Zander said:
I'm glad you asked that question. The reason is that when English settled on "he" as the neuter pronoun, there was no concept of political 'correctness' or an understanding of what much later would be described as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The decision was entirely apolitical. In contrast, the use of "she" as a neuter pronoun was foisted on the English language for political reasons at a time when Whorfian thinking was well understood.
I guess i'm not convinced that the posited apolitical nature of the origin of 'gender-neutral' male pronouns even matters--it seems to me that the meaning we bring to language is grounded in current use much more so than in etymology. Thus, if we culturally ascribe connotations to words, it matters not whether those connotations are 'correct' or historically valid--all that matters is that those connotations are there. IOW, when our culture shifted to recognize that modern language constructions could influence thought (or even just worldview), it simultaneously caused existing language constructions to have the power to influence thought (or worldview) to the same degree.
[And, personally, the more i read about post-Medieval, pre-20th-C Western cultures, the more i think that he/him/his as 'gender-neutral' pronouns most definitely *was* an exclusion of females, historically--in general, even when both genders were being talked about, only the men being talked about were really being considered as relevent.]
Perhaps my education has warped me. While i'd never before heard of the Sapir-Whorf axiom, the ideas it labels are something it would only occur to me to question as an intellectual exercise, because they are so obviously true to me from simply observing the world. But then, my educational background is in equal parts in hard science (mostly physics) and folklore (including touching on dozens of cultures and languages), the former of which tends to dismiss semantic confusion in favor of math, and the latter of which is all about subjectivity and difference and culture (rather than objective fact).
And, i still maintain, that if you believe that choice of language doesn't influence thought, that 'she' as a gender-neutral pronoun is just as harmless/sensible as 'he'. I find it hard to accept that 'he' can be without greater connotations, when used as a gender-neutral pronoun, and yet changing it would somehow lose something (that putatively wasn't there in the first place). Or, more succinctly: 'because that's how we've always done it' is insufficient reason, IMHO, when there is any reasonable counter-argument of any sort. If that's the
only reason for sticking with the traditional way, then i don't see a reason not to change.
