Interesting, thanks Mark!
- Fabian
On 07.04.2015, at 16:38, Mark J.Nelson
<mjn@anadrome.org<mailto:mjn@anadrome.org>> wrote:
Flöck, Fabian <Fabian.Floeck@gesis.org<mailto:Fabian.Floeck@gesis.org>>
writes:
Does anyone know about a study that looks at how often for example
articles about a profession use the male instead of the female form as
the name (female form doesn't exist or is just a redirect)?
It would probably not be a so much of an issue for English, but rather
Spanish, German, Russian etc. Concrete example:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor exists in German, but
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professorin is just a redirect.
One thing to be careful of in such a study (though I would also like to
see it!) is tha the politics and preferences in this area vary widely
across languages, and sometimes within a language, so a purely
data-driven study has to be careful about its assumptions and
generalizations.
Below a long-ish discussion of Greek that you may skip if not interested
(it ended up longer-winded than I had expected):
For example in Greek it is very profession-specific whether the trend is
towards using a slashed form of both genders, or towards convergence on
a single form that applies to both genders (sometimes with atypical
morphology). Sometimes it depends on the specific word form and
historical usage. In fields that historically had both men and women,
both forms are very well established and tend to persist, e.g. a male
teacher is a δάσκαλος and a female one is a δασκάλα. But in fields that
were typically so male-dominated that only the masculine version has
been in common use, there's disagreement over whether it's more
progressive to "revive" a feminine form, or to generalize the masculine
form to cover both genders. For example a female president would
universally be called by the historically masculine form πρόεδρος,
but with a feminine article (i.e. πρόεδρος can now be either a masculine
or feminine noun, depending on context, even though it's morphologically
irregular as a feminine noun). There is in Byzantine Greek a feminine
analog, προέδρισσα (referring to a different position), but it isn't
used today outside humorous contexts (roughly where you might use
"Presidentess" in English). The same applies for a number of other more
common professions, but for some it's more disputed which form should be
used (for President there isn't any usage variance).
In short it's complex, so I hope any data set is careful about what it's
counting as data, and why. :)
-Mark
--
Mark J. Nelson
Anadrome Research
http://www.anadrome.org
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Cheers,
Fabian
--
Fabian Flöck
Research Associate
Computational Social Science department @GESIS
Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8, 50667 Cologne, Germany
Tel: + 49 (0) 221-47694-208
fabian.floeck@gesis.org<mailto:fabian.floeck@gesis.org>
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