Use of gender-specific nouns in Welsh

Welsh General / Questions
1

In recent years there has been an increasing tendency in English to dispense with specifically feminine forms of nouns, especially those relating to occupations where gender is not particularly relevant anyway. For example, it now seems a bit condescending to refer to an ‘authoress’, a ‘poetess’, a ‘paintress’, a ‘doctoress’ or a ‘vicaress’, and while one still sees ‘actress’ I understand that some female actors don’t much like it. Is there any such tendency in Welsh, or is it still perfectly correct and unobjectionable to distinguish between ‘athro’ and ‘athrawes’, ‘bardd’ and ‘barddes’, ‘awdur’ and ‘awdures’, ‘actor’ and ‘actores’ etc?

2

Hard to measure, of course, but I get the sense that some of the feminine forms are getting used less and less… :slight_smile:

3

It will be interesting to see how far this will go.

Will a “dynes” become a “dyn”…?

:slight_smile:

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4

That might be the sort of thing one could query the new corpus of spoken Welsh for when it becomes available.

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5

I have to admit to not realising words like doctoress, poetess and most of the others you mentioned were actual English words.

I read somewhere that in English, words introduced by an elite that don’t find regular usage in the vernacular tend to disappear rapidly from use anyway. Words that enter the vernacular and get adopted tend to survive and often replace the existing word. The old English word for “die” is now “starve”. “Die” entered English from trading links with Scandinavians and the more prestigious “dicease” introduced from French has survived, but has very limited usage.

If the same happens in Welsh, then I suspect the older words like Tywysoges will persist - any that are newer will be much less likely to and if they don’t enter the vernacular then they are almost doomed.

This ignores all the political notions about male and female etc, just simply that some words generally have a higher propensity for longevity than others anyway. I suspect actress will still be in use for a long time yet and efforts to change that may also be doomed to failure in the long run, but who knows.