User:Montrealais/Non-sexist usage in French

Hum, side issue

For those of you who know a language that have masculine and feminine grammatical gender, what would be your opinions in terms of naming conventions for these special terms which may deal with man or woman (such as étudiant) ?

Would you rather consider

one page only, with the masculine gender only, exemple : avocat
add a feminine page avocate with a redirect to the masculine one
two pages with basically the same stuff in

With a masculine page only, would you consider

only refering to the definition of the masculine term, and be done with it
or try to entangle the masculine and feminine terms in the definition (something like, un(e) avocat(e) est un blablabla
or only define the masculine one, then put an additional paragraph to give the feminine translation ?

I'd be happy to have a canadian point of view on this for example (mtlais ?)

user:anthere

My first instinct would be to put the article under the feminine form, and add (Le féminin est utilisé dans le seul but d'alléger le texte), but then I'm perverted that way. Best of all would probably be to put the article at "Droit" or whatever, and have "avocat" and "avocate" redirect to it. (Well, "avocat" would have to disambiguate to "droit" and "avocat (fruit)", I suppose.) - user:montrealais

True. We should as much as possible use a more generic word to "hide" the issue. Avocat and avocate could exist and redirect to Droit. That's a good point to add on our discussion on the fr.wiki. That's probably the most neutral if we can do it.

This said, we can't always do that. Let me take another example maybe. Say we have an article about Physique. On that article, to avoid cluttering it, we want to add a link to another page to deal more specifically with the people famous in physics (List of physicists).

We first have to deal with do we have a common list of women and men or a separate one. Let's say we agree to have a common one (in physics, I hope we could agree that neutrality is that there is no difference between a woman physicist and a man physicist - but then on the fr.wiki, we have a chanteurs page and a chanteuses page so that is probably not obvious for everyone :)))

If we have a common list, how do we name it : Physiciens et physiciennes célèbres ? or just Physiciens célèbres (providing that official conventions say physicien is not refering to males in that case, but has a neutral meaning ?). For pragmatic reasons mostly, I would favor physiciens célèbres

If we name it Physiciens célèbres, and we want to describe what a physicien is, do we write Un physicien est un scientifique spécialiste de la physique. And then maybe imply physicist are necessarily males ?

I can guess the naming convention that will be decided in the end will be Physiciens célèbres, for respect for official conventions are very strong on the french wiki.

It seems french would agree to say that Un(e) physicien(ne) est un(e) scientifique spécialiste de la physique. But I am not sure. The only people involved in the discussion are french. It seems canadiens are more "advanced" in terms of non-sexist language, so that's why I thought it important to see what your feelings were on the matter. I'd like to know if there are other arguments than those expressed in [1]

I'd like to know what you feel would be the most neutral option.
And how other languages such as german solved the issue if it was already raised.

I apologize because I know this is absolutely not a english issue, but I don't know really where to ask for other french speaking not on the fr.wiki what their feelings were on the subject.

Thanks user:anthere

(BTW, we could move this discussion to a new page on Meta & leave a link here)

I don't think two similar pages is a good idea. We could call the page "Avocat(e)", and have both forms redirect. I wonder, are there any efforts in France & the French language worldwide similar to the trend towards "firefighter" instead of "fireman"? I suppose since instead of an obvious suffix it's the gender division throughout the language it's different. Apparently the Academie Francaise advises against things like "la ministre", where the noun doesn't change. Doe we have any French experts in gender studies? -- Tarquin 13:24 Oct 5, 2002 (UTC)

Unfortunately, there's a limit to how far I can go - I'm not a native speaker of French, although I do all my work in a French-language environment so have studied this issue informally a great deal. But I'll see if I could get some opinions; I know at least two people who might want to express themselves (including the linguist who came up with the term professionèles [sic]). - Montrealais

Curry, expressing himself in this discussion is a french linguist. I will be happy if your friends can give their point of view on this matter

user:anthere