Enjoy reading books, whether Arabic or English. And while reading books in both languages, one thing that always stands out to me is how both languages address the sexes.
In Arabic writing, the masculine form is always used, even when both sexes are addressed. If a subject addresses men only, the context informs the reader. If women are addressed, then almost everything is switched to the feminine. Not just pronouns and adjectives, but verbs and nouns as well.
Grammatical gender is a somewhat difficult part of Arabic, but it is part of its extraordinary precision, even if new speakers might think it a cumbersome chore. In English, people today commonly view the use of the masculine tone as politically incorrect. They frown upon sentences like “Man can be anything he wants to be if he puts his mind to it.” Unacceptable! Offensive! Outrageous!
But is it? Interestingly, using the masculine pronoun to address a general audience is a sound and old practice in English, and only in recent times did it change due to social pressure.
It may be politically correct not to use the masculine form in English anymore, but it makes the language a lot clumsier in my opinion. The above sentence becomes “One can be anything he or she wants to be if he or she puts his or her mind to it.” You can hear the clunk of this plodding beast miles away. A sentence such as, “One can be anything one wants to be if one puts one’s mind to it” is painfully repetitive and obviously unusable. And something like, “A person can be anything they want to be if they put their mind to it” feels weak and bland.
It’s confusing and clumsy, when reading an English book, to see the adjectives and pronouns vacillating between masculine and feminine. An author might write a sentence, “If solution X does not solve the customer’s problem, she should try solution Y.” And then a few paragraphs later, “The customer who could not resolve his problem using solution Y is advised to try solution Z.” And so it goes, throughout the book. I feel as if authors are writing in a worried state, walking on eggshells, counting the number of times she/her were used against he/his, afraid of offending anyone.
Social movements affect many aspects of society: Politics, culture, education, even everyday etiquette. But when a movement (like feminism) affects language itself; language that predates the social movement by hundreds or even thousands of years, there’s something wrong — either the language is too weak to withstand such an unnecessary assault, or the movement’s proponents are so sensitive that they are willing to deform their own culture, their own language, just so they would not be “offended.” And currently in the West (and the US especially), protection from “offense” is now a sacred right. What are the parameters of “offense”? What is offensive and what is acceptable? No one knows, the definition changes regularly.
And the victim, among others, is this once-great institution, now a victim to bullying and pressure: The English language.
