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As I recently saw in a video about bible translations: Greek used (uses?) generic masculine forms for plurals. So a mixed group of stewarts and stewardesses would be called "these stewarts". If there's no context added, it's impossible to tell whether the group was actually all male or not.
I think that's how a large part of European languages still work.
So...like English then?
In many aspects English doesn't distinguish between genders at all.
I chose the words above specifically because they are gendered. I'm not a native speaker, but as far as I know, teacher, butcher, officer, warrior, president, welder, etc. can each mean male or female. There's maybe a connotation, but the words are not gendered. English also has no concept of a grammatical gender. Articles, adjectives, etc. are gendered in most European languages.
English absolutely has grammatical gender, it just defaults to "male" so much people forget there's other options. For example, "teacheress" is a real word, it's just so archaic that the male word now means both, same with how "you" is both singular and plural.
Take "The has a yellow ". Which gender do these nouns have? In German, I could tell you. Both articles and the adjective have a gender.
Of course, you can use gendered nouns, but only a very small minority of nouns actually have female forms.
Hunter, huntress, huntsman
Waiter, waitress, waitsman
Actor, actress, actsman
Nobody says waitman or actsman. I had to fight my phone’s autocorrect just to type those.
Consider that German and French gender basically everything. Your desk has a gender in those languages. English is almost genderless on comparison.
Stewards he said, gently mansplaining.
But to answer your question, yes. If an unbiased translation is impossible (which it is), the solution is to have versions with as many contradictory biases as possible, so they hopefully cancel each other out.
Christianity enters the chat…
This reply has only upvotes and I still think it’s underrated.
For a while, I would get YouTube recommendations with “Translators DID IT again - when do they learn???” videos highlighting what they viewed as horrendously biased censorship in translation.
Every once in a while, I give these idiots a minute of my attention and by their own data they look stupid. Whatever inaccuracy they thought was there pales in comparison to getting the writing to flow well in English.
Classicist sounds hyper specific to classical Greece.
Classicism can be broadly applied to Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, because of how often the sources intermingle (with many older Greek sources transmitted through Roman copies, and many Roman sources themselves written in Greek), but there's usually an element of specialization in one or the other for any given classicist.
I like the way we handle it in German, where Klassische Altertumswissenschaft is the study of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome as pioneered by Friedrich August Wolf in the 1700s, and Altertumswissenschaft is used for the more broad study of antiquity.
The German impulse to just smoosh words together is perpetually amusing and awe inspiring
I can see why you like it, fassgealterte Langeweile
Können wir aus dem Namen ein langes zusammengesetztes Substantiv draus machen?