Germany debates how to form gender-neutral words out of its gendered language | Hacker News Reader

Germany debates how to form gender-neutral words out of its gendered language

text.npr.org

20 pointssamizdis72 comments

As a German I would much rather say: a small part of intellectual people (mostly sitting in the offices of left-leaning newspapers) debate while the rest is pretty annoyed by it or does not even care.

As a German this is assumptionist at best and plain ignorance at the worst. I don't even get how something so biased and subjective gets voted so high. He doesn't base it on empirical numbers like the article, no, he has feelings.

He/she is right, though, polls say.

The poll you refer to without linking it is from July 2021 and the ONE question asked is if people find it "important" or "not important" and most answered with they don't care. Does don't care imply to you that people are against it? Because you can ask the question in a poll and then come and refer to it as gospel otherwise I don't care.

How do you know which poll I am referring to? Actually I said "polls" and there have been several polls at least this year. For instance one in May where the majority of people (65%) where against gender-neutral words. Interestingly a poll made by the the same institute (Infratest Dimap) the year before had only 56% against gender-neutral words. So I conclude the opposition is growing.

I agree, there is no evidence that these people are intellectual.

"assumptionist"... I think that was the term for some catholic order.

I hope you're right.

T. Sowell: The Quest for Cosmic Justice can be summarized in three propositions which may seem to be axiomatic, but whose implications are in fact politically controversial:

1. The impossible is not going to be achieved.

2. It is a waste of precious resources to try to achieve it.

3. The devastating costs and social dangers which go with these attempts to achieve the impossible should be taken into account.

It's certainly possible to find a way to refer to people without gender; plenty of other languages do it! Conceptually, it's a very simple idea, and one programmers certainly can grasp due to our familiarity with typed references/pointers, even if ones natural language doesn't have it (yet).

Being technically possible doesn't mean culturally possible though

It's impossible to prove that something is culturally impossible, though. So my point stands: premise #1 in the comment above, when interpreted as "culturally impossible", is a statement without support. When interpreted as "technically impossible", it's a false premise.

It’s also possible to make do with 3, or hell, no tenses, as some languages do. You could dispel a phonetic alphabet and use ideograms, that’s a thing too.

Doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for English, or other languages either.

and then what?

What is the cost/benefit in that?

There is a growing list of pronoms and identification, do we need to change the language for every identification that someone can create?

It's interesting to watch languages evolve around this issue. I can't help but contrast this and other debates by native speakers with the obnoxious spread of "LatinX", a term which makes no sense if you speak Spanish (I prefer Latine as a gender-neutral term).

"LatinX" doesn't seem to be spreading all that much among Latinos, at least in the US [1].

76% of Latino adults say they haven't even heard of it, 20% have heard of it but do not use it, and 3% use it.

The most usage is by women 18-29, with 7% using it.

The majority say that if you need a non-gendered term of such people use "Hispanic".

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...

Thanks for the data, that's exactly my point! this is a term constructed by those outside the group, and those within the group don't use it.

There already at least three to four variants of "gender-neutral" phrases used in German. The almost classic one with using a "binnen-I" (within-I) as in "BürgerIn" (citizen masculine and feminine). Doesn't work so great in the plural, though, were with "BürgerInnen" you lose the masculine marker. The same with the more recent "Bürger:in" or ""Bürger*in".

There's also the possibility of enumerating "Bürger" und "Bürgerin", which becomes quite tedious when it's used throughout longer texts.

In special cases it's possible to use the noun form of an adjective as in "Studierende" which has become the standard gender-neutral form of "students". As a German native speaker I never understood how "Studenten" has been perceived to exclude female students but that's how it is now. In the same vein people taking part in something are now called "Teilnehmende" while they were formerly called "Teilnehmer".

Personally I find all of this horrible although of course I am for equality, equal opportunity and equal pay.

As the article points out the debate around this is very toxic, and I wonder if it does not harm than good in that sense.

In my personal experience it certainly does. People get annoyed by this pretty quick. Also it's being perceived as something devised by some sort of intellectual elite that are gonna teach the unwashed masses how to write and speak properly.

Newspeak?

yay... let's quote a book without understanding it. There should be a school of thought for this, I will sponsor it. Let's call it the Pseudo intellectual Institute of Shitty Quotes.

I have read the book. In the case of 1984, they remove words. In this case they add words in order to fit an ideology. Go back to reddit Mr. Not Pseudo Intellectual

In 1984 the usage of works gets restricted by a totalitarian government, now in the real world written and spoken language evolves trough discourse even with people like yourself. I know you read the book... I said you didn't understand it.

Sorry, didn't know you were a 1984 connoisseur. You didn't even refute my argument "In this case they add words in order to fit an ideology". All you added was that you knew the book and understood it more than me.

You can gender whom ever you want as whatever you want without repercussions from your government. You can add words you can retract words in German and the government will not care, will not incarcerate you or will do you physical or financial harm. There is no argument except that you mistook math class with language study. There also is only one exception the denying of the Holocaust I hope we are at least on the same page about this one.

This is literally about bending reality by amending language. So a newspeak comparison is exactly right.

Quite the opposite. It allows you to express more, not less.

Yes, but part of the idea still stands. Changing the language in order to fit an ideology.

In case of 1984, words were removed, in this case words are being added, but I bet that they plan to remove gendered words if this gets through.

As a native English speaker who took German as a kid, I was always perplexed by gendered nouns. Why are fruit feminine and pencils and pens masculine? Is it because writing instruments were the tools of men or because they're phallic? Why is lawyer feminine? Is it a form or derision? Best I recall (and can find), it's arbitrary and I would assume, like many things in our world, they were chosen based on some gender association that often boils down to misogyny. German has neutral articles as well.

While I wouldn't spend my life chasing this debate, as an outside observer, I can't understand why normalizing on "das" would be a problem for 99% of the things and moving forward from there. Language evolves and if we can evolve it to be more inclusive, why not?

Imagine someone comes along and insists that your native language is discriminative on something totally innocuous. Like, say, “a” vs “the”. Dunno, because you can make some nouns special this way. It lets you say “the man” and “a woman” which shows, allegedly, disrespect to one of the genders. You must integrate them into one “tha”. Never mind you lose a key mechanism for expression: surely, you’re not sexist, are you?

You may find it a bit silly or ridiculous, but perhaps, like other people, you may find the very suggestion offensive: that unless you put an axe to the language you speak, according to someone’s half-baked ideas, you’re a bigoted misogynist.

Languages evolve, we change bits to better fit the zeitgeist and that’s normal. But these “though shalt change your language because I say so and I know better” wars are ridiculous.

Why can't gendered nouns stay as a cultural curiosity?

To me the Moon will always be feminine and the Sun masculine, even if they're not gendered in English. So what? People that are bothered by this duality tacitly imply that one of these gender is inherently worse than the other, and speaks volumes about their assumptions and views of the world.

So what if fruit is female and pencils are male? How is that misogyny? Are fruits "weak"? Do they have "emotions"? No, saying it's rooted in misogyny is cultural and historical revisionism pushing an agenda.

Gender activism tries to make society more moderate and inclusive by taking an extremist position: culture will eventually settle towards a more moderate, but still progressive view of the matter.

I expect society to be more inclusive after these efforts, but I honestly do not want nor hope these extremist views to actually take hold. They're just a means to an end. I accept them in the hope they make a better world, but viewed by themselves they're just posturing bullshit.

Moon and sun are the opposite in German. It is arbitrary in different languages and the discrimination angle is just wrong.

> Why are fruit feminine and pencils and pens masculine? Is it because writing instruments were the tools of men or because they're phallic? […] it's arbitrary and I would assume, like many things in our world, they were chosen based on some gender association that often boils down to misogyny

A suggestive and imaginative theory, but wrong. Reality is always much more boring. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29043881>

Think of it as a checksum.

As a non-native German speaker, I sometimes struggle with understanding speech (especially with thick accents). Knowing the gender lets me narrow down the possibilities of what a word might be, when I don't hear it all the way.

The grammatical genus doesn't have anything to do with sexuality. It is arbitrary otherwise and difficult to learn, true. Lawyer is masculine in German, plurals are always feminine.

> they were chosen based on some gender association that often boils down to misogyny

No. They were explicitly not chosen for this reason. There are some exceptions maybe, but the whole debate is based on false assumptions.

There are languages which don't do this of course. I don't see any problems that affect one country but not the other. No.

In the sense that henceforth we will no longer be allowed to use Oldspeak gendered pronouns - it is clearly mandating (in this particular context) that we adopt a more restricted form of expression.

There is at least one proposal for a properly pronounceable gender-neutral version of German:

https://delesystem.wordpress.com/ -> https://geschlechtsneutral.net/

Yes, it's quite a big change, but probably that's unavoidable with the constraints of what they want to achieve.

Thanks for the links, as a German I did not even know that it existed. However, I am really surprised how well the gender gap can be pronounced by people with a glottal stop. IMHO the print form is the rather ugly bit. Maybe adding a glottal stop (ʔ) to the german alphabet would be the easier solution.

A much better idea than that horrible asterisk and its pronunciation. However, I think it still misses the mark. There‘s an opportunity to make German simpler AND more gender-neutral by completely dropping both the masculine and feminine forms. Other languages have done so (or got really close) before. English and Dutch (not the Flemish variant) being the closest ones to German. Instead of saying „die Bürger*innen“, you could just say „die Bürger“, which would simply be the plural form of „das Bürger“. It also avoids the whole „Bürger* innenmeister* innen“ issue…

How is that different from the status quo?

Currently we say “der Bürger“ for a citizen of unknown or male sex. „der“ is male, so certain people perceive sexism.

The plural for citizens of unknown, male or female sex is „die Bürger“. „die“ is female. Yet in this case no one perceives it as sexism.

The proposal you refer to just removes the former while leaving the latter. By this logic of „the (der) spoon“ being sexist, it’s now just become sexist towards men?

Add to this the fact that German has words to refer specifically to „female citizens“, „female doctors“ etc, but not for men, they’re generic. Yet no one complains.

It may be that the generic masculine bears witness of an historical injustice, but so what? A trace of an injustice is not a continuation of it. A language should be capable of expressing things simply and elegantly; it oughtn't to be burdened with the need constantly to manifest some orthodoxy.

Apple’s Siri already pronounces it and the software is already localized like that. For example, gender neutral artist is „Künstler:in“ spoken as „quinstler’in“

Pick one, I don't care which, make it all feminine I don't care. They're worsft, tools to convey a message and not the message itself, so anything reasonable works.

Just stick to something known and which evolved after centuries of organic shaping, don't come up with tumblr-tier neographs like ə, 3, x, *.

I wonder whether inserting underscores or asterisks, frequently used in search as a wildcard character, into words will cause archive indexing/retrieval problems down the line. I'm asking seriously, not flippantly, here.

I'd guess not, as anything that would store these new words is probably storing longer text strings, and thus already would need to be dealing with escapes properly. Unlike names, these words won't be keys terribly often.

A "word character" class in regex would have to include an asterisk to match something like "Künstler*in".

Good point, didn't think about that.

Why don't you just use neuter? Already used daily. Didn't English the also came from neuter if I'm not mistaken?

It’s a kind of forward error correction for us. Even if you speak fast under noisy conditions I can tell what you said because certain options collide with the surrounding grammar. Removing this would lead to misunderstandings and more „what did you say?“. For people that already speak the language it is therefore purely a loss.

> Didn't English the also came from neuter if I'm not mistaken?

Confirming, you are mistaken. English used to be 3-gendered (system m,f,n) like its linguistic predecessors and neighbours, only lost it in the 14th century with scant traces remaining. <https://i2.wp.com/antigonejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/202...>

Yeah, the articles the comes from masculine, that from feminine, and this from the neuter demonstrative. That's what I was talking about. It seems I was mistaken, no wonder Interlingua makers used Romance masculine demonstrative le for their universal article due to using English as grammatical source.

Ille, illos, illa Le, les, los, las, etc

Romance languages inventing gendered articles from gendered demonstratives is always fun.

(Especially since my language, Malay, has no grammatical gender at all, not even in the third person; and have no regularized article.) [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar#Demonstr...

I can’t imagine something less important. We can’t afford to go to space because people are starving but we can certainly afford to reformulate our entire language?

It's not gonna be the linguists nor the social activists that are going to send us to space or solve world hunger.

They are often paid with tax money.

"That's exactly where the economy's going, isn't it? Nobody makes things anymore. We just provide pointless services. I'm a party planner. I'm a pencil case organizer. I shout on panel shows. We Used To Make Steel."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwfejPdonnU

My straw man alarm is burning a hole through my ear reading your comment.

Gender reform is the exact equivalent of bike shedding.

And my opinion is that bike shedding takes high priority because it's very convenient to tackle problems that take no effort to solve, independently of their importance.

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