Struggle for the Russian language: Who needs feminitives and why, and how is it right - a doctor or a doctor

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

It is not the first year that discussions have been raging in the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet, which, to be honest, are simply incomprehensible to the average layman. Some defend in them the right to use feminitives, others answer that feminitives disfigure and destroy the Russian language. Some articles use mysterious words that look as if the interlocutor was unable to switch from Czech to Russian - "author", "spetskorka", "borcina", in others you read the article to the middle, before realizing that the producer, who started a family with a top manager of an IT company is not a gay couple at all. What kind of beast are feminitives, why are such passions boiling around and why is someone fighting for their use?

What are feminitives, and why do you use them since childhood

Feminitive (aka feminative) is a word denoting in the feminine gender any specialist, worker, representative of nationality or religion, and so on. Teacher, nanny, blonde, brunette, Swedish, Japanese, student, schoolgirl - all these words refer to the feminitive. The controversy revolves mainly around feminitives, which are not approved as a literary norm, and not so many traditional feminitives (use the words artist and writer or artist and writer for a woman, for example).

For example, there are many experts in their field who perceive the designation of their profession in the feminine gender not as a stylistic feature of someone's speech, but as a personal insult, and on Wikipedia and Google you can see how about some celebrity of the past they write “a woman artist "Or side by side words in a different way:" writer, suffragette"

The controversy also revolves around whether one person, whether he is a supporter or opponent of feminitives, has the right to demand from another to build a speech according to his personal taste, up to insults in case of refusal. Similar passions have recently been simmering around fresh borrowings such as "smoothies", "fitness", "manager" and "coworking".

Why are some people for feminitives?

Surprisingly, feminitives like to use two opposite camps: feminists (by the way, not all) and lovers of antiquity, who, however, besides “doctors” and “professors” use many more half-forgotten old words. It is clear that the latter like everything traditional, and for many centuries it was normal for the Russian language to form feminine forms to denote women in the profession and not only. Feminists have very different reasons.

visibility of the contribution of women to a particular profession. When most of the professionals around are called masculine, the brain falls into a trap and many begin to believe that it is mainly men who work - and they also create everything around them, and women, at most, go to work in school. In addition, many scientists are mentioned in Russian textbooks, but since their full names are not given, and the specialty is always mentioned in the masculine gender, another illusion is created - that women did not contribute to science.

The illusions themselves seem harmless, but they are used to argue why it is right to pay women less, why women should not have professional authority, or why women should be curtailed in civil rights. For about half of the citizens of Russia, this is very unpleasant - because about half of the citizens of Russia, in fact, are citizens, if you use the feminitive.

Feminitives can help to get used to the idea that professionals of different genders are equal. If one and the same profession in the masculine gender sounds important, but in the female one it begins to seem like something frivolous, it is clearly not a word: the point is that women in this profession are perceived by outsiders. But if you start using words like “poetess” and “draftsman” in exactly the same situations and with the same intonation as “poet” with “draftsman”, maybe this will slightly align the perception on a purely psychological level.

Why don't others like them?

Most of all they protest against the unusual feminitives - the feminine gender for words such as "author", "editor", "courier", "manager" and so on. But in some cases, the protest is also ideological in nature (and some of the opponents of the feminists are feminists).

abandoning the feminine gender for professions and other occupations, perhaps, would equalize the perception of specialists. If everyone is around, both men and women, taxi drivers, lawyers and journalists, then it seems like the difference in attitude towards them will be stupid. In general, this is something like political correctness in the sense in which this word is usually used in Russia: if you make the difference invisible in words, then the problem of discrimination and different opportunities in childhood and life will disappear.

the mention of a profession in the feminine gender draws attention to gender, making it paramount in relation to the profession. This implies that only feminine words can attract attention to gender, as opposed to masculine. It is not entirely clear, however, why in this case not abandon the adjectives of the female gender: after all, words like "sociable" and "smart" just as clearly indicate that we are talking about a woman. Do they make gender more important than qualities, that is the question?

unexpectedly for many opponents of feminitives, LGBT people and their supporters are in their ranks. Not every person is ready to declare their gender - masculine, feminine, or, for example, absent at all. Abandoning the division of nouns denoting occupation into feminine and masculine could alleviate this problem. By the way, just in this case, they advocate the abolition of gender for verbs and adjectives, which is logical.

The fourth reason: not everyone knows who exactly stands for and against feminitives. It is customary to associate them with feminists, and some people just want to do everything in spite of feminists. If only a feminist would be pleased with their healthy ears, they would have frostbitten their ears.

Why do some feminitives look so weird?

Photographer, autoress, psychiatrist, manager - it seems that someone jumps from Czech or Bulgarian to Russian and gets confused all the time in words. Where do all these words come from, who comes up with them and why do they look so strange?

When there are no codified (recorded in dictionaries) forms, but there is (some of the native speakers, not necessarily all) need this form, a person tries to build a word based on his knowledge of how words appear in the language. The same happens if the word already exists, but the person does not know. So many unusual feminitives are simply invented on the go, and then picked up (or not picked up, or actively used for ridicule) by others. Words taken not from a dictionary, but compiled for their own needs, are called "occasionalisms", that is, made by chance, if translated literally.

There are several reasons why feminitives are sometimes put together this way. Some people like to borrow the experience of other Slavic languages (that is, when it seems to you that the word was brought from Polish or Belarusian - you don’t think). Others like to unify everything and dream of a single common way to form the feminine gender. Here options are possible, add the suffix -к- or the suffix -ess- to everything. Or maybe -its-? Still others deliberately move away from the forms that already exist in the Russian language, such as the "doctor" and "doctor", since among the intelligentsia these forms are considered vernacular and ridiculed. Then why not come up with a doctor or a doctor? (Or a very harsh editor instead of an editor).

Finally, sometimes the word is composed according to completely traditional templates and there is no special history of mockery at it, but it looks unusual, as the “PR”, “rating” and “manager” once looked unusual. Remember how these words annoyed many in the nineties!

And what about the classics?

In the literature and press of the nineteenth and twentieth century, you can find many feminitives that now look strange. Some, when faced with them, consider them a village dialect or a remake of feminists. So, in old books and articles you can find an inspector of the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens, a chauffeur and chauffeur, an aviatrix, a sculptress and a doctor (and we are talking about a lady with a medical education, and not about the doctor's wife). Lomonosov mentions a hat and kalachnitsa, Soviet writers - violinists, pre-revolutionary - musicians.

In general, there is nothing surprising for a language in which there are not even two, but three grammatical genders, two of which in the case of people have been associated with gender for many centuries. In fact, the rejection of feminitives does not occur until the end of the nineteenth century, and it becomes a sign of education and literary speech only after the war.

Continuing the story of linguistic subtleties, an interesting version about how words in Russian changed meaning.