the language, it will just sound “weird” for a bit, as it’s taking advantage of an underused, but already existing, part of the language.
You’re right, it can happen but I think it would require some central authority to decree that the language is now gender neutral and then use it exclusively in schools and public communication. Changing a language is hard.
EDIT Oh boo hoo you fuckin liberals, you don’t want to admit that we need central control of fucking anything and want to pretend language will just magically get better on its own.
We’re still struggling with slurs and that’s just a few words used in a few contexts. You fucking think you can restructure grammatical gender without state intervention? Grow up.
At the very least it would require all the state schools and publications changing, if not forcing it onto mass media on general.
That’s what we need. Stop being cowards.
Really?
Why is it man is the default and not human? ‘Man’ exists in both ‘man, woman, and human.’ Why even assume the default is male when talking about a fireman? (aside from the fact firemen have historically been male)
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Another option is like in German where you invent some sort of new suffix like “*in”. For example, Lehrer (m), Lerhrerin (w), Lehrer*in (m/w/d). Prounounced as a sort of shorter than space silence.
That’s a terrible solution, there’s no pronouns and articles that could refer back to that kind of construct (“The teachers who went to the bridge met their students there”), and don’t get me started on cases or adjective agreement.
If you don’t want to use generic feminine/masculine forms (Like “Die Person löste ein Bahnticket”, “Der Bäcker buk ein Brot”) there’s the Inklusivum, which is nothing but a whole new fourth grammatical gender: Animated but sex-neutral.
Wow this is bullshit. Who’s gonna learn a whole new grammar for their mother tongue? And “de gute Arzte” still sounds masculine to me. There’s nothing wrong with generic masculine in my opinion, it’s efficient and everyone speaks it. But I’m a man, so my opinion is invalid anyway.
It’s not a new grammar it’s a new gender and the difference to what we have isn’t larger than German inter-dialectal difference. It’s a linguistically sane alternative to Binnen-I and Sternchen and everything.
As in: If there was a dialect around without male/female distinction that used the Inklusivum instead you’d hardly blink. You’d be able to make sense of it (at least more than I can make sense of Bavarian) and with some exposure, you would be able to speak it without studying.
You could also learn Platt which pretty much has lost the female/male distinction everywhere but in pronouns just like English (but retains the neuter), but I guarantee you that’d be harder.
I think you’re exactly right on that. All the opposition to change is in favor of keeping language as efficient as possible. The smoothest way to get everyone on board with neutral language is to use a term that’s both familiar and efficient. If our generic words are masculine, then we can just redefine them as neutral. Some claim this means “women are now men” but long-term it really means “old generic word no longer applies to only men”