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Comment by bellyfullofbac | Hacker News Reader

An interesting feature of some Asian languages (e.g. Japanese, Thai, Indonesian) is that in general they use 1 word (I'll write it as "s/he") to refer to third persons. I wonder how that's influenced kids growing up with the language.

Meanwhile in German they're trying to define RegExp, which is also pronouncable, for gender-inclusive words[1], since they differentiate between e.g. Pilot (male) and Pilotin (female) as well as Piloten (many pilots, in the old days this used to mean of mixed genders, but some people felt excluded) and Pilotinnen (many female pilots).

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/30/1049603171/germany-gender-neu...

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> An interesting feature of some Asian languages (e.g. Japanese, Thai, Indonesian) is that in general they use 1 word (I'll write it as "s/he") to refer to third persons.

IIRC, that's only true of spoken Chinese, they have different written pronouns for each gender.

> I wonder how that's influenced kids growing up with the language.

In my experience, it only results more mistakes using gendered pronouns (e.g. occasionally swapping he/she), but that's about it. It doesn't result in any kind less gendered outlook or greater acceptance of gender nonconformity or anything like that.

Gabriele Diewald, a linguistics professor at the University of Hanover, disagrees. "The generic masculine is not a grammatical must," she says. "Claims to the contrary are deliberate attempts to continue marginalizing women and other genders."

Tja.

>> Gabriele Diewald, a linguistics professor at the University of Hanover, disagrees. "The generic masculine is not a grammatical must," she says. "Claims to the contrary are deliberate attempts to continue marginalizing women and other genders."

I mean that's technically true, since it's not even a must to have a number system or much in the way of color categories (or really anything except nounish things and verbish things), but it kind of misses the point.

Pretty bitter. It's a matter of convention. To color it a 'deliberate attempt' is a deliberate attempt to politicize normal linguistic conventions.

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