Alice Workman writing for The Australian:
English speakers would not spend time of their day thinking what "gender" is COVID-19. However, in other languages where nouns are used with articles that differ by gender, it is a genuine question.
Academie Francaise, the pre-eminent council for matters pertaining to the French language, has decided that COVID-19 is feminine and should be used with the article “la” instead of “le”, according to a directive published on its website.
COVID-19 is an abbreviation that combines words "corona", "virus", and "disease" with the number 19 that stands for the year the pandemic began.
“We had to find a name that did not refer to a geographical location, an animal, an individual or group of people, and which is also pronounceable and related to the disease,” World Health Fund director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus explained when COVID-19 was thrust into our daily lexicon on February 11.
However, it should really be COVIM-19, because "corona" and "virus" are Latin words, and the Latin word for "disease" is "morbus".
Historically, viruses are much more frequently named after their locations of origin. Ebola, for example, is named after the Ebola river in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Spanish flu... did not actually originate in Spain, but Spain was the first country that reported the epidemic because in the time of world war other countries affected by the flu censored the news.
However, in 2015 the WHO called on scientists, national authorities and the media to adhere to what it called “best practices” by naming new human viruses as to minimize “unnecessary negative effects on nations, economies and people”.
The reaction in the scientific world has diverged. Many agreed that names such as "swine flu" or "Middle East respiratory syndrome" create unintended negative impact on certain communities. On the other hand, other researchers thought it was the matter of political correctness that would lead to "boring names and a lot of confusion".
What do you think?
