<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv=content-type>
<META name=GENERATOR content="MSHTML 8.00.6001.19088">
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff text=#000000>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Hi everybody,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>I would like to refer us to an article on
Wikipedia, <A
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender</A> .
An extract from the link as follows: <FONT size=3 face="Times New Roman">"The
linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and
social notion of <B><A title=Gender
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender">natural gender</A></B>, although they
interact closely in many languages."</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>When we speak of 'gender neutrality' in language we
refer to changing the masculine word used, i.e. 'he shall', not for a female
word 'she shall', but as far as practicable to neutralise the wording, i.e.
'they shall' or change the syntax entirely in order to avoid the use of
using the male or female sex; 'pronouns' in this example. Women don't
really want to read a manual where the instruction or information is described
throughout as 'he'. We opt for non-gender specific language in lieu of
this.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>It is usually the creators of the dictionary of a
country that nominate the grammatical gender of a word. In France for instance
they have the French Academy, called 'acad<FONT size=3
face="Times New Roman">é</FONT>mie française'. Wikipedia's grammatical gender
will be decided by the grammar used in a given country and it is far from
objective; but it is grammatical gender, not a description of male and
female/man and woman biological gender. In France the French Academy have
traditionally been the institution that assign the gender to a noun. It would be
interesting to compare, not so much across countries, but within countries to
examine the grammatical gender allocated to various words, because in many
instances is has no relationship to male or female, and it's quite a mystery how
the nouns are allocated a specific gender, and excuse this aside but I used to
think on this and wonder why all the strong, positive, and creative words seemed
to be assigned the grammatical masculine gender. As the extract above says, "The
linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and
social notion of natural gender...'., so we don't speak of grammatically
gendered words as being female or feminine in the biological sense; words are
classified, grammatically, into at least three categories, feminine, masculine,
neuter. They don't refer to men and women, as does the notion 'non-gender
specific language' which does address the biological usage of female and male
words in sentences. And there is a large body of work in all disciplines that
have traditionally referred to 'he' when they mean 'he' and 'she'. It is only in
recent decades that this error is being addressed.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Thank you,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Anne Frazer</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>WMAU</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV
style="FONT: 10pt arial; BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=sarah.stierch@gmail.com href="mailto:sarah.stierch@gmail.com">Sarah
Stierch</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A
title=gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
href="mailto:gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org">Increasing female participation in
Wikimedia projects</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Cc:</B> <A title=vgrigas@wikimedia.org
href="mailto:vgrigas@wikimedia.org">Victor Grigas</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Friday, December 30, 2011 1:14
PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> [Gendergap] What Gender is
Wikipedia?</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>Hi folks,<BR><BR>While a discussion was taking place on this
list about gender neutrality and language, Victor (User:victorgrigas) and I
were having a conversation about it via email. Victor decided to create a page
about "what language is Wikipedia?" <BR><BR><A
href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_Gender_Is_Wikipedia">http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_Gender_Is_Wikipedia</A><BR><BR>Hopefully
you will contribute to your own and other languages. <BR><BR>Interesting
mention about Russian Wikipedia, it states that they refer to Wikipedia as a
female, similar to how in English we refer to ships as women.
<BR><BR>Aweee...even Klingon is featured }:) (How
sentimental!)<BR><BR>-Sarah <BR><BR><BR>
<DIV class=moz-signature>-- <BR><STRONG>Sarah
Stierch</STRONG><BR><STRONG><EM>Wikimedia Foundation Community
Fellow</EM></STRONG><BR>>>Support the sharing of free knowledge around
the world: <A
href="http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=WMFJA085/en/US&utm_source=WMdonate&utm_medium=sidebar&utm_campaign=20110130SB003&language=en&uselang=en&country=US&referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwikimediafoundation.org%2Fwiki%2FHome">donate
today</A><<</DIV>
<P>
<HR>
<P></P>_______________________________________________<BR>Gendergap mailing
list<BR>Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org<BR>https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap<BR></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>