Lawyer and lawyer: Linguist about the future of feminitives and language changes
There is hardly any linguistic problem. causes so much fierce disputes in public space, like feminitiva. While some say they are needed to make women in the language visible, others insist that it is “violence” over the language. We talked with the candidate of philological sciences, associate professor of the RSUH, Alexander Peppersky, a researcher at the Higher School of Economics, about the changes taking place in the language, gender inequality in the language and whether these complex issues can be solved. Soon Alexander, together with linguists Maxim Krongauz and Anton Somin, is publishing the book “Hundred Languages” - about a hundred of the most interesting and unusual languages of the world.
Changes in the Russian language, emoji and borrowing
I think that over the past ten years we have simply become accustomed to what is happening around us, so the level of complaints that the Russian language in a crisis has decreased. Ten years ago, radical changes did take place: texts appeared on the Internet that did not meet the usual high standards - not to mention the “Padonkaff language”, which deliberately distorted these norms. Now people correspond in messengers, social networks; complaints, of course, are still heard, but they have become much quieter.
If the Internet changes something in the language, we will not even notice it. This will not be the beginning of universal illiteracy - the norm will simply change: something that was unacceptable will begin to seem normal. A simple example: in modern Russian it is all the same whether to write the letter E or not. In ancient Novgorod, it was all the same to write O or b. It’s unthinkable to confuse O with Kommersant, and please, E and E. New rules will quickly become familiar. For example, we are not surprised that people write texts and comments on the Internet with a small letter, although the rules say that a sentence must begin with a big one. The fact that we read texts that do not pass through the proofreader and editor, of course, affects us.
On the one hand, the visual recognition of complex cases is violated, which correctors and editors would correct. But, on the other hand, thanks to the Internet, we read a lot. Studying Facebook posts, you may not know how to write “on the go” correctly - either together or separately - but how you spell the word “computer”, remember exactly, because you see it all the time.
As for emoji, stickers and gifs, I think there is nothing to be afraid of speaking, because it still does not penetrate into it. But in writing, interesting transformations can indeed occur. The appearance of Emoji is in some sense a rollback to where the letter began. If you recall Kipling's story about how the first letter was written (this is not just a scientific source, but a rational story), first people began to draw, then gradually the drawings became more and more sketchy, then they started to designate not words, but syllables, then not syllables, but sounds. Now we again turn to the letter, which can even be called ideographic or pictographic. Paint a sample cake shorter than writing "Happy Birthday!" Just change some areas of communication.
→ Difficult to predictwhich feminitiva will be fixed in our language, but you can see which of them are most actively discussed. This helps corpus linguistics - the science of the study of large arrays of texts. Having collected texts with a total volume of five hundred thousand words on the key words "feminitiv", "feminism", "sexism", "gender equality", "feminist", "language", I received a dozen of women by profession or occupation, which are found in These texts are many times more likely than on the Russian-language Internet in general.
They talked about the abundance of borrowings ten and two hundred years ago. But it seems to me that there is nothing terrible in them. For example, yesterday I recognized the Russian word "merch" - this is a souvenir production (there are also two non-Russian roots here). This word is shorter. In addition, it is built into the system of the Russian language, it is inclined according to the cases: merch, merch, merch. A word has appeared to designate a new reality - there is nothing wrong with that. It seems to me that as long as the Russian language is not crowded out of the fields of communication, nothing bad happens to it. For example, I teach master's courses for linguists in English, and this, on the one hand, is good, because it implies internationalism (we have students from the Netherlands, from Italy), and on the other hand, it means that The subjects that I teach, it is already difficult to speak in Russian. But for the time being, it’s just about borrowing, which the Russian language is mastering perfectly, I don’t see a problem.
Of course, it is possible to artificially protect a language - they often do this with different success. The result strongly depends on the language situation, politics, even the size of the country. Say, Iceland is doing very well, because it is a compact community that is attentive to the language. There really are practically no borrowings - although individual words come through.
In Russia there is no authoritative body that would say that it is impossible to use certain borrowings. In France, there is a regulator, but its decisions often cause laughter: for example, when they prohibit the word "hashtag" and force them to say "mot-dièse" - "lattice". I, as a linguist, rather prefer the descriptive approach to the prescriptive - that is, to describe what is happening, and not to prohibit something.
About inequality in language
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which implies that language defines consciousness, modern linguists have different attitudes. If I say that we are "in captivity of the tongue," it will be a strong phrase. But if I say more carefully that “language affects some aspects of thinking,” it’s harder to argue with that - but this is not an interesting statement. Indeed, apparently, there are aspects of consciousness that language defines. For example, it often affects the classification of items. In Russian there is the word "water" and the word "juice". In Russian, cola is called sparkling water. In Russian stores, most often juices are in the same place, and mineral water and cola are nearby. In Serbia, on the contrary: there the word "juice" is called any colored drink, and the word "water" - only water. And in the store, a cola stands next to fruit juice. You can talk about specific aspects, but to conclude that all our consciousness and thinking is determined by language, I would not risk it.
At the language level, gender inequality is, of course, traceable. One of the classics of gender linguistics, Robin Lakoff, has a book called Language and Woman's Place. There is an example from English - the sentences "He's a professional" ("He is a professional") and "She's a professional" ("She is a professional") - there is no difference in the English birth.
In the 70s, when she wrote this, the proposal of "He's a professional" was understood so that, most likely, he is a lawyer or works in a similar field. "She's a professional" was then understood more or less clearly: she is a sex worker. It turns out that the same word in relation to a man or a woman means different things.
Somewhere in the 70s, linguists began to pay attention to the fact that there is a lot of information in the language that we do not notice, but which we cannot but express. For example, in the Russian language the grammatical gender is more than in English: in English it appears only in pronouns, and in Russian it has verbs, nouns, adjectives. Accordingly, language often forces us to express gender, gender.
An example from my translation practice: "The singer was found dead". I quickly translated it as "The singer was found dead," but then it was: "The singer was found dead in her apartment" - that is, "The singer was found dead." In Russian, you are obliged to express it immediately, but in English you can not do this.
author
autolady
doctor
keeper
journalist
ballerina
writer
an artist
a housewife
teacher
The question of the influence of the grammatical gender is a very interesting problem. Formally, the grammatical gender is simply a set of endings, which is used for consistent words: adjectives, pronouns, and so on. The grammatical genus is even ambiguously connected with declension. For example, words like "mom" and "dad" lean in the same way, but they have a different genus - "beautiful mother", but "beautiful dad". It often turns out that for some profession there is only one name and it is masculine. A key question arises: is it good that we call a woman a masculine word?
In fact, we owe this problem to ancient Greek grammars, who, while describing the language, introduced the terms "masculine", "feminine" and "neuter gender". Now this terminology makes us annoyed and makes us think about gender inequality. If we didn’t say “female gender” and “masculine gender”, but “first co-ordinating class” and “second co-ordinating class” (this is how it works in Bantu languages), there would be much less excitement. For example, the word "doctor" of a general kind, it can be coordinated on the first and second class. But the "good teacher" speak badly - this is the word of the second class in coordination. The word "male" immediately raises questions: why male? Where are the women?
In the 80s, an artificial language Laadan was created, which was supposed to gender equalize the speakers, but it didn’t seem to take root. In fact, he was not supposed to take root - he was never intended for international communication. I would not even consider him unsuccessful: the fact that we are talking about him now shows that he played his part. For example, the Tolkien languages did not take root in the same sense: there are no people who speak Quenya among themselves, just as there are no people who speak the Laadan language among themselves. But the fact that the very idea of the feminist language has become widespread is important. It is not important that people switch to this language, but that the experiment was launched and appeared in a public space.
About feminites and politics
Attitudes toward different feminites can be associated with many things. Firstly, with sociolinguistics, that is, with questions of attitude to the language. "Authors" and "editors" seem alien to us also because they are words-markers. As soon as you use them, you immediately give out your ideological, feminist position, which can annoy others and cause controversy. At the same time, other words with the suffix -k-, which are not so noticeable in the discussion, are already easily included in the language.
No one will discuss the word "moderator", for example. It happens in different cases. For example, the word “ringing” is a marker of illiteracy, but other similar verbs that just changed the stress (it was “friend”, it became “friend”; it was “smoke”, it became “smoke”), no one notices.
There is another aspect. In order for new words not to cause rejection, they must comply with the laws of language. For example, the suffix -k-well joins the words with an emphasis on the last syllable: “student” - “student”, “communist” - “communist”, “bolshevik” - “bolshevik”. Words like "avtorka" ("ávtor"), "editor" ("editor") seem unusual. These are trifles, but they influence the fate of individual words.
Why is the word "lawyer" annoying, although the formal suffix -k- fits the word "lawyer"? The word "lawyer" used to designate all the representatives and representatives of this profession. Does this mean that we represent a lawyer necessarily as a man? Not clearly, but, probably, with probability of 80% it so. In terms of gender equality, this is bad.
When we add a suffix, two words appear: "lawyer" and "lawyer". Now we call the person’s sex each time. The question arises: why? Are male lawyers and female lawyers somehow different from each other? This opposition is well known by the words "poet" and "poetess". A poet in a template presentation is a person who writes poems on various socially significant topics, and the poetess is flowers, love carrots, something frivolous. It is the same with any other feminitiv: on the one hand, when pronouncing a word, the image of a man does not appear, and on the other, the difference in words can make us suspect a difference in professional qualities. Moreover, this distinction arises from the shape of the word. We have the basic word "lawyer" and its derivative is "lawyer." Even along the length of words, it is clear that the "lawyer" is something basic, and the "lawyer" is a derivative of it.
→ Many words on the list above - These are the names of creative professions ("ballerina", "artist"), including those associated with the letter ("author", "journalist", "writer"). Two more words remind of traditional female roles: “keeper” (hearth) and “housewife”. Adjacent to them is the word “avtoledi”, which is used almost exclusively in reports of accidents and, as it were, underlines the conviction that women drive a car badly
Here a problem arises with the type of opposition. Speaking in tedious linguistic terms, back in the 30s, the founder of phonology, Nikolai Trubetskoy, classified oppositions in the language and singled out privative and equipotent oppositions. Equipolent opposition is an opposition of equal words: they are opposed, but equal in status. And the privative opposition is when one word is derived from another, endowed with a sign that the other does not have.
For example, "mom" and "dad" are an example of an equipalent opposition: equal words of equal length, but they denote a man and a woman. And the words “lawyer” and “lawyer” are an example of a privative opposition: “lawyer” is a basic word plus something else. When we strive for gender equality and achieve it through privative oppositions, there is reason to doubt whether it is worth doing so. The ideal of gender equality is an equipolent opposition, some kind of "lawyer" and "lawyer." But before that, the Russian language, it seems, has not yet reached.
When linguistic tradition and political position collide, there can be no one right decision. "In Ukraine" / "in Ukraine" shows this very well. An amazing thing happened: literally overnight, the use of prepositions turned upside down. Before the conflict, the option "in Ukraine" was used in the official speech, and the option "in Ukraine" was used by intelligent people who spoke of the Russian language tradition. In 2014, there was an instant coup: politicians and people who are pro-Russian in this conflict began to speak "in Ukraine" to emphasize its lack of independence ("Ukraine" - "margin" and so on). And then the liberal intelligentsia reacted to this, which began to speak "in Ukraine."
→ special attention draws on the factthat there are no recent formations in the list above, except for the "author" - the most well-known and discussed new feminitive, which is constantly being written about against the background of the old words: "teacher" and "doctor". Does this mean that new feminatives do not extend beyond a single parade example? Or, on the contrary, do they spread so inconspicuously and organically that they are not even discussed? These are interesting questions for further research.
Similarly with feminitiv. Now their appearance is associated with progressive people who are fighting for equality. But imagine that, for example, the odious ministry of culture began to issue decrees that everyone must use the words “director”, “cameraman”, and so on, in film titles. As soon as it becomes associated with another part of the society, people who do not share its views will say: “And I will say“ operator ”, it has always been in Russian!”
Dear, authoritative from the language point of view, people can influence - they will be pulled after them. For example, yesterday I read the post of linguistic colleague Boris Iomdin, who told a story from the life of the Russian Language Institute and wrote: "Watchman said ..." The word "watchman" already seems dismissive, but he does not use the word "watchman" in relation to a woman. He uses feminitives because he has seen many discussions in which people whom he considers authorities to say that he should do so.
Another thing is if someone will stand above me with a whip and force them to use these words - this, naturally, will cause rejection. If I come in a tie, it is not customary to say at once: “So, you wear the tie incorrectly. It should go to the middle of the belt.” Similarly with the language. If someone says: “I will teach you now,” this causes outrage. But if it is done gently and calmly, the changes will spread.