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by mft_4 hours ago |

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by MaKey4 hours ago|

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Example: Reader

In German: Leser (masculine)

Possible forms of inclusive speech: Leser*innen, Leser:in, Leser_innen

This extension removes these possible forms of inclusive speech. Arguably they hurt the reading flow and the German language has the generic masculine. However, proponents of inclusive speech feel that the generic masculine isn't inclusive.

by input_sh4 hours ago|

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A bit of both? Imagine every time you read the word "actor", it is instead spelled something like "actor:ress", or "actor_ress", or "actor*ress" (because the separator hasn't been standardised).

Personally I'm in favour of it, but I will concede that if it's done enough times throughout the text (as German has way more gendered nouns in common use than English) it does come with the downside of breaking the reading flow.

by plucas4 hours ago|

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The first. In German, many words that refer to a person (e.g. Fahrer/Fahrerin, male/female driver) have a plural which is identical to the male singular. For a while now, many writers have used a typographic style to make the plural gender-neutral by writing the male plural, an asterisk, and then the female plural suffix (e.g. Fahrer*innen).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_star

by mft_3 hours ago|

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Thanks - that's really interesting, in a weird-interesting way.

I'm far from an expert in such things, but I'd observed that the approach in English to gendered words (actor vs. actress) seemed to be, over time, to drift towards calling everyone an actor - as a neutral term, to avoid treating women differently, rather than a male term per se.

In German, from your explanation, it's gone the opposite way - aggressively maintaining the female option because of a dislike of broad adoption of the male version as a neutral default.

by duskdozer8 minutes ago|

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English already has done this: fireman->firefighter, policeman->officer, mankind->humankind, man->humanity, etc.

by input_sh1 hours ago|

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It's not "aggressively maintaining the female option", it's just a language quirk. English has a gender-neutral "the" article which you put in front of every noun, German has three different variations of "the" depending on the gender (der/die/das). Literally every noun has a gender, including inanimate objects such as a piece of furniture. "The table" is always masculine ("der Tisch"), "the lamp" is always feminine ("die Lampe") and "the bed" is always neutral ("das Bett"). Sometimes changing the article completely changes the meaning of the word, for example "der See" is the lake, but "die See" can be the sea or the ocean.

Only living things can have more than one gender and in that case, not only does the article change, but so does the suffix. There is no "singress" in English, only "singer", but in German there's "der Sänger" or "die Sängerin". Calling a female singer "der Sänger" would be grammatically-speaking completely incorrect.

The only thing that changed fairly recently is that more and more people intentionally try to maintain gender ambiguity when they don't intent to specify a gender, in which case "the singer" becomes "die Sänger:in", or even "der:die Sänger:in" if you want to be even more pedantic.

by mft_16 minutes ago|

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Thanks; maybe I didn't explain my point well enough, but I know/understand everything you just wrote.

> The only thing that changed fairly recently is that more and more people intentionally try to maintain gender ambiguity when they don't intent to specify a gender, in which case "the singer" becomes "die Sänger:in", or even "der:die Sänger:in" if you want to be even more pedantic.

Here is my point: in English, the move to gender neutrality of certain words (e.g. actor/actress) seems to have involved adopting the male version, and using it as neutral. (I don't know if some people are offended by this, but if they are, I've not come across it).

In contrast, in German, I impute that some people would be offended by using the male version of a word as a default neutral for all including women, so are deliberately maintaining the female version within the slightly awkward "Sänger:in" construct.

This is a strong, deliberate choice, in contrast to (what I see as) the more passive "eh, let's just use 'actor'" in English.