- cross-posted to:
- historymemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- historymemes@lemmy.world
You must log in or register to comment.
Obviously a classicist is someone who studies how the working class can overthrow their divinely mandated white men overlords.
Right? No other possible thing it could mean.
Nothing else. Nothing at all.
As I recently saw in a video about bible translations: Greek used (uses?) generic masculine forms for plurals. So a mixed group of stewarts and stewardesses would be called “these stewarts”. If there’s no context added, it’s impossible to tell whether the group was actually all male or not.
I think that’s how a large part of European languages still work.
So…like English then?
In many aspects English doesn’t distinguish between genders at all.
I chose the words above specifically because they are gendered. I’m not a native speaker, but as far as I know, teacher, butcher, officer, warrior, president, welder, etc. can each mean male or female. There’s maybe a connotation, but the words are not gendered. English also has no concept of a grammatical gender. Articles, adjectives, etc. are gendered in most European languages.
English absolutely has grammatical gender, it just defaults to “male” so much people forget there’s other options. For example, “teacheress” is a real word, it’s just so archaic that the male word now means both, same with how “you” is both singular and plural.
I mean if you want to go that far, there’s an argument to be made that the gendered terms wifman, werman, man, woman, and men were all simplified, to the gender neutral term of man and the feminine specific term of woman. We seem to have gone back and forth linguistically.
Well, uh, yes. The thread OP notes greek (as in bible) uses generic masculine forms for plural. Modern English takes that tack much more broadly, using the theoretically masculine term for everything. And you can tell it’s masculine, not neuter, because, eg. a steward (of Gondor) is a steward, but a (-n air) stewardess is now a flight attendant.
Take “The <noun> has a yellow <noun>”. Which gender do these nouns have? In German, I could tell you. Both articles and the adjective have a gender.
Of course, you can use gendered nouns, but only a very small minority of nouns actually have female forms.
Being immediately identifiable isn’t the standard, for example in languages that don’t use the definite article (Slavic languages, for example) the first noun wouldn’t necessarily exhibit it’s grammatical gender, but it wouldn’t mean it doesn’t have one. Also, the brackets you used get parsed by boost as html tags.
The very existence of gendered nouns and pronouns means English has gender. It’s just less noticeable because unlike the German “-innen” approach, English typically shoves most things into neuter and mostly defaults to male for persons and then hides it behind “he or she” or a singular “they”. You can argue it’s archaic or vestigial, and I’d agree, but it is there. Same how nouns don’t exhibit cases, but pronouns do. Compare:
“The man stood there, the man’s hand on the coffee cup, the cup warming the man”.
“He stood there, his hand on the coffee cup, the cup warming him.”
Hunter, huntress, huntsman
Waiter, waitress, waitsman
Actor, actress, actsman
Consider that German and French gender basically everything. Your desk has a gender in those languages. English is almost genderless on comparison.
Stewards he said, gently mansplaining.
Well it’s not like we use the words Wifman and Werman anymore.
Where can I find a unbiased translation?
I would wager that will be possible about 5-6 years after the AI singularity. Currently all translations have some sort of bias and cannot grok both the source and destination languages natively.
Edit: I hope I used grok correctly. Someone older than I am that actually used that slang when it was popular please correct me. As I understand it Grok means: To intuitively know and understand the deeper meaning of a word, concept, meme, sociological nuance, or process.
Thank you!
But to answer your question, yes. If an unbiased translation is impossible (which it is), the solution is to have versions with as many contradictory biases as possible, so they hopefully cancel each other out.
Christianity enters the chat…
This reply has only upvotes and I still think it’s underrated.
For a while, I would get YouTube recommendations with “Translators DID IT again - when do they learn???” videos highlighting what they viewed as horrendously biased censorship in translation.
Every once in a while, I give these idiots a minute of my attention and by their own data they look stupid. Whatever inaccuracy they thought was there pales in comparison to getting the writing to flow well in English.
