Manifestations of sexism in English

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1、Manifestations of sexism in EnglishMorphology: Jesperson , the Denmark linguists, pointed out :“ English is the most masculine language in all the language he was familiar with ”in his book Language and Structure published in 1923.Suffix:In English the words that are used by men are usually unmarked

2、 while women are marked. These two words “unmarked” and “marked” were discussed by the renowned linguist Greenberg in the 1930s which discloses deeply the phenomenon of sexism in English languages . The suffixes are well known to people are:1)-ess: actor and actress ,host and hostess, prince and pri

3、ncess, heir and heiress 2)-ette: farmer and farmerette, sailor and sailorette, major and majorette 3)-enne: comedian and comedienne, tragedian and tragedienne, equestrian and equestrienne4)-trix: administrator and administratrix, aviator and aviatrix5)other suffixs: fiance and fiance ,hero and heroi

4、neThis kind of word formation is somehow considered that women are deprived for men.However, there are also exceptions .Under certain circumstances ,the phenomenon of “unmarked” and “marked” will be reversed ,For example, the use of “bride” and “bridegroom”. When women get married ,they will be call

5、ed “bride”. And another pair is “widow” and “widower”. When womens husbands died ,they will be called “widower” while men may remarry with someone else after their wives passed away. So in any of these cases reflects the sexual discrimination to women.Compounds: Take the word “kingdom” as example, a

6、nd it refers to “a country governed by a king or a queen ”, and even the queen is in power ,there is no such word “queendom” existing. And looking at this instance “sports man ship” which means “behavior that is fair, honest and polite in a game or sports competition taken part by men or women”, how

7、ever, there is no “sports women ship” ,even though there may be numbers of women in the game. Whats more, “man” can be regarded as “human beings” while “woman” has no such particular usage. In other aspects, there are many English words including “-man” or “man-” such as mankind, chairman, manmade,

8、postman ,fireman ,salesman, freshman etc. All of these words can represent not only man but also women .Nowadays ,even if it appears some new words such as “chairperson”, “Madam Chairman” being used to express fairness for women ,but they often ignored by people. Syntactic LevelWord OrderAccording t

9、o the Bible, Eve is derived from one of Adams ribs, so Adam said “This is a piece of new bone in my bones, the flesh separating form mine: as she was taken form men ,so she was called women.” From this ,we can see that women became an appendage to men a long time ago.When it comes to words and phras

10、es constructing ,masculine words are usually put before feminine counterparts which has become an usual practice. And we can see that the male are more respectable than the female ,e.g, father and mother, boys and girls ,brother and sister ,host and hostess, sir and madam ,king and queen, etc. In th

11、e view of Spender (1980), this kind of order came from Mr. Wilson .His book “Eighty Eight Grammatical Rules” was published in 1746, which described that the male is supposed to be placed before the female ,the reason is that the male is more complicated than the female. However ,in spite of the exce

12、ption of “ladies and gentleman”, this just complies with the trend of “ladies first” in modern society.GenderIn English ,the use of personal pronouns can reflect the discrimination to women .When people do not know the gender of someone , he will prefer “he” instead of “she” to replace. Even sometim

13、es it refers to both of the genders. In formal types of writing, people also choose “he” to be represented as somebody ,someone ,no one and so on.For example:(1) Nobody knows the result unless the professor tell him in advance.(2) Everyone will do his best to acquire the knowledge as much as possible.In these two sentence , “he” can not be replaced by “she” which is only can be used as feminine pronouns in most of cases.