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La Crusca to the Cassation: no schwa, yes to the feminine of the professions in the sentences

Nothing schwa or asterisks and no also to the article in front of female surnames. These are some of the rules indicated byCrusade Academy after a question from the Equal Opportunities Committee of the Governing Council of the Court of Cassation on gender equality in the writing of judicial documents. The question goes beyond these acts, for a use of language that is respectful of gender differences, but the answer is an indication that can have a general sense.

These are the principles indicated:

  1. Avoid rhetorical reduplications. On the basis of the principle of concision which inspires the general revision currently underway of the legal language, interventions involving double reference to the two genres should be limited as much as possible, an expedient although widely usable in contexts of public speaking and rhetorical value. We intend to refer to the type «workers, men and women, male and female employees». When this is not possible, the inclusive masculine plural, unlike the singular, is acceptable.

  2. No to the use of the article with the surnames of women. If you don’t understand the gender of the person you are talking about, you can add the first name: «The presence of Maria Rossi» or «The presence of the witness Rossi».

  3. No to schwa and asterisks. «Exclusion of heterodox signs and conservation of the unmarked masculine to indicate offices, when they are not connected to the name of the person who holds them. Language is first of all spoken, indeed spoken enjoys a priority in the eyes of many linguists, and writing must correspond as much as possible to it». In juridical language, the use of graphic signs that have no correspondence in speech, artificially introduced by minority decision of single groups, however well-intentioned, should be excluded. Therefore, the asterisk must be strictly excluded in place of the endings having a morphological value («Car* amic*, all* those* who will receive this message…»). The same goes for the scevà or schwa, the ǝ of the international phonetic alphabet which represents the central vowel of many languages, not present in Italian, but used in some dialects of the Peninsula.

The legal language is not the right place for minority innovative experimentations which would lead to inhomogeneity and idiolect. «In a language like Italian, which has two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, the best tool through which all genders and orientations are felt to be represented continues to be the unmarked plural masculine, provided one is aware of what it actually is: a way of including and not of prevaricating».

  1. The feminine of professions to use without hesitation. More and more extensive use should be made of professional names inflected in the feminine. These names can be derived by applying the normal rules of grammar (engineer > engineer, the president > the president…).

Here the complete opinion of the Accademia della Crusca.

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Source: Vanity Fair

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