I am not a feminist, maybe. But it's interesting to discuss how certain concepts are seen differently in different languages. German, for example, will refer to "key" as something masculine. It is described as a hard, metal, and strong thing. While Spanish perceives it to be feminine.
Indonesian, on the other side, is a genderless language. We do not differentiate things by gender, and what's interesting is that we even have the same pronoun for both sexes. Based on this fact, we never have such cases on 'sexism' and 'political correctness'. I do not think that I should argue this issue through the common perspective that Indonesian is a simple language. Because it's not, its complexity can be defined from how the nouns could receive affixes, infixes, and suffixes to form verbs.
Anyway, talking about hyper-correction and the conscious effort to change gender-sensitive word into more neutral ones, like history into herstory, is a little too much for me. I wonder if my insensitivity really comes from my ignorance or my native language concept instead.
Indonesian, on the other side, is a genderless language. We do not differentiate things by gender, and what's interesting is that we even have the same pronoun for both sexes. Based on this fact, we never have such cases on 'sexism' and 'political correctness'. I do not think that I should argue this issue through the common perspective that Indonesian is a simple language. Because it's not, its complexity can be defined from how the nouns could receive affixes, infixes, and suffixes to form verbs.
Anyway, talking about hyper-correction and the conscious effort to change gender-sensitive word into more neutral ones, like history into herstory, is a little too much for me. I wonder if my insensitivity really comes from my ignorance or my native language concept instead.
1 comments:
i guess our linguists were so pro democracy :D
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