I don't really know what to make of this satire... I find this confusing:
> In most contexts, it is self-evident when "white" is being used in an inclusive sense, in which case it subsumes members of the darker race just as much as fairskins.
That's definitely not how that works. "Black" and "white" are opposite in the dictionary. Looking up the term "man" in the dictionary [1][2], they all contain as one of the definitions of "a human being of either sex; a person" or something like it. It is at worst an unclear-but-possible construal to use the word "man" to imply "person," whereas construing "white" to mean "white or black" is not how any version of English works.
> whereas construing "white" to mean "white or black" is not how any version of English works.
You know that it's satire, yet you somehow missed that it's satire and think he actually means this part to be literally true about our real-world English. If you read on it's pretty clear that this is from an "alternate world" version of English and not our own. He even says as much in the postscript.
In the universe of the satire your comment would have been:
I don't really know what to make of this satire... I find this confusing:
> In most contexts, it is self-evident when "man" is being used in an inclusive sense, in which case it subsumes members of the fairer sex just as much as the stronger.
That's definitely not how that works. "Man" and "woman" are opposite in the dictionary. Looking up the term "white" in the dictionary [1][2], they all contain as one of the definitions of "a human being of any race; a person" or something like it. It is at worst an unclear-but-possible construal to use the word "white" to imply "person," whereas construing "man" to mean "man or woman" is not how any version of English works.
I guess. But we're not in that universe, we're in this one, and the dictionaries don't say that. Bad analogies can't lead to good logic by making them longer.
I think you might still be a bit confused about what Hofstadter is trying to do in the post? He's trying to show how strange the use of gender in English was (pronouns, "man" to mean everyone, etc) by writing as if he were in a hypothetical alternate universe where race received that treatment instead of gender.
It's mighty white of Master "William" to have penned this piece.
[Edit: it may offend your sensibilities; that is a good sign, for we may have made some modest progress. When I was young, "mighty white" was used in public and unironically.]
This Hofstadter piece is what got me on board with the idea that long term English should use singular "they" by default. Race doesn't belong in our pronoun system and neither does gender.
> Race doesn't belong in our pronoun system and neither does gender.
Neither do a lot of things: gender, irregular verbs and plurals don't need to be in the language at all. It's time to ditch English and force a switch to a wholly synthetic language, carefully engineered to be free of English's pervasive ungoodness.
What do we do, then, in languages where noun classes are mandatory and (for animals) aligned with gender, and eliminating them would take a revamp of the entire noun morphology? The masculine-feminine-neuter triple of classes in German does occasionally allow neuter nouns for people, but in Russian a neuter term absolutely implies you’re an inanimate object (possibly a corpse).
French, which doesn’t have a neuter at all, can kind of get by with inserting ·e· because there masculine and feminine adjective endings frequently differ by a single e in writing, but the resulting hybrid is impossible to pronounce as the orthography reflects the sounds of five centuries ago.
A lot of the attempts at this for English before the 2000s failed because they didn't integrate well with the rest of the language, and I think the elegant solution for each language will depend on details of that language.
Technically, before the ideologically-charged forced meme took over, both masculine товарищ tovarišč and feminine товарка tovarka were in use for “comrade”, but only the former was chosen for the newspeak as a gender-neutral title, in line with the Revolution’s professed equal-rights ideals. (Yes, seriously. Of course, the Revolution’s professed ideals at a particular time and place are to be distinguished from its ideals next year, the next town over, or indeed its actual goals or consequences.) The forcing was so effective that the title now only remains in military regulations, the ideology being both out of fashion and rarely relevant, and even the original generic term has essentially fallen out of use with no real replacement (I understand “comrade” in English has also suffered as a result).
I’d say titles are a red herring, though,—unlike e.g. Polish, Russian doesn’t really use them outside a few exceptions (a news article might refer to Professor $SURNAME, a letter might be addressed to Master Ambassador), and essentially never to address somebody in person. That role traditionally falls to $NAME $PATRONYMIC (thanks to the Varangians), though you might hear $NAME nowadays as well.
The problem is that every adjective, numeral, or possessive that attaches to a noun and every pronoun that refers to it depend on whether the noun is {{{animate,inanimate} {masculine,feminine},neuter} singular,plural} and which case it is in. (Unlike in Romance languages, plural forms are not gendered.) Having a grammatical gender is not optional, and being neuter means that you are either dead or were never alive to begin with. (The converse is not true: тело telo “body” is neuter, труп trup “corpse” is inanimate masculine, мертвец mertvec “dead man or woman” is animate masculine. The sex of the diseased makes no difference.)
Common nouns that refer to people—professions, roles, demonyms, agents, patients, etc.—are usually either masculine only whatever the referent or have separate masculine and feminine forms following one of a half-dozen patterns. (This is no Slovak, a single feminine suffix would be much too simple.) Many are formed from other words by productive or long-fossilized but still recognized rules. None can be gender-neutral.
Sounds indeed like degendering po-russki would be likely to follow, rather than lead, any underlying societal/political change.
I am somewhat surprised to see that, in the Old Country, "singular they" is becoming acceptable, well before the adoption (should it ever be) of an Equal Rights Amendment; back in the 1970s, I had expected these changes would proceed in the opposite order.
1. All people shall be equal before the law and court.
2. The State shall guarantee the equality of rights and freedoms of man and citizen, regardless of sex, race, nationality, language, origin, property and official status, place of residence, religion, convictions, membership of public associations, and also of other circumstances. All forms of limitations of human rights on social, racial, national, linguistic or religious grounds shall be banned.
3. Man and woman shall enjoy equal rights and freedoms and have equal possibilities to exercise them.
NB. not that Единая Россия necessarily strongly upholds the principles of this article?)
On the bright side, I believe in 1985 the Post Scriptum was considered necessary to avoid publication having been a career-limiting move, but today it might have been omitted with few other than the deliberately obtuse missing the intended point(s).
I thought it was poor satire then and now. There's no essential difference between whites and blacks. But there definitely is between sexes.
Whether this difference needs to be exhibited in language is a different matter, but this satire misses the mark.