So to finish my story about Russian suffixes, the problem is that there are very few feminine suffixes for professions. And remember that Russian adjectives are gendered. There isn’t really such a word as ” a physicist” or “a professor.” The suffixes turn these words into ” male physicist” or “male professor.” One can stick the word “female” in front but then the whole construction turns into “a female male doctor.” It’s so annoying!
I keep saying things like ” our pediatrician who is a woman talked to the HR director who is also a woman.” It sounds beyond dumb but what can one do?
So why not gay and straight adjectives? 😈
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There seem to be different solutions to the fact that languages change more slowly than realiy (regarding women in the professions).
IIRC Spanish speaking women (at least in Latin America) strongly prefer the creation of specifically female forms.
Also IIRC in Swedish the original forms simply became generic (facilitated maybe by the common gender). This was true for not only historically male professions but also historically female ones, so that the title for a male nurse in Swedish still has a feminine suffix.
In Poland there was some talk about trying to create specifically female forms (like psycholożka from psycholog) but they mostly have’t caught on yet. And lots of formerly female forms have been replaced by male ones so that hardly anyone says wykładowczyni (female university lecturer) both men and women have the title wykładowca.
Interestingly there is a de facto syntactic difference for female professionals in that the titles for women don’t decline. So if I want to ask a female friend if she’s seen Professor Nowak the possibilities are.
Widziałaś profesora Nowaka? (if the professor is a man)
vs
Widziałaś profesor Nowak? (if the professor is a woman).
This is because womens last names only decline if they end in -ska or -cka (and maybe if it otherwiseends in -a).
Also sometimes pani (ms.) is added.
Czy wiadomo kiedy będzie pani dziekan?
Do you know when the (female) dziekan will be in?
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Don’t know about now, but in Germanic counties it was common for wives to be addressed with their spouses’ title, as in “Frau Doktor Blücher”
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“wives to be addressed with their spouses’ title”
Slavic languages used to provide women with possessive names. That is, a woman’s last name was possessive form of some man’s last name.
In Polish the suffixes were -owa (for wives) and -ówna (for daughters) (w equals German w)
So a woman born as Nowakówna (Daughter of) Nowak who married someboday named Kaczmarek would become Kaczmarkowa (wife of) Kaczmarek.
The (wife of) suffix remains in Czech -ova where it’s just indicates females. They’ve almost completely fallen out of use in Polish and can even be seen as kind of insulting.
In Russian IINM the wife suffix has similarly mutated into female last name form -ova, -eva while the daughter suffix is only retained in patronymics, so that Nikolaevna would be daughter of Nikolaj.
There used to be son suffixes as well but they died out of active use in names earlier I think (though still used in Russian patronymics).
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