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<br><div><div>Nicolas Meeùs wrote:</div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br></font> Gendered categories do exist, I think, in all languages and all cultures.</blockquote><br></div><div>Actually, however, languages are quite different in this respect. In Finnish, for example, there is no grammatical gender, and the same pronoun means both "he" and "she." There are also gender-neutral words for "human being," "mankind" etc. Hence, no problems of inelegance caused by expressions like "she or he" in Finnish.</div><div><br></div><div>I have a wonderful suggestion that would solve so many problems: Why don't we all abandon languages with dated built-in sexism, such as English and French, and adopt Finnish as the primary language of scholarly discussion!</div><div><br></div><div>Olli Väisälä</div><div><a href="mailto:ovaisala@siba.fi">ovaisala@siba.fi</a></div><div>Sibelius Academy</div><div>University of the Arts, Helsinki </div></body></html>