It's a men's talk. Well, and women's, too.

Ok, this post is gonna be a mix of some stuff.



In Bahasa Indonesia, now it's dawned on me, there're much more words refering to female, girl, woman, and the likes compared to those to the opposite sex; there are perempuan, wanita, gadis, dara, betina, etc. Male or man is usually translated to jantan, lelaki, or laki-laki.

There are some denigrating adjectives and nouns which most of the time go with those words connected with female. For example: perempuan jalang/binal (lewd woman), setan betina (female evil), janda kembang (literally flower widow, usually used to describe young, attractive widow; there's no duda kembang or flower widower). Even gadis and dara can be used to mean virgin, only applicable to females.

Another thing is, the equivalent of Mrs in Bahasa Indonesia is Nyonya, while Miss is Nona. While it's getting rare to hear people use Nyonya, Nona is almost unheard of. Most of the time, when a lady still looks quite young, usually she's called Mbak (sister), followed by her first name. An older lady's called Ibu (literally mother, but it's a polite way of addressing older women) followed by, again, her first name. Maybe it's because of the Indonesian way of addressing people by their first names rather than family names which are required after Nyonya and Nona.



Move on to French.

When I started learning French, I thought it was one of a sexist language; every noun's either masculine or feminine. Masculine nouns are indicated by the use of le in front, and feminine la. The worst thing's that there's no logic in assigning the gender. Le soutien-gorge is masculine and means bra, la guerre is feminine and means war. According to my teacher, the nouns were given their current genders based on how well they sounded with either le or la.

Speaking of Mrs and Miss, Mrs is Madame and Miss Mademoiselle in French. There are now more and more people (especially women) in France who demand for a new title for women which doesn't reveal their marital status, the equivalent of Ms. It is, according to them, to prevent discrimation against women which might arise from their marital status. By the way, like in English, men only has one title: Monsieur.



Now let's talk about English and Singapore.

In my secondary school, when talking to teachers, we use Sir for male teachers and Madam for female teachers; so there's no "Good morning, Miss Tan", instead it's "Good morning, Madam". Married or unmarried.
But we still refer to them using Mr, Mrs, or Miss/Ms; so it's still "Hey, Jon, have you handed in your homework to Miss Tan?" instead of "Hey, Jon, have you handed in your homework to Madam Tan?"

Some people say the use of Sir and particularly Madam when speaking to teachers is very old-school British. But, it's kind of the school's tradition. I'm not sure if there are many other schools like us.