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Is this for real? (Please see text) (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

70 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Is this for real? I can't draw no other conclusion than US defaultism in trans activism gives a free pass to TERF politics in Europe. This kind of news from Germany cannot mean anything good.

According to Wikipedia:

In 2019, the German Language Association VDS (Verein Deutsche Sprache; not to be confused with the Association for the German Language Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache, GfdS) launched a petition against the use of the gender star, saying it was a "destructive intrusion" into the German language and created "ridiculous linguistic structures". It was signed by over 100 writers and scholars.[11] Luise F. Pusch, a German feminist linguist, criticises the gender star as it still makes women the 'second choice' by the use of the feminine suffix.[12] In 2020, the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache declared Gendersternchen to be one of the 10 German Words of the Year.[13]

In 2023, the state of Saxony banned the use of gender stars and gender gaps in schools and education, which marks students' use of the gender stars as incorrect.[14][15] In March 2024, Bavaria banned gender-neutral language in schools, universities and several other public authorities.[16][17] In April 2024, Hesse banned the use of gender neutral language, including gender stars, in administrative language.[18]

Here are the original Wikipedia references

"Der Aufruf und seine Erstunterzeichner". Verein Deutsche Sprache (in German). 6 March 2019. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
Schlüter, Nadja (22 April 2019). ""Das Gendersternchen ist nicht die richtige Lösung"". Jetzt.de (in German). Retrieved 5 April 2020. "GfdS Wort des Jahres" (in German). Retrieved 13 December 2020.
Jones, Sam; Willsher, Kim; Oltermann, Philip; Giuffrida, Angela (2023-11-04). "What's in a word? How less-gendered language is faring across Europe". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
"Schools in Saxony are forbidden to use gender language". cne.news. Retrieved 2024-04-05.

I got into this rabbit hole from this news article

News article in German

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

@whydudothatdrcrane No, gender neutral pronouns are not banned. What is banned is the Binnen-I (Mitarbeiter*innen). It is recommended to use much easier to read Mitarbeiter und Mitarbeiterinnen or Mitarbeitende. Also the belittled version Mitarbeiterchen is gender neutral and allowed.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (3 children)

As a person regularly writing regular expressions, the usage of * in a written language rubs me the wrong way. I wouldn't mind Mitarbeiter/innen, similar to how Czech does it (prodavač/ka, although some are impossible to shorten like skladník/skladnice, as skladník/ce sounds too weird, much like Krankenschwesterinnen would).

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 weeks ago

regularly writing regular expressions

The statement speaks for itself.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Krankenschwesterinnen

Der Begriff ist eh obsolte, ist nun Krankenpfleger.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I think you mean Krankenpfleger*in

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I think you mean Krankenpfleger

I have the "Binnen-I be gone" extension install :(

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I don't know but I wouldn't be surprised if those words are the reason for the * being included on the keyboard in the first place 😅

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Multiplication. It's why it's on the numpad.

Also, normal non-technical text also never uses these keyboard characters @^\|_ ` but they are there. If the computer keyboard was designed for proper typography, there would be keys for nbsp, curly quotes or the em dash.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Wouldn't it make more sense just to use × instead if that was the case? I guess maybe it makes it easier to differentiate it from x?

I guess it's probably just a hold over from typewriters that ended up setting the standard for computers e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_2741

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Wouldn't it make more sense just to use × instead if that was the case? I guess maybe it makes it easier to differentiate it from x?

This right here is the exact reason, especially because x is frequently used as a variable which may be sitting directly nex to ×.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

I understand this is a fine point. What is the status report on gender legislation in Germany then? Is this isolated from broader anti-trans politics as a matter of language puritanism and aesthetics?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

These laws are only applicable in two of Germany's 16 states and only for state officials and authorities as well as schools. The other states mostly critize those states for infringing on equality rights. It just bans the use of gender related punctuations in written documents and school exams. It's not well thought out.

You can still use gender neutral terms (Lehrende instead of Lehrer*innen). It's a big deal as those states do it to cater to right-wing voters and fish them from the nazi-party AFD.

Btw Binnen-I is LehrerInnen. Other gender neutral notations are a "*", "_" or ":"

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

@whydudothatdrcrane There are only two relevant parties who are against gender neutrality: The Nazis from AfD and CxU. I also don*t like the Binnen-I and use an browser extension to fix that for me.

Krankenschwester is already female the offical Job name is Krankenpflegefachkraft (which is already neutral).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I see. Probably most North-Americans would confuse "gender-neutral" with "non-binary inclusive".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

That's a north American problem though. German settled on nouns that are more like "the ones who X". Like, Studierende instead of Studenten and Studentinnen. (The last two are just "students" in their gender specific form. The first one literally translated means "the ones who study")

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (3 children)

The very same happens in French. The use of recently popular gender-neutral structures like "étudiant.e.s" is strongly discouraged in formal writing. The older "étudiant(e)s" less so but still not recommended.

What's recommended is to either say "étudiants et étudiantes" or just use the masculine form as a group for both masculine and feminine forms, as has been the standard forever, and almost no one bats an eye at.

It's not TERF, it's not misogynistic, it's just to make texts easier to read. It takes more time and effort to read a text full of those extra period/parenthesis characters, for very very little gain.

People wanting to write a text where they consider the sacrifice in readability worth it for the extra emphasis on gender inclusion still can; the police won't show up. It's just not standard grammar.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 weeks ago

Agreed. I think using the masculine as the default should be fine if everyone agrees that it applies to all genders in this context. I wouldn't even mind if the feminine was used for this instead. It's just for the sake of legibility.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago (5 children)

This always makes me wonder why isn't the feminine that is all inclusive. It occurred to me it is because males would take offense to be called women, where (at least traditionally) this is not the case the other way round.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 weeks ago

In german or french It is mostly because the female version is just the male one with an extra ending. I.e. händler / händlerin English would have something similar but the male as default is just the now. You dont say actress but actor

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

I think that would be a history/etymology lesson going all the way back to Latin. I haven't studied Latin, but I think there used to be a lot more grammatical genders, but they were gradually merged into one another in languages with a Latin heritage.

Why the neutral gender got merged into masculine and not feminine is a good question. Maybe it was just because they were the most similar.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Yes, neutral and masculine were similar, and they just collapsed into one.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

In French the masculine and neutral gender collapsed. That's why masculine is a default. All neutral pronouns merged with the masculine due to sound shifts.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I speak Italian, which works similarly to French. The male form is called the "non-marked" form, while the female is "marked". It means that if you use the female form, you're actually talking about women, otherwise it may be anyone. So, the real inclusive form would be to just use the male form.

It's because both Italian and French come from Latin. Latin used to have three forms: male, female and neutral. The neutral and male form were very similar, so during the evolution from Latin to modern languages, the two forms collapsed into one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Because of how languages evolved. But my male neighbour still is a midwife.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Same in Dutch but ''student(e)'' is generally accepted.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

There is no good way to use gender neutral language in German. The language works differently than English.

So people came up with workarounds like putting stars in nouns to include both forms of the word for male and female but German grammar does not work well with this. There is also no good equivalent to using "they" as a neutral pronoun.

People still are trying to figure out how to make German more inclusive but this isn't easy.

Don't be ignorant.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I 100% agree that it's not perfect. Still, banning an attempt at being inclusive is clearly not about how impractical it can be. And even if it were, policing language is stupid 9 times out of 10.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Same in Italian.

Italian is heavily gendered, even inanimate objects have genders. A chair? It's a female. A door? It's a male.

It's not easy to modify a language; some people on the internet are trying using stars and other non-letters, but the result is ridiculous and nobody actually speaks like that in real life.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

In Dutch a door is female. Chair? Male.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Let's be honest: it looks like shit and interrupts the flow of a sentence. The alternative of writing both words completely also makes sentences way longer than they should be.

Every gendered language would have to make massive changes to become ungendered and change their grammar too. There's quite a large list of ungendered languages.

German, to my knowledge, is like Russian and has cases which change the ending of a noun depending on the purpose in the sentence (subject, direct object, indirect object, possessor, location, time, ...). Languages with only male and female would have to add a neutral ending, and languages with 3 grammatical genders would have to either use the neutral ending - if there is one, or make a new one specific to living beings.

Then of course pronouns would have to be changed too. In English they/them is already confusing enough when talking about a singular person to somebody and the person doesn't know it's a single person e.g "I talked to them today" - a group or a person? Until hints are dropped it isn't clear. The most logical would've been "it", but that's used for inanimate objects. I'm sure there's a neutral third person singular pronoun languages could borrow instead of using the second person plural.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

FYI: Unlike Russian and other Slavic languages German doesn't (usually) decline the noun, just the article (der/den/dem/des, etc).

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

But aren't all these technicalities to undermine the inclusion of one or more genders on the basis of some linguistic purism?

This makes me smirk, because a single course in college linguistics will persuade you there is not bigger amalgamated bastard in town than a human language, which is any non-formal language.

For example, you say they ambiguity of they/them, isn't this comparable to the ambiguity between you/you in plural/singular.

Ambiguity is like, an inherent feature of any language and there are hundreds of languages that resolve ambiguities based on context. Plus, the scholars said that singular them is in usage since the Middle Ages or sth.

So to me all this is a tension between A and B, where A is either linguistic purism or typographical convenience, and B is always including women/trans/non-binary folks. At the same time most people won't accept the feminine gender as all-inclusive because of their fears of emasculation.

It is a deeply laughable situation.

[–] Tar_alcaran 7 points 4 weeks ago

The German thing is a bit different. It's kind of like if English didn't have "they" as a neutral alternative, so people use "**e" as way to mean neither "he" nor "she".

That's fine in writing, but it looks pretty weird, doesn't work well in other forms, and you get things like "e gives the ball to h". It also really doesn't work outside the written word, because how do you pronounce that?

And I do understand that you don't want the female form to be the neutral form. If youre genderneutral, it probably feels weird to be constantly adressed as a woman.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Would be interesting to know what's your native language, to get an idea of what evolutions are possible.

Because surely someone with such a stark opinion on the matters speaks a gendered language natively, right?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (3 children)

I know nothing about german but some languages don't even have neutral pronouns, even things have gender. In this case you either invent a new word or let it be.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Yeah Saxony and Bavaria are pretty much in the hand of populistic politicians and or outright right extremists.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago

Yeah, pretty much that. Just because those Staates have banned it in administrative formal writing, this is in no Case a generalization for Germany. Just "Freistaat" doing their Thing as opposed to the other.

Also as a Note, that "Verein" has in no Case any inflouence over the course of education, as that is governed* by the "Gesellschaft" as mentioned.

*As in giving recommendations

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Ah Bavaria has right wing extremists? I miss the times when one could flee to the US under similar circumstances.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 weeks ago

Bavaria is like Texas. You have Munich and a few other cities that are progressive and vote even green (so, Austin) , and the rest is cowboys and farmers.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 weeks ago

Mostly Populists like Söder of CSU.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

I have no opinion mostly bc I didn't read the whole thing) but I think its funny how "over 100 writers and scholars" isnt the impact it used to be. U can get 100 ppl to sign just about anything, especially in today's day and age when it's so easy for ppl to find other ppl with the same exact prejudices

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 weeks ago

Good point

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago

Saxony and Hesse are currently deep in the far right clutches of the Alternative für Deutaschland, so this does not really come as a surprise.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I don't know what a gender star is, but it sounds cool

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Let's take the word "Kassierer", which is German for cashier. Kassierer is the male form, Kassiererin is the female form.

The idea of the Gendersternchen is that you write Kassierer*in to indicate that it means either male or female. I believe "Sternchen" ("little star") translates to asterisk.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

It denotes all genders not only male and female by using the asterisk as a wildcard for everything that could be in between the ends of the spectrum from male (Kassierer) to female (Kassiererin).

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