veritygold:findingfeather:randomishnickname: rururinchan:I found sources. The word &ldq
veritygold:findingfeather:randomishnickname: rururinchan: I found sources. The word “man” was gender neutral and referred to both sexes until the 13th century The female specific pronoun “she” was invented in the 12th century. The word “girl” was gender neutral and referred to children of both sexes until the 15th century High heels were invented for men and were worn predominantly by men until the 16th century From the mid 16th century to the 19th century boys would typically wear dresses until the age of 7 Until the early 1930s pink was considered the appropriate colour for baby boys and blue was the colour for baby girls In 2017, a Christian couple pull their 6yo son out of a primary school because his classmate is transgender - citing their “traditional beliefs” IMPORTANT NOTE: Last source is transphobic and from a pro-life website that attempts to defend the dumb ass couple. Feel free to ignore it if you prefer, but it was included for the sake of accuracy. Reblogging because verifiable sources make every information 70% better. Thanks for the addition! So the bit about “she” is really misleading. It makes it sound like there was no differentiation between masculine and feminine in the third person before the 12th century in Middle and Old English which is completely incorrect. A singular feminine third person pronoun existed in English before the 12th century. It was (more or less) heo. (More or less because spelling was really not standardized and it’s also found written “hio”, “ho”, “hoo” … ) For reasons that are subject to debate - as the actual sourced link will tell you if you follow it - for some reason English shifted from “heo” to “she”. That’s all. While many aspects of gendered language and gender roles of those who spoke what would become English prior to the 12th century were different from ours, they are really really not who you want to go to in order to put forward some idea of lack of gender, ungendered language/conceptualizing, or … anything of that nature. You honestly can’t, without lying about the past. Yeahhhh, I looked up the words on etymology-online out of linguistic curiosity and they’re all like that. The meaning of the words has shifted, sure, but it’s not like there wasn’t a word for “adult male” or “female child” before 1200 AD; they were just different words. Girl used to mean a child of either sex and then became synonymous with maid/maiden (which were the previously used words for a female child) - in fact both are sometimes still used this way. Before “man” acquired the specific meaning of “adult male”, there was wer/wife (aka man/woman) to get across the same distinction.… so I mean, yeah, their basic point isn’t wrong (the meaning of language changes, so do the specific trappings that are associated with gender roles; it’s not like there is any sort of objective, inherent female-ness to a skirt or the sound ʃi).But the above post is an extremely misleading way of conceptualizing it; it makes it sound like gendered pronouns and gender roles are a recent invention, which they obviously are not. I had reblogged the original post, so here’s the obligatory reblog of the erratum too. -- source link