A female soldier searches a civilian on August 18, 2021 at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Victor Mancilla / AP
The soldier Laura Ana Domínguez was interviewed last August in several media after being photographed in an overwhelming farewell hug with a pregnant Afghan woman whom she had cared for on the plane that took them from Kabul to Torrejón along with a hundred refugees from that country.
The vast majority of journalists wrote or said "the soldier."
A few weeks before, the anniversary of the death of the American soldier Vanessa Guillén was commemorated, harassed for months at the Fort Hood base without measures being taken, and whose body was found dismembered in 2020. The information also spoke of "the soldier" .
The
Dictionary
has not collected the feminine of that word.
Therefore, those who used the morpheme
or
can rightly hide in the lexicon of the academies.
Now, "welded" responds to a perfectly regular training in our language, in analogy with "delegate" and "delegate" or "lawyer" and "lawyer", among others ...;
and therefore cannot be considered alien to the language system.
The military lexicon seems to
remain as a
last redoubt against flexure of the names of positions and jobs that is spreading in the rest of the language under the general morphology of nouns that end both with
or
as
án
and
or
.
This is the case, for example, with "the captain": according to military custom, the same woman would be "the captain" in the army in the morning and "the captain" in her handball team in the afternoon.
This custom of the Armed Forces has perhaps hampered the introduction of women such as "soldier", "sergeant", "pilot" or "cab", perfectly possible and, in my opinion, recommended to designate those positions when they are held by women.
If you want to support the development of news like this, subscribe to EL PAÍS
Subscribe
More information
Soldier, Cabin and Sergeant;
do not generate it
Language is not sexist, but its use
In the case of "welded", it is usually opposed that such box is already occupied by the meaning of "salary, salary or stipend";
But this argument forgets the information provided by the different grammatical functions of the same term and the pragmatic sense that we all apply to the messages (the influence of the contexts on the meaning).
We can say "the fruit seller gave me a fruit bowl", or "the wallet forgot the wallet", or "the cashier put more bills in the cashier".
And in the same way, "the soldier was left without his soldier."
If it weren't for the avoidable redundancy, we could also write “the music misinterpreted the music” or “the technique applied the technique very well”.
We have pointed out on other occasions that the immobilized uses of the masculine to name professions, trades or positions of women (provided that the morphology of Spanish has picked up that inflection) constitutes in our opinion a sexist asymmetry.
But be careful: as on so many other occasions, sexism resides in use, not in the system.
The same happens with "the doctor", "the architect", "the engineer" ..., or with "the sergeant".
Those formulas were used years ago when both men and women understood that the masculine was more prestigious;
or that, as the face of the same coin, the feminine discredited the profession.
But there is no such.
So nowadays you can say in perfect Spanish “la soldada”, “la caba”, “la pilota”, “la sargenta” ...
40 years ago "the minister" also sounded strange.
That is why records of "the minister" can be found in copies of EL PAÍS from 1977;
mentions that, logically, referred to ministers from other countries.
But now we not only have more ministers in the government than ministers, but we also have the soldier Domínguez.
Subscribe here
to the weekly Ideas newsletter.
