A Sino-Italian mistranslation morass
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A jumble of soccer talk and Confucian piety, with a splash of CCP ideology
Week in China has an interesting article about a football flap that occurred recently in China:
"Lost in translation: Cannavaro gets Confucian" (May 14, 2021; WiC 540)
The story is quite convoluted and complicated, so we need to start with the background of the key term at play: shì 士 (not tǔ 土 ["earth; soil; dust; local; native; indigenous; uncouth; colloquial"] — it is very easy to confuse the two characters). You will note that nowhere in this long article is there any attempt to translate 士 ("warrior; soldier; scholar; gentleman") into English, and that is a big part of the rub.
During the Warring States period that began about 2,500 years ago the gulf between the nobility and the rest of society was a gaping one. However, the aristocratic boundary was made a little more porous by the emergence of a new class known as shi, as younger princelings recruited their own retinues of retainers.
Lord Mengchang of the Qi state, for one, was said to have attracted 3,000 shi, including warriors, assassins and scholars, under his patronage.
The shi system contributed to some of the most important concepts in what we know as Confucianism, although it is little understood outside scholarly circles in China.
That’s why onlookers were stunned when Fabio Cannavaro, the manager of Chinese football club Guangzhou FC, showed that he understood the ancient idea rather well himself.
The Italian had been confronted by reporters on Guangzhou FC’s poor start to the new Chinese Super League season after losing one match and drawing another (the team was better known as Guangzhou Evergrande before new rules came in to de-commercialise football franchises, see WiC525). Through an interpreter, the World Cup winner confessed that the ultimate goal of the club owner – aka the property developer China Evergrande – was not necessarily to win the CSL championship this season but “wei guo yang shi” – which translates as “raising shi for the country”.
The hashtag of “Cannavaro wei guo yang shi” swiftly became one of the most discussed topics on social media. Fans of the team were irritated that the manager of a club that has won the CSL in eight of the past 10 seasons would publicly write off its title hopes so early in the campaign. But neutrals were more amazed that the 48 year-old seemed to understand the shi system.
Cannavaro has spent most of his managerial career in China but his Mandarin is said to be limited. Perhaps his interpreter added a few localised flourishes to his comments, although the sports media later explained that Cannavaro was attempting to convey the message that Guangzhou FC’s longstanding policy has been to focus on developing younger, homegrown talent. That means more game time for local players in the hope that they might grow into genuine stars that contribute to the Chinese dream of winning the World Cup.
In this context Cannavaro was using the analogy of the shi to talk about his task in elevating younger, less celebrated players into the footballing elite, or soccer nobility. The current squad at Guangzhou FC is a mix of local players and stars that were born overseas. At a stretch there is a case that the team could be considered as an “all Chinese” side in its own right as the squad boasts five Brazilian-born players (such as Elkeson and Ricardo Goulart) that have been naturalised and could thus represent China in international matches.
However, the club has been implementing an unofficial rule that the team should play only two of these naturalised players per league game, while Cannavaro is also said to be required to give game time to all 18 players on the team list in any single match. Quite how that complicates the tactical and managerial challenges for Cannavaro has gone unremarked in the media. But he seems to be happy enough to be part of a bigger project to lift China up the footballing ladder.
Of course, Cannavaro was captain when Marcello Lippi led Italy to World Cup glory in 2006. Lippi is now managing China’s national side, which means that he is picking players from clubs like Guangzhou FC. It could be said that Evergrande’s boss Xu Jiayin now views the club as a ‘shi academy’ for the Chinese national team.
From a friend who is a native Italian speaker:
An amazing article on so many levels, including paths to naturalization on China.
I very much doubt he said anything remotely close to wèi guó yǎng shì 為國養士. Something like “breeding talent” I guess.
But most of the time I don't understand Italian soccer players even when they speak Italian.
My friend is right: Cannavaro never said anything remotely resembling "wèi guó yǎng shì 為國養士" ("to raise warriors for the country").
We still have a long way to go before we can determine exactly what Cannavaro said and why his interpreter misrepresented him so badly. To put it charitably, as one of my correspondents wrote, the interpreter was "localizing" what the Italian coach actually said.
The editors of the journal probably declined to translate shì 士 into English because — due to its slippery polysemantic qualities — it is devilishly difficult to do so accurately and intelligibly unless one pays close attention to the context in which it occurs. The reason why shì 士 is so hard to handle is that — despite its being one of the most important terms in the Sinitic politico-cultural lexicon — it started out meaning one thing ("warrior; soldier") and ended up meaning almost exactly the opposite ("scholar; gentleman").
- † unmarried male; bachelor
- † (honorific) man
- † general; high-ranking military officer
- † soldier; noncommissioned officer
- 士兵 ― shìbīng ― soldier
- (historical) scholar-official (civil servant appointed by the emperor of China to perform day-to-day governance)
- (historical) self-appellation used by scholar-officials in ancient China, when addressing the emperor: I; subject
- (historical) a social stratum in ancient China
- scholar; academic; intellectual; intelligentsia
-
- 博士 ― bóshì ― doctor; doctoral degree
- † (honorific) suffix for a virtuous, knowledgeable or skilled person: commendable person
(source)
How did this happen?
A look at the etymology of shì 士 will help us understand:
- "bachelor, man, male"
-
- Reminiscent of Austroasiatic synonyms like Old Khmer si (“male”) or MK words for "man, male" like *ʔŋsiil, *ensir, *kəsəy on the Malay Peninsula; Schuessler (2007) noted that foreign *-r sometimes left traces in OC initial complex. These relations, if, valid, would keep 士1 "bachelor, man, male" distinct from 士2 "servant, retainer, officer, scholar".
- "take or give an office, serve", "servant", "retainer", "officer", "scholar"
-
- Schuessler (2007) noted that one could naturally assume the semantic development "male > man > servant > to serve" in order to posit that 士1 "bachelor, man, male" is the same word as 士2 "servant, retainer, officer, scholar". Yet, the exopassive derivation 事 (OC *ʔsrɯs, *zrɯs) "assignment, affair, thing" and Tibeto-Burman counterparts demonstrated no association with "man, maleness"; & "male" hardly derives from "to serve".
- Therefore, Schuessler derived these forms from 理 (OC *rɯʔ) "envoy, jail official, matchmaker" & proposed ultimate Austroasiatic origins. In terms of phonology, MC *dʐ- normally does not occur with *l- and *ʂ in an ST word-family, apparently confirming a non-ST provenance; however, MC *dʐ- here could go back to OC *s-r- (unlike MC *ʂ-, which is from OC *sr)
- Subsequenly, Schuessler posited either relation to Austroasiatic or OC loan into Tibeto-Burman as Proto-Tibeto-Burman *ʔ-dzəj (“send on an errant”) (Matisoff, 2003), whence Burmese စာ (ca, “thing”) & Tibetan རྫས (rdzas, “thing, matter, object”) (Gong, 1999). Even so, Tibeto-Burman cognates of this etymon and 所 (suǒ) are difficult to distinguish.
(source)
Let us take a closer look at the transformation of the shì 士 from the stage of the Shang (1600–1046 BC) and Early Zhou dynasties (1046–771 BC) when the shì 士:
…were regarded as a knightly social order of low-level aristocratic lineage compared to dukes and marquises. This social class was distinguished by their right to ride in chariots and command battles from mobile chariots, while they also served civil functions. Initially rising to power through controlling the new technology of bronzeworking, from 1300 BC, the shi transitioned from foot knights to being primarily chariot archers, fighting with composite recurved bow, a double-edged sword known as the jian, and armour.
(source)
This was followed by the Warring States period (476-221 BC) when, with the advent of iron technology, the old feudal aristocratic order based on bronze technology broke down, and an entirely different rearrangement of the political and military system emerged, with massive armies of infantry being fielded in contrast to the bronze-wielding, chariot-centered feudal forces of the past.
This transition of the shì 士 from feudal warriors to bureaucratic scholar-officials is embodied in the person of Confucius, who lived right at the cusp of time when the transformation was occurring. He still had the warrior heritage from his father and earlier ancestors, complete with swashbuckling sword, but he is the eponymous figure in the evolution of the tradition of the Confucian scholar (see Peter Bol, This Culture of Ours (1992).
So, despite all the oohing and aahing and googoo gahing about how well Cannavaro understood ancient Chinese thought and society as epitomized in the heralded shì 士, he spoke not aword about them. That all came from his interpreter and the fevered imagination of the media.
What Fabio Cannavaro said in Italian that got translated into "wèi guó yǎng shì 為國養士" ("to raise warriors for the country") may be found in the following sentence:
Quest’anno l’obbiettivo è di far crescere giocatori, tipo Wu, come oggi, ha giocato bene. Stava giocando bene, si è fatto male.
This year our goal is to develop players, Wu (i.e. Wu Shaocong 吴少聪), for example, played very well today, (yet) he got hurt when he was playing well.
In Mandarin, this can be translated as:
Jīnnián wǒmen de mùbiāo shì ràng qiúyuán chéngzhǎng, lìrú Wú (Wú Shǎocōng), jīntiān tā tī dé hěn hǎo. (Kě) zhèngzài fāhuī hěn hǎo de shíhòu shòushāngle
今年我们的目标是让球员成长， 例如吴（吴少聪），今天他踢得很好。（可）正在发挥很好的时候受伤了。
It seems that the interpreter overinterpreted "crescere giocatori" into "wèi guó yǎng shì 為國養士" ("to raise warriors for the country") and thus triggered the dispute.
In the video of the coach speaking at this point in which this sentence can be found, we can hear the interpreter saying:
Dàn zhège jiùshì jīnnián gēn dàjiā yě shuōguò hěnduō cìle, wǒmen jítuán de xìnhào hé mùbiāo yāoqiú fēicháng míngquè, jiùshì wèi guó yǎng shì, zhè hěn jiǎndān, jīntiān nǐ xiàng Wú Shǎocōng zhèyàng de duìyuán, zhèyàng de bǐsài, jiù tī, dànshì, jiù tī dé bùcuò, túrán yīxià shòushāngle, nà zhège nǐ shuō, shéi yě méi fǎ yùjì.
但这个就是今年跟大家也说过很多次了，我们集团的信号和目标要求非常明确，就是为国养士，这很简单，今天你像吴少聪这样的队员，这样的比赛，就踢，但是，就踢得不错，突然一下受伤了，那这个你说，谁也没法预计.
But this is what I have told you many times this year. Our group’s emblem and goal requirements are very clear, that is, to raise warriors for the country. This is very simple. Today, you take a player like Wu Shaocong. He played in the game. But, though he played well, he suddenly got hurt. So, you see, no one could predict this.
Interpreters and translators need to be careful about embellishing statements in the source language, lest they set off a chain reaction among speakers of the target language.
Update: Here's a video of Fabio Cannavaro speaking the crucial sentences where "crescere giocatori" was overinterpreted as "wèi guó yǎng shì 为国养士":
Selected reading
- "Fried scholar's" (8/6/11)
- "Non-translation" (7/24/16)
- "The dissemination of iron and the spread of languages" (11/5/20)
- "Sinitic for 'iron' in Balto-Slavic" (2/15/19)
- "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 7" (1/11/21) — with extensive bibliographical references
- Victor H. Mair, Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way (Bantam, 1990) — for the military and political implications of the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age during the middle of the first millennium BC
[Thanks to John Rohsenow, Ed and Elena Shaughnessy, Nicola Di Cosmo, Yijie Zhang, Zihan Guo, Tong Wong, Chenfeng Wang, and Yixue Yang]
AG said,
May 15, 2021 @ 7:51 pm
Would it be accurate to say that the words "samurai", "knight", and "squire" all had similar journeys to respectability? Are there other examples of this?
Peter Taylor said,
May 16, 2021 @ 2:23 am
That sounds like something else that got lost in translation. Usually he would only be able to give game time to the 11 starting players and 3 substitutes; it seems that to help unblock a schedule which got backed up due to coronavirus restrictions the CSL relaxed that to 5 substitutions per match (and allowed 12 potential substitutes on the game list), but this rumour still only makes sense if it's talking about pre-season friendly matches.
R. Fenwick said,
May 16, 2021 @ 4:21 am
@AG: Would it be accurate to say that the words "samurai", "knight", and "squire" all had similar journeys to respectability? Are there other examples of this?
A similar path appears to have been taken by the Proto-Indo-Iranian word *marya– "young man" (originally *"mortal", from PIE *meryo-, a derivative of *mer– "to disappear; by ext. to die").
Reflexes are attested in Sanskrit "young man, especially as bridegroom, lover, suitor, servant, attendant" (as well as Avestan mairiia– *"yeoman" → "villain, rogue, scoundrel"), with some suggestion that a sense of "warrior, fighter" may have arisen quite early in Indo-Iranian, but in Mitannic – the closest relative of Vedic Sanskrit, a Middle Bronze Age Indic language of Upper Mesopotamia – it came to refer not to warriors or fighters generally, but specifically to a class of hereditary petty nobility having the privilege of fighting from chariots. This social class arose from within the early Hurrian-Mitannic symbiosis; in this sense the Mitannic term is attested in the Hurrian loan maryanni "charioteer noble", subsequently borrowed into Akkadian and thence also Ugaritic.
Victor Mair said,
May 16, 2021 @ 7:50 am
@R. Fenwick
[For some unknown reason I have not been able to make paragraph breaks in this note, so I'm indicating them thus: //.]
I love your virtuoso (!! — see below on "virtue" < PIE root *wi-ro- "man") tracing of the Proto-Indo-Iranian word *marya– "young man" (originally *"mortal", from PIE *meryo-, a derivative of *mer– "to disappear; by ext. to die" -- a beginning that is redolent of violence) through stages and stops that include "yeoman" (→ "villain, rogue, scoundrel"), "warrior, fighter" and "noble charioteer". // I have long been fascinated by a parallel development in English "virtue" and Sinitic dé 德 ("virtue") (Old Sinitic (Baxter–Sagart): /*tˤək/, (Zhengzhang): /*tɯːɡ/; Middle Sinitic /tək̚/) . The former started out from the PIE root *wi-ro- "man" and then passed through "manliness", "courage (in war)", and so forth. The latter similarly began with meanings akin to "potency"; here's a part of what I wrote about it in 1990 in my translation of the Dao de jing when I explained that the difficulty of rendering the term // ===== ...is evident from the astonishing sweep of thoughtful renderings of its meaning: power, action, life, inner potency, indarrectitude (inner uprightness), charisma, mana (impersonal supernatural force inherent in gods and sacred objects), sinderesis (conscience as the directive force of one's actions), and virtue, to name only a few of the brave attempts to convey the meaning of te in English. Of these, the last is by far the most frequently encountered. Unfortunately, it is also probably the least appropriate of all to serve as an accurate translation of te in the Tao Te Ching. (1990:133–4) ===== // I concluded (1990:135) that Daoist de is best translated "integrity", which "means no more than the wholeness or completeness of a given entity," and like de, "it represents the selfhood of every being in the universe." ===== // So much for the early stages of dé 德. It is noteworthy that later and modern definitions are of a quite different order: "virtue; moral(ity); kindness; favor". // All of this makes me wonder whether we might posit a linguistic (etymological) process called "softening" that is akin to "bleaching".
Chris Button said,
May 16, 2021 @ 8:17 am
In terms of 土 and 士, it's worth noting that the confusion goes back a long way. Takashima's Bingbian analysis has in interesting discussion about how scholars have mistakenly chosen to misinterpret the 土 component in 牡 "male of animals" as an error for 士.
To the relationship of 土/仕 and 事 with 理, I would add 史 around the concept of "scribe". Following on from the Sanskrit observations by R. Fenwick above, I'm not sure if Schuessler's decision to separate 士 "bachelor, man, male" from 士 "servant, retainer, officer, scholar" is warranted. It seems like like the idea that "male" might be the original notion is influenced by the mistaken association of 士 with 牡
Chris Button said,
May 16, 2021 @ 8:20 am
And by 土/仕, I mean 士/仕!
Victor Mair said,
May 16, 2021 @ 2:57 pm
I repeatedly watched the video of the coach speaking to the press, and it sounded more and more to me that the interpreter had prepared the phrase "wèi guó yǎng shì 為國養士" ("to raise warriors for the country") ahead of time and was just waiting for the moment to insert it into his translation. Bear in mind this is not the sort of expression one would use in casual speech, nor does it match what the coach actually said very closely.
David Marjanović said,
May 17, 2021 @ 12:36 pm
AFAIK, yes. Knight in particular has a German cognate Knecht, which means 1) "farmhand", 2) "opposite of 'lord'".
That's a root *weyh₁- with an adjective-forming suffix *-ró-. Because the suffix is stressed, it deletes the vowel of the preceding syllable, producing a stem *wih₁ró-. In most IE branches, -ih₁- at the end of a syllable became a long vowel (which is preserved in Sanskrit and to the present day in Lithuanian). One way or another (what happened is disputed), a short vowel resulted in Italic (e.g. Latin vir), Celtic (e.g. Old Irish fer) and Germanic (Old English wer, whence werewolf and such).
*h₁ was probably just [h], but that's another story.
Daniel Barkalow said,
May 17, 2021 @ 1:29 pm
It's not like there was anything he could have said in Italian which would have made sense in Italian and translated clearly to the historical reference without a long digression as to what he was talking about. I'd guess that the club owner told the interpreter in advance how they want to present the policy, and the interpreter used their phrasing when Cannavaro said what the goal for this season was. For that matter, he obviously didn't come up with the idea of improving the national team off the cuff (or, presumably, himself, at any point), so it's not like he would have to have the allusion spring to mind during a press conference.
AntC said,
May 17, 2021 @ 6:12 pm
"most of the time I don't understand Italian soccer players even when they speak Italian."
Indeed. I remember the kerfuffle when Eric Cantona (French) said something (in English) deeply insightful, or not, about seagulls following trawlers.
As Monty Python has it: "Goals, David."
R. Fenwick said,
May 20, 2021 @ 1:10 am
I love your virtuoso (!! — see below on "virtue" < PIE root *wi-ro- "man") tracing
You do me too much credit! The etymology isn't original to me, though certainly Mitannic evidence (both in this specific instance, and also more broadly) is not widely used in etymological circles – especially given how central a role Sanskrit has always been given in Indo-European. Of course, the extraordinarily rich Sanskrit corpus also greatly eclipses the sparse few surviving handfuls of secondarily-recorded lexemes of its Mesopotamian sister language.
Proto-Indo-Iranian word *marya– "young man"… a beginning that is redolent of violence)
Moreover, such an etymology is not unique in the region, and North-West Caucasian shows two excellent parallels. Proto-Circassian *ɬ’ə "man" also arises via an earlier sense *"mortal" and thence from *ɬ’ə "to die"; Proto-Abkhaz *apɕə́- "Abkhaz"—attested in the modern languages only in compounds, such as Bzyp Abkhaz Ápɕwa "Abkhaz", Apɕnə́ "Abkhazia"—is also etymologically *"the mortal[s]", from *pɕə "to die; as n. dead (person), corpse", reflected in e.g. Bzyp Abkhaz a-pɕ-rá "to die", a-r-pɕ-rá "to kill", a-pɕə́ "(the) dead person, corpse" (in all other Abkhaz dialects *-ɕ– regularly becomes –s-: compare Abzhywa a-ps-rá, a-r-ps-rá, a-psə́).
I have long been fascinated by a parallel development in English "virtue" and Sinitic dé 德 ("virtue") (Old Sinitic (Baxter–Sagart): /*tˤək/, (Zhengzhang): /*tɯːɡ/; Middle Sinitic /tək̚/)
Intriguing indeed. Though the Sinitic 德 doesn't appear to show the preceding sense of "manliness" in Latin virtūs, the parallel in the rest of the transformation process is still an interesting one.
All of this makes me wonder whether we might posit a linguistic (etymological) process called "softening" that is akin to "bleaching".
Indeed; another example of a similar process is English nice, whose earlier sense was "simple, foolish", from Old French and thence Latin nescius "ignorant" (ne-scius "not-knowing"). And the converse "hardening" process might also be exampled by words such as silly, from Old English sǣliġ "happy, blessed, fortunate".
R. Fenwick said,
May 20, 2021 @ 9:39 am
@David Marjanović: *h₁ was probably just [h], but that's another story.
On what basis? I was under the impression that the debate about whether PIE *h₁ represented [h] or [ʔ] was still up in the air. I know about the failure of syllabic *h₁ to create a full vowel between semivowel and consonant in Greek and Tocharian, but that's the only piece of evidence that appears to sway in the direction of [h] (and even there, one could argue that [ʔ] could produce the same result). As Alwin Kloekhorst has shown, Hieroglyphic Luvian appears to preserves*h₁ in its orthography, with a- and á- representing a distinction between */a-/ and */Ha-/ (where C is the reflex of *h₁), but most instances of á- in Hieroglyphic Luvian transcriptions of foreign names are used to represent Semitic ayin [ʕ], which really isn't illuminating.
I really wish we knew the Old Udi cognate of modern Udi eˁk (dialectic eˁkʷ) "horse", which has been proposed to be a loan from PIE **h₁eḱu- or some close descendant. Old Udi would have reflected initial h– in a borrowing beginning with *[h] (cp. Old Udi hetanos "Gentile" alongside Old Armenian het‘anos "id."), but instances of this h– appears not to survive into modern Udi (cp. Old Udi sa-həwk’ "harmless" (literally "one-hearted"), helas "oath" alongside modern Udi uk’ "heart", elas "oath").
Philip Taylor said,
May 20, 2021 @ 2:24 pm
Mr Fenwick — "Hieroglyphic Luvian appears to preserves*h₁ in its orthography, with a- and á- representing a distinction between */a-/ and */Ha-/ (where C is the reflex of *h₁)". I have no familarity with the point(s) being debated whatsoever, but I am nonetheless confused. As far as I can see, the only mention of "C" is in that last parenthesis — what rôle does it play in the point(s) you are seeking to make ?
R. Fenwick said,
May 20, 2021 @ 9:55 pm
@Philip Taylor: Mr Fenwick
My appropriate salutation is "Dr", elsewise, "Ms".
I have no familarity with the point(s) being debated whatsoever, but I am nonetheless confused. As far as I can see, the only mention of "C" is in that last parenthesis — what rôle does it play in the point(s) you are seeking to make ?
In the editing of my comment I made the error of replacing one "C" with "H" but not the other. Amend my comment to read thus:
Hieroglyphic Luvian appears to preserve *h₁ in its orthography, with a- and á- representing a distinction between */a-/ and */Ha-/ (where H is the reflex of *h₁).
Philip Taylor said,
May 21, 2021 @ 2:32 am
Ah, thank you Dr Fenwick — all is now clear. And sincere apologies for my seeming lack of respect in failing to address you as "Dr" in my preceding comment — had I been aware of your academic title, I would of course have used it.
R. Fenwick said,
May 21, 2021 @ 10:16 am
@Philip Taylor: You're quite welcome, and my apologies in my turn for the confusion caused by my error.
And to clarify, I'm not trying to be pissy about demanding respect in the form of my academic salutation; I'm perfectly fine with "Ms" too. (Or just "Rhona", for that matter – academia in Australia is often a little less formal than in other regions!) My issue was primarily with being assumed to be male; as a woman, either the feminine "Ms" or the ungendered "Dr" are appropriate for me, but not the masculine "Mr". Thank you for the apology, and good will to you in any event.
Philip Taylor said,
May 21, 2021 @ 11:58 am
At the risk of boring everyone else … I suppose that my assumption, based on 74 years of British life, is that <initial>. <surname> is in general an indication that the writer is male. Or perhaps was an indication — I don't know. For my generation, a woman signing a letter "S. Gamleck" would normally append "(Mrs)", or "(Miss)", or ("Ms)" as an indication of her sex/gender. Of course, you were not signing anything, and to the best of my belief there is no-one commenting on Language Log who identifies herself as <initial>. <surname> ("M{rs|iss|s}"), so I had no right whatsoever to assume that the omission of such post-modifier might be in any way significant. But I did, and I therefore apologise unreservedly.
Rodger C said,
May 22, 2021 @ 10:54 am
I suppose that my assumption, based on 74 years of British life, is that . is in general an indication that the writer is male.
That's certainly the assumption that C. V. Wedgwood and E. G. R. Taylor were counting on.
Philip Anderson said,
May 28, 2021 @ 1:54 am
@Philip Taylor
In my experience of British life, it’s not unusual for women to use initials and surname, precisely to create ambiguity and to avoid being judged as a woman, e.g. J. K. Rowling.
Philip Taylor said,
May 28, 2021 @ 2:23 pm
But if that then leads others to mis-address them (using "Mr" where "Mrs", "Miss" or "Ms" would be correct), is that not a bad thing for all concerned ? I realised with the benefit of hindsight that when I incorrectly addressed Dr Fenwick as "Mr", I wasn't being as cautious as normal, perhaps misledby her use of the <initial>. <surname> convention — in most cases when I do not know the sex/gender of a person with whom I am communicating or to whom I am referring, I fall back on "M.", which in French would be applicable only to men but which in English can, I think, reasonably be used with both sexes/genders.