Shon Faye thinks the words "girl", "woman" and "she" were "invented" in the 13th century

[VickyEadie]

www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/9ba1l5/this_tumblr_post_that_claims_words_like_girl_and/

And there were no languages other than English, presumably.

Does it work with other words too? If there wasn't a specific word for rain that's sudden and heavy can we assume that either that didn't happen or people just didn't notice that sometimes water falls from the sky?

If it doesn't have a name, does it even exist?

Got to be honest, that types who are as deep as an Adam Sandler film whilst pretending to be a French language art house film just ain't my cup of tea.

That's the polite version of saying how much I dislike these types of reality star activists.

Sometimes people have babies, and then there's another group of people who look different who never have babies. We don't need words for the first group, obviously, in fact most of us hadn't noticed that such a group existed, we'd assumed that everyone could get pregnant and it was just coincidence that the ones with the dangly bits and the beards never did.

(Life prior to the 13th century, according to Shon.)

What have they been doing at universities over the last ten years?

Lobotomies?

I believe that 'arse wipe' was a word in the 12C. Maybe.

If it doesn't have a name, does it even exist?

In the case of something like perception of different shades of blue, possibly not - yet whether we perceive the difference or not, the wavelength tells the truth.

I started scanning the Old Norse dictionary in Ánláf's link (Favourite word so far - arm is 'handleggr'). It's interesting to see where there are multiple words for the same concept (battle, brave...). Wandering OT but the subject of the OP wasn't as interesting as the Norse tbh

Puella et puer

Femina et vir

If there was no word for women, how did they know who to shove in the red tent once a bleeding month?

Old English has a great many words for women, at all stages of life from virgin to queen.

They even had words for women who brewed beer and wove cloth.

My favourite: aglæcwíf
a wretch of a woman vile crone

In the case of something like perception of different shades of blue

See now that is interesting. In many other languages there is no word for pink. Pink is not a colour on its own, it’s just light red. However some languages have different names for light and dark blue and perceive them as two different colours, just like English speakers do with pink and red.

Are there any languages that don’t have male and female pronouns?

Did all those people thousands of years ago making the sculptures of huge-breasted, big-arsed fertility goddesses really not have a name for what they were predicting? Really?

MrsTerryPratchett - that's what the sculptures were for. Not having words for women, they had to make the sculptures.

Every time they wanted to say woman, they held up a sculpture. When they meant old woman, they turned it upside down.

It's amazing we still exist as a species. Not knowing who can impregnate whom, or having common language to communicate with.

Sumerian cuneiform had a word for woman. Munus.
sumerianwotd.livejournal.com/9817.html

Dance Seems very time-consuming.

'Bat' and 'ben', one means 'daughter' and the other 'son'. It was completely impossible to know which one to use until fairly recently.

Andrós is ancient greek for man. Guné is ancient greek for woman. We are going back to 9th century BC here. Humans have had written words for man and woman for at least 2800 years.

Shon is going to roll their eyes soon and tell us we've missed their point, which was a cunning dig at some conservative types who use the word 'traditional' to back up their choices.

Shon is going to be oblivious that they and all their TRA chums are building a philosophical edifice on exactly the same constructed notions of tradition.

Shon is a simple sort.

It's a miracle DH exists. His family managed to broker marriages in the 11th century in such a way that they ended up with heirs. And allowed some of them to inherit castles and stuff. God alone knows how they allocated which ones were castle inheriting types or not.

Clearly an elaborate game of eeny meeny miney mo @AornisHades

No other possible explanation.

I was always impressed by Jesus’ kind intervention to cure the woman suffering an issue of blood. Presumably her pronouns were normal for a female in Aramaic. And I bet he didn’t try to foist a bloody Mirena on her first .

I am thoroughly enjoying the linguistic primer aspect of this thread. Who would have thought TRAs’ pronouncements would prove to provide such fertile ground for discussion?

I'm actually gobsmacked by that quote from Shon about the definition of 'woman'. Throughout the centuries men have declared that women have defective virtue (Aristotle), no souls (was it Jerome, Augustine or the council of Macon or someone??), were closer to evil than men (the whole Eve and Pandora thing), have limited intellect, were property, should be burnt upon the death of our husbands, etc. and so on and now some clown suggests we don't even exist, (we are just what, shifting signifiers??), but because he identifies as one of us then we are 'transphobic' if we argue against our own erasure and risk being censored even here, on a site for women, if we protest too much? Well fuck me.

Got to be honest, that types who are as deep as an Adam Sandler film whilst pretending to be a French language art house film just ain't my cup of tea.

Quite. Cocteau, they ain't.

This is what elite education confers you know - over-articulacy, under-intelligence. They just blind you with word salad.

This is what elite education confers you know - over-articulacy, under-intelligence. They just blind you with word salad

But it is the essence of this that is at the heart of self-ID and which drives a lot of the gender studies tosh in the academy - it's not just Shon.