The SBB (Swiss federal train company) has dedicated a train to the Swiss author Annemarie Schwarzenbach!
Schwarzenbach in the Engadine (CH), 1938
Describing her as a Swiss traveller, these two quotes are printed in some of the carriages,
“Wir müssen auf eine neue Brüderschaft [sic] trinken, auf die Sinnlosigkeit, die Unwegsamkeit, die tastende Spur.”
“Die Gnade dieser Erde ist überschwänglich, wenn wir nur die Stimme erheben.”
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“Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen”, Die Zauberflöte
(MET, 1961) Love Kathleen Battle!
Although the music is unbeatable on every level, I have a slight problem with some of the lyrics. Otherwise one of the best operas, if not the best opera, ever made.
So if not ‘love’ then at least Mozart’s music will spice up one’s life!!
a few weeks ago my bike was stolen. left was only a demolished bike chain. an hour later, the bike was on sale on various websites.
the institution in charge of dealing with such issues knew that but nothing was done…
Fazit: one fewer item to make one sorry to leave london soon… r.i.p. my beautiful bike! i hope your new ‘owner’ takes as much care of you as i did.
(this is of course not my bike. photo purely for illustrative purposes, d’uh)
the ultimate video that much current cultural industry output //might// be modelled on …
love the go-betweens
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If you haven’t laughed today, check out how Plato ‘explains’ forms –by coming up with the notion of ‘bedness’, the way beds, based on the idea of a ‘bed’, are made. . .
Gotta love it.
Certainly not the number one of sophisticated distinction but I simply have a faible pour l’attitude de ce type de pop. I guess, I love it.
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stairs at the Albertina museum in Vienna.
makes the heart sing. 🙂
Words are great and languages are a great invention. Language is, however, also an incredibly powerful marker of difference (think of accents, literacy, etc. as determinants of social status, e.g.). So albeit linguistics and other (scientific) inquiry into the ways of ‘language’ are often a little belittled, people, interestingly enough, frightfully cling on to the orthodoxies of language.
The example I want to focus on here is the ‘established’ grammatical, orthographical and syntax gender differentiations that different languages exhibit to different degrees. This is to say that while some languages have three grammatical genders (German, Latin) and others do not necessarily specify a person’s sex according to a female/male binary (Chinese, Nordic languages like Norwegian, etc), most languages are structurally based in a fundamental distinction between ‘female’ and ‘male’ (which is nevertheless referred to as grammatical ‘gender’).
This is, however, not necessarily consistent in many languages, as for example the English language does have certain specific terms for, let’s say, the decidedly female author or lion (authoress, lioness) but not a lawyer or doctor. Of course, it is often argued that the latter example proves that English is a more or less ‘gender-neutral’ language -but why would it then bother differentiate in the first cases (and, consequently between the personal pronouns)? It seems conclusive to suggest that this reflects the asymmetrical distribution of power according to certain categories. Logically, it follows that il faut strategies to combat the unequal power relations portrayed but arguably also perpetuated by such linguistic structures.
Different languages and different ‘gender equality’ strategies
There have indeed, for many years, been attempts to do so, as power is now widely accepted to be quite implicated in mechanisms of power (de Saussure 1916, Foucault 1975, Derrida 1976, Cixous 1975, Spivak 1993, Orwell 1946). So, particularly in terms of sex parity and/or gender equality, there have been many approaches to mitigate said power asymmetries (Mills 1995). Recently, for example, parity campaigns for gender-neutral toilets and unisex changing rooms have been joined by suggestions to introduce un-gendered titles (‘Mixter’ instead of Mr and Mrs in Brighton, UK) and pronouns (‘hen’ instead of ‘he’ and ‘she’ in Sweden). The use of the plural pronoun (‘they’ instead of ‘he’) in English to refer a ‘neutral’ person, for example, seems to be established pretty well now.
It is, however, crucial to note that these changes are promoted in languages that already make little sex/gender distinction. So what about languages that are fundamentally and ontologically built on (grammatical) sex difference?
German, French, and Spanish for example require a rigorous precision of grammatical gender. I.e., all nouns, pronouns, adjectives (and in the cases of French and Arabic, also the verbs) need to be declined and conjugated in a gendered way.
This is why many activists and scholars (Pusch 1983) have in these cases focussed on making the use of the language more inclusive and accurate rather than erasing sex difference completely. Notably, since German’s structure, for example, would be likely to implode if its three grammatical genders were integrated into one “neutral” one. So German ‘language parity’ movements have focussed on mainstreaming the use of a) both the male and female versions of a word (Schülerinnen and Schüler = female and male students, or SchülerInnen) and b) generally more inclusive terms (to go beyond the binarism of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’) such as Schüler_innen, Schüler*innen). Likewise with the Spanish tod@s (=todos and todas, male and female version of ‘all’/’everybody’, which is important, as the orthodox grammatical rule subsumes the female todas in the male todos as a ‘neutral’ plural).
In short, then, it is great to be aware of how power asymmetries are mediated and maintained via language, but it is also important, to make sure that the methods used to mitigate them are appropriate for the specific structures of the targeted language. Zhe said.
leerelehre 