Why some women are not asked to dance

opendoor said:
Germans are known for their political over-correctness
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The problem now is that it's becoming politically incorrect to be gendered (actresses are actors now), and you just look at the furore around choice of European translators for Amanda Gorman's poetry.

I understand the 'DJane' (or even sometimes 'TJane' for tango - Germany, Austria, Switzerland) in a gendered grammar, and picked up some quirks from such languages myself. To be honest it sort of gives an idea of the expected flavour of the choice and a relief from the 'DJ'.

But back to the topic, my preference is to dance with a partner with a female body, however they identify, but I'll happily do a same gender practica in either role. I'm also happy to be requested to dance. It's more about my confidence to lead any specific partner. Maybe the problems come from attempting to stick to old, male, traditions.
 
opendoor said:
hmm, please help me: actor got a male ending, this word is not a neuter.
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English, like tango, has no central authority, and therefore the evolution is driven by memetics. If you invent or change the usage of a word and people use it, it becomes part of the language. The language is going through a slow process of gender neutralization for the (few) occupation titles that are gendered. Sometimes there's a gender neutral word people settle on in place of the old masculine/feminine forms (for example: policeman / policewoman -> police officer), but no one proposed an alternative word to "actor" that people actually wanted to use. So, "actor" is ambiguous right now and could be used as neuter or male depending on the speaker's intent.
 
opendoor said:
hmm, please help me: actor got a male ending, this word is not a neuter.
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Yes, I always thought it was just a little odd to go for the default masculine word. So we no longer have stewardess, but steward, and some object to chairman/chairwoman but expect chairperson (they may also object to being called a chair). Manageress has also gone for manager, but a nurse can be male, female or however they identify. S/he may not be acceptable to some; 'they' or 'their' is non-binary.

Language evolves. English is generally not gramatically gendered, unlike German, French, Spanish, etc. Nevertheless in German some rivers are masculine, some feminine. And some non-Engish names could be seen as unacceptable when translated, or not translated. I was surprised to see some Spanish coco-pops in a UK store untranslated, and let's not get into a certain Austrian emigre called Arnold...

I'm not advocating anything! Just commenting on the situation - and waiting to get beaten up for some politically unreformed comment - or turned down for a tanda as an unreformed dinosaur.
 
Brummbaer said:
..English is generally not gramatically gendered..
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Sorry for commenting (I know its off-topic) but I find it quite interesting, Brummbaer. So why do think that English isn't gendered? I would think that the knowledge of grammatical genders actually is a question of education, but not a question of language. Of course also German kids have to learn which rivers are female and which are male entities (rivers that were named by germanic, slavic or celtic tribes usually are female (out of religious reasons), the Romans usually gave male names).
 
Brummbaer said:
Yes, I always thought it was just a little odd to go for the default masculine word.
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Mostly-irrelevant linguistics tangent: this is due to a concept called marking.

All words are constructed of one or more morphemes, where each morpheme carries a fragment of the overall word meaning. For example, the word "dancing" includes the morphemes [dance], which is a verb we all know and love, and [-ing], the present-continuous tense marker.

"Default to masculine" comes from the trends in a language with what to do when a word is unmarked--that is, it carries no morphemes to indicate tense, case, or gender. For example, the morpheme [dance], when unmarked, indicates present simple tense. In most languages that mark gender with morphemes, the "unmarked" words are treated the same way as ones marked masculine. Some languages take that even further, and the masculine gender is always unmarked, whereas feminine and neuter carry explicit morpheme markers.

English, for the most part, does not mark gender--this is something that has been lost from the Germanic roots over time. But the loss is not complete, as we see in [-er]/[-ess] and pronouns. Because this fragment of marked gender remains, so also does a fragment of "default to masculine."

opendoor said:
So why do think that English isn't gendered? I would think that the knowledge of grammatical genders actually is a question of education, but not a question of language.
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English is "not gendered" because in almost all cases there are no morphemes available for marking gender. As such, there is no concept of "gender agreement," between nouns and verbs or nouns and adjectives. Individuals may have an opinion about what gender should be associated with a certain concept, but the language does not mark it and so there is often disagreement.
 
I work as an editor. That's my day job. People have made two very true and important statements here:

1. English has no central authority – there's nothing like, say, l’Académie française or der Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung. We make it up as we go. Speakers and writers of English in Australia, Canada, the U.K., the U.S., and other countries don't use exactly the same language . . . in fact, I've been paid well to "translate" (well, localize) Canadian English to U.S. English. Even within one of these regions, there are style guides for writing that specify different rules; AP isn't Chicago or (the largely defunct) UPI. Plus organizations endorse variants; my employer, for instance, uses "modified AP." And finally and most recently are a morass of rules covering pronouns and gendered endings – my employer prefers the singular they, them, their, theirs, and themselves.

2. English doesn't have grammatical gender. Yes, there are gendered endings (e.g., actor/actress), which are increasingly deprecated; gendered pronouns (she/he, her/him, hers/his, etc.); and words that clearly refer to gender (like male and female). But nouns have no gender that affects choice of article or demands accord from adjectives, verbs, and other parts of speech.
 
Fanny-K said:
I knew there were many male engineers and female hairdressers in tango, but I was unaware that there are large numbers of philologists and linguists too.
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I actually haven't met any hairdressers through tango, which is highly inconvenient right now (I could use one)
 
fiesta0618 said:
..english is "not gendered" because in almost all cases there are no morphemes available for marking gender..
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But that is a week argument, fiesta ! A gender may nevertheless exist, although it is not explicetly linguistically highlighted. I have already aske hundreds of Londoners: what gender has the river Thames? And they all answer instantly: male of course! There are Londoners around in this forum, too: what about your perception of the river Thames?
 
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opendoor said:
Sorry for commenting (I know its off-topic) but I find it quite interesting, Brummbaer. So why do think that English isn't gendered? I would think that the knowledge of grammatical genders actually is a question of education, but not a question of language. Of course also German kids have to learn which rivers are female and which are male entities (rivers that were named by germanic, slavic or celtic tribes usually are female (out of religious reasons), the Romans usually gave male names).
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Well, I said 'generally' and 'gramatically'. It's a matter of degree. Of course there are words for gendered roles 'priest'/'priestess' (Priest/Priesterin), but they're not declined as masculine, feminine or neutral (der, die, das) but just as the definite object 'the' or indefinite 'a' . Historically probably male roles, like a minister of state were only male, whereas German can easily add 'in' (Minister/Ministerin). But, in German you get der & die Azubi depending on the gender of the person. We have a female 'Home Secretary', but would probably refer to 'she', or maybe 'they' if I really wanted to be non-binary, whilst using the generic title; German has der Innenminister, but might go for die Innenministerin in some/most publications. Some might consider the 'in' non-PC.

This is an extremely simplistic view since English has Germanic roots, but also includes French, Indian, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, Danish, Norse, etc. depending where the inhabitants travelled/invaded/were invaded. I understand some bits of Dutch/Plattdeutsch even sound like English dialect. Even that derogatory Anglo-Saxon word (f***) has Dutch roots.

So, I can see 'DJ' getting a feminine 'DJane' - even as an empowering feminist viewpoint to identify the contribution of women at some historical point, but some might now consider that non-PC. Personally I quite like it, but maybe I'm no longer keeping on top of cultural changes.

It's complicated - especially with many countries using variants of British English in former colonies. You can't win; you can't change the rules; you can't get out of the game. To someone, somewhere, you'll always be wrong - even to other, native, English speakers.
 
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