this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
991 points (95.9% liked)
Memes
45901 readers
1252 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Emperoratrix sounds really clunky to me, -atrix is the feminine counterpart to -ator. Imperator, dominator, navigator, etc. I'm particularly fond of the overextension that is 'alligatrix' myself.
Fine fine, then Emperoress instead. It's what the actual English translation of The Incal uses
Why not 'Empress', I wonder? Nothing actually wrong with any of the options, just rings strangely to my ears.
Because the entire point was that the character in question is genderless and this was the early 80s and also French so more modern gender neutral terms didn't exist yet, and "let's just smash the two gendered endings together" was his attempt at one (I'm guessing emperoratrix comes from a literal translation from French, where a female emperor is an imperatrice, and -trice is -trix in english, so imperatorice -> emperoratrix) The book also uses s/he as a pronoun instead of they.
I mean hey, it's much more gender neutral than just defaulting to the masculine like say Le Guin did in left hand of darkness
Interesting!