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Comment by allendoerfer | Hacker News Reader

TLDR: English and German both have compounds, but German additionally has simple rules to form and decline nouns from participles.

E.g.:

werdend = becoming

Werdender = someone (male), who is becoming

Fun fact: These participles always have a neutral plural, so they are gender neutral and are thus abused all over the place. In official documents the German language is losing all of its proper nouns, until everything is built out of participles.

E.g.:

Studenten = students (male)

Studentinnen = students (female)

Studierende = people, who study

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Another fun fact: for political correctness, an artificial gender-neutral way of referring to both male and female students has long been the "internal capital I" [1]:

    Studenten (male) + Studentinnen (female) = StudentInnen

Recently though, the Green Party has gone a step further in Germany, and now uses in all of their documents the so-called "gender-star" [2]:

    Student*innen

This is because it was felt that the version with capital-I only focused on males and females, but still excluded trans-sexual, trans-gender, and inter-sexual people.

This practice has even led to a new verb in German: "to gender", i.e., to use politically correct gender-neutral language.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binnen-I

[2] http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/die-gruenen-machen...

Spanish countries do it for years with "@" or "x" like "estimad@s" for "estimados" and "estimadas" at once. And Latin America is not very politically correct, it's just respectful for all genders.

In writing only, and very obnoxious as well for a culture that fights for their grave accents and correct language way more than their English counterpart.

Otherwise tell me how do you say niñ@s out loud.

Hah, I just tried to pronounce it with coarticulation of [a] and [o], and it came out as [ɞ] [1]. /niɲɞs/ sounds totally alien.

In reality, probably “niños y niñas”.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_central_rounded_vowel

Italian is similarly gendered (and actually lacks a neuter): consider the translation of “all”: “tutti” (male) and “tutte”, a particularly ironic case that amuses me as an attempt to be all-inclusive can inadvertently become exclusive when applied to groups of people.

The standard politically correct solution is to use both “tutti e tutte”, but of late a trend is to use the asterisk next to remedy this (“tutt*”), which irks my regex-informed sensibilities no end because it might also match “tutto” (“everything”), though in context is fairly clear.

To get a bit more into detail on this issue: In German, nouns referring to occupations generally are all gendered, where the base word is male, and the suffix "in" changes that to female. In cases of mixed groups, or where the gender doesn't matter, the suffix is not used:

Singular: Studentin = student (female) Student = student (male, or unspecified) Plural: Studentinnen = students (all female*) Studenten = students (at least one male, or unspecified)

Feminists (correctly) identified this imbalance as an issue of sexist language. The problem is, there isn't an easy fix. The common solutions nowadays are to use phrases like "Studenten and Studentinnen" (creating the new issue of which gender to name first) or in written form "StudentInnen". That's kind of clunky, creating a desire to use ungendered words where possible. So then people come up with constructs like this because they happen to be ungendered (but horrible in other ways).

I think in Austria, using the female form even for mixed/unknown groups is relatively common nowadays. But I'm just a very occasional visitor there and I'm not certain about the details. (Do they throw dice to determine which to use? Or did they just switch to the female, which then could be interpreted to be sexist against men.)

Actually, neither Studentinnen nor Studenten nor StudentInnen is used at all anymore.

There is an easy fix: Using the plural particip of the verb.

Studierende.

Geflüchtete.

Werdende.

"Studierende" is actually a counterexample, because it means "people who are studying right now". So if you hear of "Studierendenproteste" rather than "Studentenproteste" (student protests), you can picture them reading books during their protest. :)

“Student” comes from Latin “studens”, which grammatically is exactly the same as “studierend” (Partizip I in German / Present Active Participle in Latin). The difference in meaning is random.

Heh, but German is not Latin, and so 'student' in German, as often happens with borrowed words, has acquired a different meaning, viz. that of a noun in this case.

Sorry, in Latin every adjective can also be used as a noun. So “studens” (“studierend”) can also mean “Studierende(r)”.

Edit: The point is, Latin “studens” also has the concurrency aspect to it, just as German “Studierender”. If you say “studens ambulat”, it means “He/she is taking a walk, while studying.”

I think you might be reading too much "right now" into "-ende". Counterexamples: Tragende Wand, führende Persönlichkeiten, rollende Landstraße etc.

Doesn't buy you much in the singular case since you gotta pick a gendered article. :/

German, having maintained more of its agglutinate "Germanic" roots than English over the centuries, has a fantastic morphological system for new word formation. For this reason, I've often thought it would be great if more new terminology were to originate from German.

Here are just a few of my favorite compounds you will likely struggle to form in less compound languages.

1. Spannungsbogen <=> the series of events which create suspense

2. Fernweh <=> the desire to go to other countries / leave your homeland

3. Torschlusspanik <=> being worried at the last minute

4. Leitmotiv <=> theme

And the list just keeps going. Because of the compound nature of German if you know the constituent parts of a word you will almost always have a pretty good idea about its meaning. Good examples of this from the IT world are : hochfahren vs. "boot", Zeichenkette vs "string", weiterleiten vs "forward", einhängen vs. "mount", etc.

Studierende is kind of problematic. While Studenten or Studentinnen describes groups of people who study in a university. It's a status. You are matriculated in an university. Therefore you are a Student. Studierende describes people who study. Whatever, wherever. Like study right now. This leads to weird problems.

If you now say that there is a group of students sitting in the bar drinking. It becomes a group of people who sit in a bar to drink and study.

On the flip side of that, I was living in Munich many years ago and got a letter for a referendum on some local issue. What struck me was that:

1. They'd been organized enough to translate it into English for me (which shouldn't have been surprising, because Germans), and

2. It started with "Dear male voter, dear female voter", which I found hilarious.

There's a lot to be said for gender-neutral language.

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