Gendering weirds language
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@topspin said in Gendering weirds language:
if I heard you say it I’d immediately understand, but the spelling looks completely alien.
Isn't that Dutch in a nutshell?
EDIT: As opposed to Polish, which looks and sounds completely alien
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@Zerosquare said in Gendering weirds language:
@topspin said in Gendering weirds language:
if I heard you say it I’d immediately understand, but the spelling looks completely alien.
Isn't that Dutch in a nutshell?
EDIT: As opposed to Polish, which looks and sounds completely alien
I take it you are unfamiliar with Hungarian?
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@topspin said in Gendering weirds language:
@Gurth well, not really funny, I guess. I just was confused as heck at first what that combination of letters was supposed to mean. Looked completely indecipherable. Then I realized that it’s basically the same as “Frau” but presumably pronounced a bit differently (I’m sure there’s some dialect here that’d pronounce it similarly), so it’s really quite simple but it just looks so weird to me.
The thing to realise here is that in Dutch, ou and au are pronounced exactly the same, and almost identically to German au (except in a few names of places and people, where ou is like in French). The difference is entirely etymological, and, yes, needlessly complicated.
Also, though the word starts with v, that is often pronounced [f] in many (especially Hollandic and northern) dialects, so the sound of the word as a whole moves even closer to German Frau. Which, to my eyes, looks like the spelling a
semi-literateHollander might use ;)
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@Gurth said in Gendering weirds language:
vrouw
German joke that
the rest of usI don’t get?Also to me it sounds (using
normalEnglish pronunciation) very much like the word for the sound a car makes ("vroom"), so it's also (somewhat...) funny because of that."vrouwelijke buschauffeur" -> bus driver likes going "vroom!"
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@Gąska said in Gendering weirds language:
@Gurth said in Gendering weirds language:
In Dutch, I suspect that what happened is that women began being hired to perform secretarial functions ca. the late 19th, early 20th century, and as was normal at the time, the feminine form of the word came to be applied to this. But because of course you don’t give a woman the same kind of responsibilities as a man, the meanings of the masculine and feminine forms began to diverge.
My personal theory is similar, but slightly different. It wasn't about not giving women the responsibilities. It was about middle-aged not-so-successful men wanting a woman to order around and sit close to them all the time, instead of a man.
That is definitely a factor and always was. Actually, that was quite an issue in the late 19th century, when women actually started to be employed. The very fact that a woman (or women) can be in the same room with strange men, every day for 10-12 hours or more, managed to spin moral guardians to overdrive. Only concentrated pressure of big industry money (they needed the workforce and they needed it cheap) defeated repeated conservative proposals to ban this Sodom and Gomorrah completely. Still, there were some written and unwritten regulations (like: always two or more women, ideally in separated room, strict dress code, etc). No private secretary, unless she is the boss's wife.
Btw, I think that these days, "secretary" is not used at all. All the hip companies have "office assistant" instead. In English, of course. So it's fashionable, corporatey and gender neutral as a bonus.
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@GOG said in Gendering weirds language:
@Zerosquare said in Gendering weirds language:
@topspin said in Gendering weirds language:
if I heard you say it I’d immediately understand, but the spelling looks completely alien.
Isn't that Dutch in a nutshell?
EDIT: As opposed to Polish, which looks and sounds completely alien
I take it you are unfamiliar with Hungarian?
Finnish barely looks like language.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in Gendering weirds language:
Btw, I think that these days, "secretary" is not used at all. All the hip companies have "office assistant" instead. In English, of course. So it's fashionable, corporatey and gender neutral as a bonus.
Same in Poland AFAICT. Except being a woman is still a hard requirement (not listed on posting, of course).
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@Gąska said in Gendering weirds language:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in Gendering weirds language:
Btw, I think that these days, "secretary" is not used at all. All the hip companies have "office assistant" instead. In English, of course. So it's fashionable, corporatey and gender neutral as a bonus.
Same in Poland AFAICT. Except being a woman is still a hard requirement (not listed on posting, of course).
Being John Malkovich (2/11) Movie CLIP - The Speech Impediment (1999) HD – 02:53
— Movieclips
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That's an useful clip. It can also be used to illustrate a sort algorithm.
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@Gąska said in Gendering weirds language:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in Gendering weirds language:
Btw, I think that these days, "secretary" is not used at all. All the hip companies have "office assistant" instead. In English, of course. So it's fashionable, corporatey and gender neutral as a bonus.
Same in Poland AFAICT. Except being a woman is still a hard requirement (not listed on posting, of course).
I have already seen few guys in that position. It should be noted that they were really "office" assistants, ie they were not exclusively catering to single boss.
That reminds me of another gendered profession: nurse. At least in languages where it is called some variant of "health/illness sister/nun". There are some "healthcare brothers", but looks like German language went the generic way with Krankenpfleger and other languages mostly follows. I am not sure what would be considered a WTF here.... I suppose in English, the whole idea of hospital staff consisting of doctors, sisters and brothers would be kinda weird.
Just few weeks ago I have received a notification from LinkedIn - my former coworker changed job and is now "Surgical & Trauma Emergency Nurse". Which is not that surprising, I remember that when he worked on our puppet infrastructure POC, he always carried military medic textbooks. Considering the way the POC went, I definitely support his career choice! Maybe I should ask him if he's "a brother" now :-)
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@Zerosquare said in Gendering weirds language:
That's an useful clip. It can also be used to illustrate a sort algorithm.
But the subtitles are the worst. I suppose they're appropriate for the movie, though.
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“Dear members and vaginas, “
— Me, properly gendering things
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in Gendering weirds language:
Maybe I should ask him if he's "a brother" now :-)
Funny you should say that.
In Dutch, a male nurse was referred to as "broeder" which means "brother". It dates from the times that hospitals were generally run by (Catholic) nuns and brothers.
I don't think that term is used anymore by anyone younger than 120.Later a nurse was usually referred to as a verpleger (m) or verpleegster (f), like the German Pfleger/Pflegerin.
And nowadays we moved on to the gender neutral "verpleegkundige", which is too hard for me to translate.
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@nerd4sale said in Gendering weirds language:
"verpleegkundige", which is too hard for me to translate.
It's suffixes all the way out. The root is a verb, "verplegen", which translates as "to nurse" in a medical context (the physical act is "zogen"). The "kunde" infix indicates we're talking about the associated skill, rather than simply doing the job. "kundige" is someone who has that skill.
