“We say, “Clarissa” and smile”
Supporters of feminities want equality for men and women. In Russia it will be difficult.
If you have the “author” should be “autorka” — because no one scruple to call, say, a woman-journalist — journalist. Sure the supporters of the introduction of femination for all professions and positions in the Russian language. However, many such neologisms society rejects, and if used, it is often in an ironic way. Why this is so and whether the introduction of new words to change the attitude towards women in society? To these and other questions in an interview with “Tape.ru” replied the candidate of philological Sciences, senior researcher of the Department of culture of the Russian language Institute of Russian language named after V. V. Vinogradova ran Oksana Gunchenko.
“Ribbon.ru”: Many believe that the new feminitiy — “autorka”, “redaktoro” and so forth dissonant. Why? It is precisely because of this, I think, their society is not taking. Thus, for example, the word “combinare” does not cause such emotions.
Gruntenko: I would say that the attention, interest feminities that they become the subject for discussions and even for our dialogue, is not that other, as a certain fashion. Just in the circles of people who are not alien to the Humanities, at some point it became fashionable to discuss individual words. Again, again and again we see only them, “autorka”, “redaktoro”, “moderatori” and so on. It is the same word that the social network throws a narrow circle of people. It is therefore difficult to say that these words are not acceptable to society, or society opposes, or in this case manifests the pressure of society on the woman and infringement of the rights of women. This is a rather lightweight proposition, that causes me personally just smile. I really like to be a scientist, candidate of Sciences, to feel qualified and to be a citizen of the Russian Federation.
The disempowerment of women begins at the moment when the author-a man gets probation, ten units of money for their work, and the author-a woman — five. But if we’re going to call “autorka”, it will get the same ten. That is infringement of the rights of women and fight for their rights. And now it’s just a desire of a certain number of people to introduce some new words.
Scientists estimate that in the Russian language the number of words to call women in the profession, nationality and so on, is about 1,500. This list includes “combiners”, and “Soviet secret” (despite the fact that the word is somewhat obsolete), and “the governess”, and others. But we’re talking about a very small number of words, not thousands and not even hundreds of them.
Your opponents will tell you that through language you can change the attitude towards women.
My opponents will say that they — the starry-eyed idealists for trying to make something so aggressive act. They speak out against violence and inequality, while they themselves are trying to do violence to language. They are trying to tell other members of society “do so, say so”. Why do they want it? Because they want a word to build peace.
What can I say? “In the beginning was the word, and the Word was with God…” If someone wants to be a Creator in this sense… It’s pride, I think. Pride is good, pride is definitely bad. To build word of man can not. A person can build. All the new names of women in the profession appeared in a certain situation. When the woman sat behind the wheel of a tractor, she became a tractor driver. If a woman will sit in the turret of a tank — it is tank girl.
Some time ago a woman fought for the right to be a typist train. But she said the driver’s job is very complex and heavy, are you sure you’re able to do that? It is important not to be called a typist, and a job as a typist.
And one or the other profession should be well mastered by women, to was a proper word. For objective reasons we have the word “steelworker”, but there is no word “Stalevarov” because women at the blast furnace unit. We have the word “picador”, but there is no word “pecadora” (picador are the ones who teases the bull in the bullfight sticking a sharp peak). We have a male swingboats…
Swingboats? I don’t even know…
Yes, the one who slaughters a pig.
I thought the miner pigs…
Well, but sabishii!
With this you can bet. Surely women also slaughter pigs.
As for sabishii, I would agree, but then we’d be talking about a pair of words “the miner” — “sabishisa”, but the other couple is not exactly “swingbike”. On the other hand, if we look at the same problem from a different angle, there are also so-called women’s profession. For example, there is the word “the Lacemaker”. Do you know anything about the word “krajevni”?
No, but there are certainly men who do this.
Great! Now, if we learn that a man tat, it’s likely we’ll call it a braiding of lace, not kruzhevnica.
But why?
Yes, because the way the language. Anyone coming from the outside, can not say “no, guys, come on, we will oblige everyone to call him kruzhevnica!”.
Let’s make them call the man who deals in nail design master nail design, nail designer, and “masterroom”, “Mastercam” or “trowel”. Or let’s put in a couple to the manicurist “manicure”.
Why not “the manicurist”?
Great! Let you tomorrow will deploy on the Internet a heated discussion, and invite all native speakers of Russian use of the word “manicurist”, “krajevni” and so on. I think at best would be perceived as a freak, a language game.
You gave some examples… masculinities? Don’t know how it correctly is called…
Yes, let us think of the term! We call it “mention” or “masculinities” and also will deploy actively campaigning for the equal rights of men.
But some sound more or less acceptable (as, for example, the manicurist), and others, on the contrary, cut the ear (for example, some “manicure”). Why?
Because the Russian language has a limited number of suffixes that allow us to form the names of persons in a certain way — productive derivational models. For example, names of females are of two types. The first case is when we already have the name of the person of a male, and we form the name of a female person from him. Second — when we have some other word, but the names of men and women are formed from this word.
I will give examples. We have the word “champion”, and from it we form the word “champion”. We have a pair of “athletic” “athlete”, “nurse” — “nurse”, “parachutist” — “parachutist”.
On the other hand, we can have the word “industrialist”, but the word “proizvodstvennye” is derived not from the word “industrialist” and as “industrialist”, the word “production”. Or the words “singer” and “singer”, which is derived from the verb “to sing”.
As I said, a “narrow circle of these revolutionaries” — the number of these suffixes is extremely small. Word-formative formants with these suffixes can be counted on the fingers of two hands: -ka, -ICA, -nica, -IHA, -Sha, -ine, -essa. (It is clear that these suffixes have options, so they may be slightly more.) The patronymic suffix -n – or its variants (Y., N. — but this is different, these words do not call women by profession) and still have the suffix-j-, forming names of women who are doing something (liar, dancer, scrambled — however, this is not the profession).
The productivity of a particular model depends not only on what the suffix formant we take (say-ka — very productive), but also from what word is the original motivating. When we talk, they say, look, we have the word “Komsomolets”, “Komsomolskaya Pravda”, “the poet” “poet,” and no we are not from this starts, but as soon as we begin to say “Clarissa” or “autorka”, we smile.
The problem is that people are trying to form a word such as “autorka” from the word “author”, and in the Russian language all the words in -or, -er, -er behave in that sense is quite inert. They resist such actions. The word, so to speak, animating it, doesn’t want to enter into derivational relations of motivation with the use of the suffix-K-. We have “the author”. There is a “conductor”, “coach”, “Director”, and “dirigerci, trenerke, directori” no.
People who are now discussing the hot feminitiy, for obvious reasons doing this as a naive native speakers. But if you look at this problem from a linguistic point of view, in a language that is wiser than us, all is arranged more difficult, than it seems.
It’s not a binary opposition “man — woman”, and the tripartite system: there’s a man and a woman (in the animal world, a male and a female), and often there’s another word that calls them, regardless of gender.
I will give an example. When we say “goose,” we mean a bird of a particular species, gender unimportant for the speaker. But if you want to use this bird for breeding, then I’ll have a gander and goose. We have horses, but the words “horse” and “horse” can be used without reference to gender. And when we are important, the sex of animals, we will use the words “stallion” and “Mare”. It will be the animals running around the courtyard, the important people as objects of the hunt or farm animals. As soon as it will be about wild animals — say, the heroes of the program “In fauna” Nikolay Drozdov, will just “Panda”, but it will not be around to be a male, referred to as “pandas”. Why? Because we, humans, pandas do not breed, their gender is unimportant to us.
I think it’s just the fact that “Panda” is quite new and is not a Russian word.
It’s not so new. And do pandas exist on Earth a lot of time.