Thursday, October 22, 2009
Week 8: Cross-gender interaction
The languages i know (english, mandarin, japanese) are all sexist. i guess there is no helping it as women used to have a lower status in the past. however, modern women are fighting back against that. in japanese, there are a lot of phrases or words that women are not allowed to use as they sound crude, yet the men can use them as freely as they like. this also happens when using the japanese equivalent of 'i'. women should use 'watashi' as it is more feminine and men can use 'boku' or 'ore'. our japanese teacher would cringe when female classmates (including myself) used these masculine terms. well, as a way to fight against sexism in language, i would still freely use these masculine terms as long as it is not done in front of the teachers. :P
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it's interesting to know that there's masculine and feminine forms of "i"..
ReplyDeleteis the "sexism" in pronouns only limited to "i"?
because in english, we sort of accept that "she" is feminine and "he" masculine, but there's no notion to change it at all.
in french, there are il (he), elle (she), ils (male they), and elles (female they), yet there are no complaints against the system.
but i guess it's different? it's about "i", and not anybody else.
I think that the Japanese women hold much lower status than Singaporean women. (From what I observe in the media - not sure if its reliable). Asian women, generally, are pretty subservient, unlike our western counterparts. Well maybe we can look at it with a different perspective - its nice to be taken care of! =)
ReplyDeleteJapanese language seems to be notorious for its gendered features. But it's 'ore' first time to hear from a language learner flouting the use of such a feature. Interesting.
ReplyDelete