Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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