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My native language is Spanish, and though very gendered too, with gender neutral being vestigial in just a few words and even having been "deneutralized" in recent times with higher participation of women in the workforce and politics, for examples, "dependienta" is a common term in some countries for a woman storeclerk, it derives from dependiente, which is gender neutral, and similarly "presidente" used to be gender neutral, but as women were allowed more often in leadership positions, "presidenta" began to be used. I am not against this really, it is a quirk of how gender was perceived, these gender neutral terms were perceived as masculine because of the lack of women in these positions and because gender neutrality is so rare in general. Now there are proposals for new ways to add gender neutral forms into Spanish, some more popular than others (the X to replace A and O are generally very unpopular), although none has been widely embraced, and I am honestly surprised that German speakers resorted to special punctuation rather than trying to make gender neutral iterations of these words, could even be interesting oportunity since German has an abundance of compund words that no one has come up with mixing terms with a word that indicates neutrality.
the capital letter in the middle and / and repeating both versions gendered male and female are all not including all genders tho. it's binary. the * _ and : and thus the version were you pronounce a gap are for representing all genders, including non-binary ones. :) that's the whole point of the new * : _ from my perspective: to represent all people through language and show their validity and their existence. :)
12:04 AFAIK that's the exact way how women were excluded from being able to vote in Switzerland. The article in the law stated that all "Schweizer" were allowed to vote, but no "Schweizerinnen" which is how they got away with banning women from voting until 1971(!).
Don't forget the canton "Appenzell Innerrhoden" where it took the people until 1990 to accept that women are people as well. No wait, that's not quite right... In 1990, the people living in the canton "Appenzell Innerrhoden" had to be told by the federal supreme court that women had to be granted suffrage.
Wow, den Auschluss der Frauen auf so etwas banales, was wahrscheinlich nur bessoffene Alpendeppen von sichgegeben haben, hinunter zu brechen, grenzt ja schon an Geschichtsverfälschung. Genau deshakb durften Frauen also bis 1971 nicht wählen. Es gab also keine anderen Gründe und viel ausschlaggebende Gründe...soso
Your last point is a real example. The Swiss constitution said that every Swiss person has the right to vote in the generic masculin (Jeder Schweizer). Before women were given the right to vote in Switzerland, many women sued the government for not giving them the right to vote even though they should be included in the generic masculin word of "Schweizer". The court rejected their claim by saying that it is obvious that only men are meant by this term. That's why today the Swiss constitution says "Jeder Schweizer und jede Schweizerin"
This is a false example from what I can see. If the wording intended for women to be given the right to vote, then we would expect a brief period where women would be voting in Switzerland followed by a suppression. Rather, this appears to be a case where they used the ambiguity of the law to expand rights that were not intended to be expanded.
@@H.J.Fleischmann It was interpreted to only include men. Women hadn't the right to vote in Switzerland until 1979 and that's also when they added the feminine form.
It should noted that laws generally don't use the Gendersternchen. They use a different way of gender neutrality: Using the present participle. So instead of "Spielerinnen und Spieler", they say "Spielende", which is formed from the verb "spielen". I think it's a much more elegant form. There are other ways. Like instead of "Bürgerinnen und Bürger" (citizen), they instead use words "Staatsvolk" (statespeople). There are many creative ways of being gender neutral. While I don't like the Gendersternchen,I do like these alternate forms and words.
Yes that's right but not for all laws because some this solution can't be used for every sentence. In Bavaria some laws use the generic masculine but to avoid misunderstandings they especially say in the footnotes that the masculine form includes women as well
@hawkanonymous2610 Eh, yeah, Studierende technically doesn't mean the same thing as studenten. But it's close enough that I've never seen a person not understand what's meant in that context.
@hawkanonymous2610 I never understood this argument in the case of students. When they're "eingeschrieben", then they're studying right now. "Studieren" has more than one meaning and "currently being a student" is one of them. The argument works for "Autofahrende" for instance, where you can be an "Autofahrer" just by means of owning a car and using it regularly, without being "fahrend" right now. But the argument is always exclusively brought up in the case of "Studierende", where it is nonsensical imho.
@@GameTornado01 whel its ze säme with talksing toally worgn, rait? Es long es evri won kan andersuand yu yu shut nod bi annnoit zett hii oar shee dus nod youse se korrlkt spällung^^
To add to your point about generic masculine being used in laws as an excuse to ban women from things; we had that exact thing happen here in the US during the suffrage movement. Several states tried to stop individual women from running for office by pointing out that the state constitutions only mentioned congress"men" and stuff like that. Don't remember which states off the top of my head, but look it up
That’s not quite right. In those instances those laws really did refer to only men. You can’t really play those same semantic games in English, we don’t have grammatical gender (barring a few cases) so when referring to both it is improper to say “men”. You need mankind, man and woman, or another broad term.
You don't get it. In english you basically always use the generic masculine. It's like saying teacher*ess or something in english. It doesn't make any sense.
@@violasses it wasn’t “twisted” the deliberate intention was to ignore women, so they used “men” on its own. I don’t understand why you would think they felt the need to play semantic games. They just excluded women because they wanted to and women couldn’t vote.
@@bertdog2119 You can't be serious. It used to be common practice in English to engage in some form of male defaultism where masculine terms like "he" and "men" were used as a blanket term for anyone, just like in German but without it being the only option you have.
I was annoyed enough 40 years ago when as a high schooler we were instructed to use "he or she" in writing or formal speech (rather than the "they" we all used naturally), and some responded by using the unsayable "s/he."
I hate reading "he or she" it's just more of a hassle to get through sentence. Just use "they". It's so weird to to me when people think "they" is "too complicated" it is literally easier.
What's funny to me is that seemingly no one thinks "you" being both plural and singular is confusing (in most cases) but singular "they" is suddenly preposterous lol Transphobia is so stupid sometimes
I have a German speaking exam tomorrow and this is one of three possible topics. Now I have an excuse to watch youtube and pretend I'm still revising :)
It's tomorrow (in my time zone at least) and you're likely doing your exam. Interested in how you feel it went :) Or if you were graded on the spot, how it actually went ;)
I believe I've heard of similar problem with "all men are created equal", being written in generic masculine as well. Nowadays, we can read it and say "Ah yes, "all men" as in "all of humanity"". While in the past, depending on who was suing for equal rights, it was interpreted in the courts as "only (white/free/landowning) men".
“All men” wasn’t initially written in generic masculine (which in English is a dumb concept because we have better terminology than “men”). It didn’t include women in the beginning. It wasn’t a semantic loophole, it was the intention.
@@owengoulding7535 If "they" were singular it would be "they is" not "they are". So yes, "they" is plural and "he" really was the correct "gender neutral" form.
@@andreasrumpf9012 Hmm, but we say “you are” to refer to one person, not “you is.” Maybe reconsider this… “They are a friend of mine.” We can say this and it can be unambiguous that we are talking about a single person. “You are a friend of mine.” The same is true for this statement! Now, both of these words CAN be plural. “They are all friends of mine.” “You are all friends of mine.” The context is key!
@@extra7646 3rd person singular goes with "is" in English. "You are" is 2nd person singular or plural and is not applicable (but weird in its own way too). The table IS green, the sun IS yellow, your friend IS annoying. He/she/it IS popular.
yeah and all thoes trees that have to be cut for new documents that have to include the gender star, whos so pro protecting the enviorment now. Checkamte leftisits!! /j obviiously
It adds about 3-4 letters to each word. I think that the genderstern is better for ink-usage than the Doppelnennung. (If you do not want to use the generic masculin)
its kinda funny how the german word for cat is almost the exact reverse of this, where "katze" is used to refer to cats in general, but the masculine term "kater" is used to refer to male cats specifically
There are quite some of them, actually. My favourite is "Geschwister (cf. Schwester, Bruder and Gebrüder)". There the feminine is so generic that it is even used for a group of only brothers...
There’s loads of them. Generally speaking, if a term for an animal ends in E, it’s likely feminine, with some exceptions like _Affe._ Katze, Giraffe, Spinne, Biene, Wespe, Libelle, … Also, for _Katze_ in particular, it’s truly neutral, as for male cats, there’s _Kater_ (tomcat) and for females, there’s _Kätzin._ However, when distinguishing, a lot of people use _Katze_ in contrast to _Kater_ to mean a female.
Neither is there anybody willing nor powerful to actually *ban* the use of this stupid asterisk. On the other side there are institutions and countries(!) perfectly willing and capable to ban and punish the use of "non-inclusive" language. Edit: Oh crap, they actually do want to ban it. The point still stands though.
Inclusivity in legal texts is actually extremely important in some rare cases: the recent French law granting rights to assisted reproductive technology was amended to specify that the right was given to WOMEN specifically, in order to exclude trans men. Small apparently innocuous changes to wording can drastically affect the meaning of a law; and though it is unlikely that people from countries with a grammatical "standard" gender would ever consider phrasing to not be inclusive; it could technically happen if there is sufficient motive and intention.
Same goes for abortions: constitutional rights to it were given to women specifically, while trans men are only protected by mere laws (even though they're more likely to get, you know...) It would have been so simple to write "people" instead, though I'm not sure it's malice in that case with how much our administration got us used to its lack of foresight and sheer incompetence
I don't gender either and I think that it can interrupt the reading flow quite a bit. But the way some people get upset about it and want to ban it is also ridiculous.
So just to check, in order to ban other people from forcing a viewpoint onto children… you want to ban it and force your viewpoint onto children? Truly genius and not at all hypocritical!
@@everettw.9610it’s not a teachers job to force their views onto their students. And how exactly is speaking the German language the way it always has been forcing views onto people? I’m not seeing the hypocrisy.
In Hebrew, we also have the same problem. For me, the most effective and equal way is to say in the beginning of a form: “This document is written in masculine, but is intended for both men and women” Also: Problems in Germany: “No freedom of speech” because you “have” to add a * in the middle of the word. Problems in Israel: Complete freedom of speech except this one little thing - you will get beaten up if you go to protest against the government YEY world is so fair
Spanish has the same issue but an advantage (?) is that gender in Spanish tends to hinge on a single letter. For instance, a male or gender-neutral friend is "amigo" and a female friend is "amiga". So there's several ways to shorten "amigo o amiga" in a single word such as "amigo/a", "amig@" or "amigx". Needless to say, a lot of people don't like this. There is another way of gender-neutral writing which is ending words in -e instead of -o or -a or -@ or whatever, I'd say it really picked up in the 00s. This is based on gender-neutral words that are already in the language such as "le". For instance "a mi amiga le dije hola" means "I said hello to my (female) friend" and "a mi amigo le dije hola" means "I said hello to my (male or gender-neutral) friend". Note that the word "le" does not change, so the letter e takes a gender-neutral role. Other words such as "estudiante" (student) or adjectives ending in -e such as "competente" or "inteligente" also don't specify gender, in contrast to adjectives ending in -o or -a which do. This allows us to create words such as "amigue" (gender neutral friend) or "chique" (gender-neutral boy (chico) or girl (chica)). Now this, a lot of people REALLY don't like it. These new words can sound pretty alien, and people can get legitimately confused when they hear them for the first time. This hasn't even been popularized in the entire Spanish sphere, some immigrants think they're just another local word they haven't learned yet. What people tend to do when they don't want to deal with all that is try to use a gender-neutral synonym whenever possible. Instead of "alumno" or "alumna" (student) we just say "estudiante", instead of "miembro" or "miembra" (member) we just say "integrante", etc.
Yeah, the ending bit is what I do. I prefer to use gender-neutral synonyms or collective nouns instead, but if I can't find an alternative I'll use the /, -e or the enby neopronoun "elle" without issue.
well the main argument I've seen with the spanish gender-neutral stuff and one that I don't see the video bringing up is that grammatical gender is not the same thing as biological or etc genders. Also that changing an entire language for very new imposals from certain populations of people who want this is very silly, also because it doesn't actually improve anything regarding equality or etc. It's simple words (that once again, are grammatical in nature so its not even referring or implying to any real thing) that people are looking at too critically here. I agree with the video that taking it too seriously is also super duper silly as well. I don't personally think that any sort of language-changing effect like this could even take place given how things are. And yet i also do think if people want do what they want they very well should. The problem I certainly have with it is more so the conceptualization itself, and seeing a problem where there isn't to begin with regarding this. Especially having to devolve this into politics, which is an extra layer of silly to an already goofy topic. I feel like there's more to all of this than we're being led onto, and that fighting for any given cause is more so that we're siding with the two hidden opposing fountains of thought that want to win this battle of ideology almost you know? Because it all has had to come from somewhere, and the culture war here almost seems manufactured in a sense.
I remember in Argentina when we had our first woman president ("presidente"), she insisted on being called "presidenta" instead, which was mocked pretty wildly (if begrudgingly accepted, like "yes of course señora presidenta (eyeroll)". I find it curious that a complete lack of affirmed neutrality turns even words that are passively neutral into masculine by default.
For laws and formal communication, I think a better solution is to add a note at the beginning of the document saying smth like "people of all genders are included, the grammatical masculine is used for simplicity". I've seen it used in Swiss French contracts, and I think it makes a lot more sense. And one could choose to write everything in the feminine form if they prefer. 😉 We shouldn't underestimate the importance of simple language; that is also a form of inclusivity. Swiss laws are written much more clearly than Italian laws, for example, which is something to admire.
Isn’t there also a convention where people write “(m/w/d)” after the masculine to clarify that it’s a generic masculine rather than a specifically-male masculine? I feel like that’s the best solution.
Additionally you could let people choose to use the generic masculine, or feminine. If "Lehrer" addresses women as well, then "Lehrerinnen" surely can address men?
That one is specifically for job ads. Back in the day job ads included (m), (w) or both to signal that they were specifically hiring men or women. Once that practice got outlawed because of equal rights, they had to specifically say (m/w) to avoid confusion with the generic masculine. Then, once it was legally established that people of other genders also exist, the added the d for diverse, making it (m/w/d)
@@lonestarr1490in this context, this is not quite true. There are some words/jobs that are purely feminine, e.g. "Hebamme" (midwife), "Krankenschwester" (nurse), Sekretärin (secretary), traditionally only assumed by womeb. There are no well-established male equivalent for them, so usually these terms are also used for men. Yes, there are new words, but they struggle getting used much. The problematic thing is that there is sexism included in the language. Usually the male-only terms are highly respected and well-payed while the female-only are usually only assistant positions, see "Doktor/Arzt" - "Krankenschwester" (Doctor - Nurse). But I agree that these are exceptions, the generic feminine is not really a thing (besides above exceptions). But I don't think this makes the language more inclusive (what about diverse people? And the law problem in the video still persists, just the other way around).
I don't know whether it is a common practice or not in Icelandic, but in Dutch it is not uncommon to see the "/" as punctuation indicating "or". So I could definitely see it being used to try and be inclusive without the text becoming a visual mess as with the asterisk.
As a German I don't like how this debate leads us to the depths of American mud war ( Schlammschlacht). There is a small counter movement which aims to develop the English way of having only one gendered word for a profession. It always uses the shorter version for simplicity even if the shorter version is feminine like "Hexe" (witch) for both male and female. I think your point about the law language and official language is good, however, Germany has a significantly high Immigrant population who from my own experiences with immigrant integration have huge struggles filing official documents to be allowed to work, receive money, have the right to live in Germany .... Complicating this process in the name of what is often seen as unnecessary is not inclusive. The grand majority of my female friends feel included in the generic masculine. I think politicizing gender language in general is unnecessary as it is not as important as other topics in German politics like economy, immigration...
Two things... Firstly, this form of gender inclusive language can't be measured on individual people, so the fact that most of your female friends feel included by the generic masculine is to be expected. The effect in perception only shows statistically over large groups of the population, because the change in perception is very subtle. And secondly, do you think we should simplify the German language for immigrants, so that they can learn it much easier. For example replacing all the different "der, die, den, das, dem" etc. with a simple "de" or "d' " sound. Like "de Haus", "de Küche", "de Stuhl" etc. Would you be in favor of simplifying the German language in such a way to make it easier for immigrants to learn? I mean, it works with "the" in English, so it should be easy to adopt.
It doesn’t even matter if you “feel included.” A language has clear rules in that regard. We’re in Ben Shapiro territory where facts don’t care about feelings.
The English word _witch_ is a great example. In the _Harry Potter_ books and movies, _witch_ only refers to girls and women, and while Rowling uses “witches and wizards,” she also used _wizarding world_ which of course includes witches. So even those aren’t on the same level. In German, and judging by how Rowling uses words, in English as well, there is no male counterpart for _witch._ In German, you can use _Zauberer,_ but it has its own female-specific version: Zauberin. That word is really, really old and can be found in Old High German texts as _zoubarin._ German is famously lopsided with respect to words for man and woman: Salutation: _Herr_ and _Dame_ ― „Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren“ Address: _Herr_ and _Frau_ - „Sehr geehrter Herr Schmidt“ „Sehr geehrte Frau Schmidt“ Terms: _Mann_ and _Frau_ - „Nach der Heirat sind sie Mann und Frau.“
@bolpat, witch is a bad example of this. Witch was used throughout history as a way to refer to people with evil magic of any gender. A better example for your argument would be sorceress or enchantress.
(Of which there are male counterparts for both) While the term “witch” does carry a feminine idea, mostly due to pop culture, there is a masculine version anyway- warlock.
i use "Lernende", "Spielende", etc. because it's inclusive but also undercover enough that the nutjobs at my job don't notice it and make a fuss about it
It’s still incorrect, as the present progressive means something different than an actor noun. „Sterbende Studierende“ ist ein Beispiel für Blödsinn, der dabei rauskommt.
@@Bolpat Substantivierung ist ein normaler grammatischer Vorgang im Deutschen die mit allen Partizipformen eines Verbs erlaubt ist, "Blödsinn" ist deine Unwissenheit über die Möglichkeiten in deiner eigenen Sprache.
The situation here in France is astonishingly similar. Far right RN and other right-wing groups, as well as Macron's party (whether you count them as right-winged or no) grabbed onto the inclusive writing debate. The arguments and moves against inclusive writing that you summarize in your video are 100% compatible with the situation here. There even is a bill proposal adopted in parliament to ban the use of inclusive writing in official documents. It's interesting to witness a parallel debate in a neighbor country. It was also nice to learn how to write gender-neutral words in German. The popular way to write gender-neutral in French is using a dot (for example, "a good player": "un.e bon.ne joueur.euse" OR "un·e bon·ne joueur·euse")
Same here in Spain! Although we use slashes and the @ instead because of the simplicity of our language That said, sometimes you have to say the words twice, as in with singular pronouns, because the words are too different (El/Ella), I have seen people write El(la) though. It is far easier in the plural where it could be Ell@s (for Ellas/Ellos) Some other forms like using the x and e are also used, but people get even MORE aggressive with those because they kind of fundamentally replace the a/o instead of incorporating both, which might be scary to many rightists because of the promotion of going beyond gender binary
Kind of funny that in Spanish (and "incorrectly" but widely in Catalan as of recent) there is technically a gender neutral pronoun in a specific case, that being "lo" which normally is used for masculine (as in tenerlo (to have him/it)) but sometimes contrasting with both the masculine and feminine (this is very complex, however, and is related to other linguistic features within spanish)
@@erikno2992 That's so cool, I didn't know any of that. Thank you for bringing that up! It's interesting to see how each language came up with different solutions for gender neutral, sometimes even fitted onto one language's specificities (like @). This variety of solutions clearly shows how easily adaptable our languages are to include gender diversity which further disprove typical reactionary nonsense.
@@stewagner I meant as easy as it is to basically find a proper separator. I'm not saying it's a perfect solution (which would be having a real gender-neutral form) but it's realistically a good compromise for our gendered languages. (I don't know for other gendered languages)
That's super interesting ! In french we have a similar issue (and we also use the feminine "personne" sometimes), and in the past i've often seen putting the feminine in parenthesis: "Un(e) bon(ne) joueur(euse)". But it's been considered not really neutral since the parenthesis kinda imply an afterthought, so a new format has emerged called "écriture inclusive" (inclusive writing) that looks like : "Un.e bon.ne joueur.euse" or sometimes "joueu.r.se" and sometimes a middle dot is used, although it more rare since it's hard to do on a computer. I think it may be a good way to fix in writing, but I think writing should be similar to how we speak, and no one uses that form orally, so maybe there's a way to have it included in speaking. Also there's also the word "iel" to act as a neutral pronoun in between "il" and "elle", although i've only seen it on twitter. And yeah same issue with the far right...
Iel is terrible. The backlash is not from the far right, it's from people with common sense. Well, nowadays, they're pretty much the same people to be honest.
"a middle dot [...] it's hard to do on a computer." On my Spaniard keyboard, it's Shift+3! ·························· (because of Catalan's L·L (geminated L) probably)
@@mrrandom1265 3/4 of the letters in French are silent anyway, literally what difference does it make? And furthermore why does it matter so much to you?
In Portuguese we also use parentheses, even in some formal texts. Like in _O(a) aluno(a) precisa ser avaliado(a).,_ meaning "The (male or female) student needs to be assessed". The generic masculine could also be used and would be one hundred percent understandable, though. I've also seen it in some tests, in questions where there might be one or more correct answers. Like this: Está(ão) correta(s) a(s) alternativa(s): Which means something like "The correct alternative(s) is(are):"
In Brazil, we put the gender vowel inside parenthesis like so "A famous player": "Um(a) jogador(a) famoso(a)" Sometimes, the second vowel (usually the feminine) adds to the final vowel-less consonant, but it can also substitute the masculine vowel that comes before it.
@nHans Good question... we usually avoid it. But if necessary, we would say both words. In this case: "/Um, Uma jogador ou jogadora famoso, famosa/" Or the full sentence twice, changing all the words' genders There's also the [very informal] possibility of doing some sort of liaison like "/Famoso-a/" but it doesn't work for short words like "um" and "uma" or if the masculine and feminine are very different like the words for "good", "bom" and "boa". It's something that happens to most romance languages, probably. And perhaps germanic ones too. English is just too different and unique and way too simple of a language.
@@luizfellipe3291 In another comment elsewhere, I mentioned that these kinds of workarounds are not sufficient; we need a more permanent solution. After all, if any feature-like artificially forced gender inclusion-makes a language more difficult to use, people won't use it. If the written form diverges significantly from the spoken form, that too is a problem. I don't know Portuguese, but after conversing with you, I see that it too has the same issue. Good luck, mate-I hope you guys work out a suitable, long-term solution that works for both written and spoken language. The issue of gender inclusivity / neutrality affects language as a whole, not just the written form. About English-oh boy! I'm not a native English speaker. I learnt English formally in school (all schools in India teach English). True, it's (mostly) genderless, and also has very few cases / declensions / conjugations compared to other languages. That part made it easy to learn. But believe me, English compensates by making everything else unnecessarily difficult-insane spellings and pronunciation, irregular verbs, phrasal verbs, collective nouns, and too many exceptions for every "rule." Old English was very much gendered, like most other Indo-European languages. Luckily, over time, it dropped grammatical gender. However, even in modern English, some bits of gender remain, particularly in the pronouns _"he"_ and _"she."_ The generic _"he"_ was used well into the 1980s-I was taught that. Then the _"he or she"_ fad started-but there was no consensus. A huge number of variations cropped up, and often indicated the writer's political agenda: _"she or he," "s/he," "(s)he," "he/she," "she/he," "she"_ etc. A few prominent writers even started using synthetic / Spivak neopronouns such as _"ze," "ou," "thon," "heer," "hir," "zir"_ etc. It was a complete mess! Traditionalists even protested and refused to use gender-neutral words like _police officer, server,_ or _flight attendant,_ and insisted on using the gendered _policeman, waitress,_ and _stewardess_ instead. But over time, most mainstream writers and speakers have switched to gender-neutral alternatives. Luckily, most other words denoting profession, like _doctor, teacher, soldier, president_ etc., had become gender-neutral long before that. In the last decade or so, the singular _"they"_ too has become mainstream. But whenever I use it myself, I flinch involuntarily. See, when I was a schoolboy, _"they"_ was strictly plural. If I forgot that, the sadistic and matronly English teachers used to whack me mercilessly on my hands and knuckles with wooden rulers and canes. However, I was already familiar with the idea, because in Indian languages like Hindi and Kannada, it's very common to use the plural form for an individual as a sign of respect. Also, the plural forms are not gendered. So that way, these languages achieve a degree of gender-inclusivity (not completely, though). Today, I see something similar happening in German, French, and other gendered languages. Progressives are trying to use gender-inclusive language, and traditionalists are refusing to budge. Let's see how it plays out.
@amicuwu Not many people are kin to using this, unfortunately. For me, I think it should only be used when talking about non-binary people. Any other case, the generic masculine feels better even though it's not perfect
7:11 “People are wrong all the time; lots of people believe something doesn’t make it true or right or good” I’d argue that people’s opinions here cannot be wrong since the language should reflect how the people use it and what they find most convenient. Why would we change the language when the majority of the population wouldn’t use it as it is used? Doesn’t make much sense 😕
Super excited for this video since Croatian is similar to German when it comes to grammatical gender. Everybody here talked about Nemo, the new eurovision winner, as a he, or even worse, an it.
Trivia: Nemo got 12 points from the Ukrainian public. Considering that Ukraine is still a more conservative country, I highly doubt that's because Nemo is non-binary...
As a progressive myself I have a bit of an unpopular opinion on that. Obviously the far-rights obsession with being against it is laughable but I'm not a fan of it either. My approach is basically to "englishify" the German language. English used to have gendered nouns but they died out so why not artificially push for that development in German as well? The generic masculine would lose it's masculine character if the feminine form gets abolished all together. If we normalize that a woman is a Lehrer and a girl is a Schüler and the -in form becomes obsolete then linguistic gender equality is achieved that way and surprisingly, some people already do that very casually. My mom once said "ich wollte schon immer Bäcker werden" (I always wanted to be a baker{masc.}) but obviously she meant Bäcker as any person of any gender who bakes and not a man. So to avoid the many complications of individually representing non-binary people and people who don't identify with any gender, I say abolish gender all together, let the generic masculine become the one form for all by taking gender itself and therefore its gendered nature away.
Kinda in the same camp: I appreciate and support the intention, but find the solution _extremely_ cumbersome. I have a soft spot for scrapping masculine/feminine altogether and go to the Swedish situation - or the situation ancient Indoeuropean apparently had: Just standard and neuter.
Wouldn't change the fact that most jobs and power positions would still use the male article der by default, what is the problem to begin with. If you want a grammatical female identifying quality you have the choice between Krankenschwester, Feuerwehrfrau and Nonne. German is a patriarchal language. Anything is default male, except being a person, girl, woman, mother, sister, aunt, nun. Grammatically male is normal, female is the variant and linguistically inferior. German is a lot older than the few years of successful emancipation . I think it is worth a thought to find a way to rethink gender outside of the patriarchal norms that this language has operated in until now.
@@Makutros The thing is, your explanation is _linguistically_ wrong. The original state of any Indoeuropean language (as far as I am aware of) was "Alive/Animate" and "Neuter/Inanimate". The special ending for "female" is a later invention. Now, that does not solve the association problem people can have today because the _culture_ the language was _used_ in was patriarchal. But I just think that adding new endings is not the solution. I'd rather have anything just Neuter, tbh.
@@LarthV I meant with German the New High "modern" German that exists since the enlightenment. Of course language is not set in stone and things might have been different before, but for quite a few centuries Germany is a language of the patriarchy. I too would prefer generic neutral gender, but I don't think that masculine could serve that purpose anymore. Either actual neuter or a fourth grammatical gender.
3:05 One alternative is doing what Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and (some dialects of) Norwegian did and merging Masculine and Feminine grammatical gender together into Common gender: "Ein guter Spieler (generic)/Spielermann (male)/Spielerfrau (female)".
Still, if the majority of people is against it, why do Universities, Schools, the public broadcast and ultimately the government decide to use and advocate for the Gender Star? Especially public broadcast is a very sensitive subject because it’s funded by taxes and if the people don’t want them using the Gender star they shouldn’t use it. I think otherwise it’s not very democratic to act against the will of the majority.
Wasting time and money on ink and paper plus paying staff to do unnecessary tasks drains the public purse. Therefore, it is economically irresponsible for a government to allow its staff to be so wasteful.
We have the very same problem in France with "Ecriture Inclusive" which wants to put a middle dot instead of a star, like "Un.e auteur.ice" (an autor) for including both French grammatical genders in the sentence at the same time, and we have the same political issues with it...
As a german enby I prefer ze good old Generikum over the gendering, because the gendering kind of makes female person be something special and all the other genders have to find themselves under the Asteriks or whatever they use to gender
As a student with Chinese as my first language studying in Berlin, I would like to share my personal experiences and ideas on the topic. I think sharing real personal experiences and thoughts can be supportive in understanding things and others more neutrally and better. As I was learning German, the issue of "*in" did bother me for several reasons. Firstly and most apparently, it appears ugly to me. (Or, at least, not that beautiful.) I am very fascinated by different cultures, writing systems, calligraphy, typing, and font designs. I have spent quite a long time practicing Chinese calligraphy and am simply a bit "picky" about aesthetic issues. So, although I reasonably understand that this asterisk is not really a big issue, one just wants it better. Therefore, when I have to use this form, I prefer using a colon instead of an asterisk, for aesthetically it fits the Latin letter typing systems better (try comparing Lehr*innen and Lehr:innen). Secondly, it does not write fluently. An asterisk is difficult for handwriting. As I enjoy calligraphy from different writing systems, I find the asterisk an interruption to fluent handwriting. For thousands of years, writers have formed almost every part of the writing system into a handwriting-friendly shape - letters, punctuation, even symbols like "@" or "&". But this asterisk interrupts the writing flow, and furthermore, the heart's flow. Lastly, but really not the least, is the writing-speaking correspondence problem. German is a language that follows the rule pretty strictly: how you write, how you read. But how do you read "Lehrer*innen"? Some would pronounce the asterisk as a glottal stop, which appears on paper perfectly well. But in practice, it fails. People speak in a continuously flowing speech. Any small blocking stones will be kicked away. And now, to pronounce this "*", one has to initially go against the natural law of simplification and stop the speech flow. This basically means that it can never be accepted into casual daily use. It will remain as an explicit rule rather than an unconscious law. That is even against the ultimate goal of gender neutrality and gender equivalence. We want a gender-neutral language because we want gender-equivalent minds. When we mention a teacher, we care about the person’s work, rather than the gender. So we omit it. But if we have to remember "Gender neutral! Gender neutral!" everywhere, it would, I guess, on the contrary be a barrier between the genders. However, these listed reasons do not send me naturally to the side of the generic masculine, although I do think it sometimes better than some other options. Generic masculine is short, simple, therefore looks and sounds beautiful, and if I were to write a poem where options are limited, it would very probably be the best choice. But I do want a gender-neutral expression. It does matter to be gender-neutral and gender-equivalent, at least, to me. I try to use "die Lehrenden" in plural i.e., “the teaching ones“ which fixes it a lot of times, but this is not the perfect answer: First, if it needs a singular expression, we come back to the problem of choosing "der Lehrende" or "die Lehrende" (or worse, "der/die Lehrender*in"); second, there are many words which cannot be, or are difficult to be, expressed in such a form. For instance, Freund (i.e., English "friend"). As a male, once I tried to refer to a very close female friend of mine (who was not my girlfriend, but that is another problem because in German "an friend who happens to be female" and "a girlfriend" are both "Freundin") but the point was not that she is female but that we are close friends, so I wanted to omit the gender there. I struggled quite a lot, with help from dictionaries, Google, and ChatGPT, only to find such an expression: "jemand, mit dem ich eine enge Freundschaft verbunden habe" - "someone with whom I have built close friendship" - which is definitely not satisfying. Thus, these are my personal experiences, ideas, and struggles. Nowadays in emails, I prefer "die Lehrenden" (plural), and if not possible, "die Lehrer und/oder Lehrerinnen" in plural or "der Lehrer oder die Lehrerin" in singular to "Lehrer:innen", but at least the last is acceptable to me. In oral speech, it is similar, except that I never say "Lehrer-(glottal stop)-innen". I would appreciate it if you can share your preference for handling the issue, as maybe you have better ways that I may learn. I did not expect to have written so long at first, so, at the end, I wish you a very nice day.
Native German who had some thoughts on language here: Agree on the first two points. You could pronounce it with a stop but not break, like the ao in Aorta instead of the one in Maoism. LehrerInnen instead of LehreRinnen. Even if that sounds like stressing they are female. The part about pointing it out is true too. Yeah I agree having no clear distinction between friend and girlfriend is a bother, especially when you are used to English with its distinctness. You could just use Freundin, as child I used that. Or better combine it with an adjective, "Meine beste/gute/alte/liebe Freundin" is always the friend one, since there is just one girlfriend, you don't need a defining term, except maybe for the "alte", that could sometimes also refer to an ex. Use other terms for omitting gender, like "befreundete Person", "naher Mensch", "Herzensperson/-mensch", "jemand eng Befreundetes", "Teiler einer engen Freundschaft", ... For Lehrer, there is an easy solution though - just use Lehrkraft. Or Lehrkörper to refer to all of them, albeit it has fallen out of use and is not that common any more. I hope you have a good time too, and this is of some help, have a nice day too!
1. _der/die Lehrender*in_ is wrong, it would be _der/die Lehrende_ as it’s _der Lehrende_ and _die Lehrende_ individually. 2. The friend issue is well-known. _Meine Freundin_ is “my girlfriend” - even in English, sometimes, especially women, refer to their female-only friend group as their “girlfriends.” _Eine (gute) Freundin von mir_ means “a (close) female friend of mine”. Weirdly, _gute_ enormously stresses the friendship character. _Eine meiner Freundinnen_ usually means “one of my female friends,” but in context can mean “one of my (ex-)girlfriends.” And _meine beste Freundin_ means “my best female friend” and never refers to your (female) relationship partner. Those also work in reverse, i.e. with _Freund_ for a male. 3. The best course of action is to ditch _-in_ forms except in certain circumstances as (funnily enough) relationship partners, where gender usually does matter, and move German closer to English, where female-specific forms do exist (e.g. actress, heroine), but almost all role nouns are perceived neutrally. East Germany did that actually, and to this day, in East German states, it’s common for women teachers/engineers/etc. to refer to themselves by the generic form, i.e. the masculine form. Germany ditched _Fräulein_ in the 70s: The word still exists, it just fell out of use; you can still use it to insult or rebuke girls and younger women („So nicht, Fräulein!“), especially for being rude or brazen, and the male equivalent would be _junger Mann._
@@Bolpat I already explained why adding any adjective to "Freund(in)" in general makes it clear it is a friend instead of a partner. I also mentioned Fräulein, although I would disagree on junger Mann, it is just the equivalent to junge Frau and still used/not sexist since it stresses the age more than gender, unlike Fräulein. I agree you could use it to achieve the same effect, but it is not the male equivalent. And you are right about alte Freundin, ehemalige is the common term, that just slipped. No clue why I got them confused.
I use the generic masculine even if its a woman i am talking about: "Sie ist ein Lehrer" In that way you essentially get a gender neurtal way of speaking.
Oh my God you sexist! You are not even respecting a woman that much to the point that you don't even care about her gender... You sexist! Ja aber das zeigt gut auf, inwiefern es sich beim gegnerischen Maskulinum einfach nur um eine neutrale Form handelt.
About that comment on prioritizing the masculine by putting it first... surely, you would put the shortest form first, whatever it is, so that anyone who wants to skip duplication when reading aloud would get it done the most efficiently (even if grammatically incorrectly).
As a german speaker let me tell you that even in german you can perform gender neutral speaking style. Most of the time we'll use Name's or Sie/Du, if you are talking about a persons role, then it'll be harder since you have to know their neutral forms für Lehrer und Lehrerinnen ist es Lehrkräfte. If you don't remember the name then you can not avoid the gender language though :< The gender star or any other gender representation in our speech is just a historical piece left over in our language. So the reason for the use of the german generic male form, is that these words are most if not all the time, the closest to the imaginary base form of the Word. Ur not gendering there if you just don't use or represent the female form of the Profession. Welche n! Lehrer haben wir nochmal in Mathe Wie heißt denn die Abteilungsleitung? Weißt du wer ... macht/ will/ kann.... Ist auch ein starkes Satzgefüge, dass es komplett umgehen kann. Deutsch ist eine Sprache in der sehr viel Kreativität möglich ist, also einfach mal damit spielen ^^
9.39-9.47 without getting into a wider debate about the AfD: how is lowering gov't spending an "anti common-person" policy? if the gov't spends less, then it also means it needs to collect less in taxes. isn't that *textbook* populism? it's precisely *for* increasing economic welfare, isn't it?
empirically, lowering government spending tends to only be good for the wealthy, the taxes you pay as a working class person are very low compared to the actual economic benefits you are getting. feels counter intuitive, but it works similarly to ideas like health insurance - it's in the long term cheaper to have it than not. HOWEVER, the economy is complicated. mismanaged government spending is sometimes worse than no spending at all. in my opinion, the working person / small business owner in germany pays WAYYY too much tax for what they're getting out of it. people pay massive amounts of their income in tax and it can be really detrimental to a lot of families. but the AfD isn't looking at that, they're looking at tax cuts for businesses and the wealthiest people in society. whose pocket do you think that money is going to come out of? who do you think the lower spending is going to affect? well, it's going to affect the little guy, the one with no steady work in their town who needs unemployment to get on their feet, and the small business owner who wants some stability provided by the government so they can get their business off the ground. combined with leaving the EU, which gives massive grants to help small businesses survive their first few years, help towns get more jobs etc, this economic policy is about draining all the resources of the economy upwards into big businesses and businessmen
3:30 Didn't knew it had a name, I've been using it on this account when a Portuguese word is gendered, like "+1 inscrit*" for "+1 subscriber" when I subscribe to a channel because the word for subscriber isn't neutral, and most of the words also aren't.
@truegemuese I suggested a singular form of "Leute": "das Leut". To achieve basically the same thing. "Der/die Feuerwehrmann/-frau" becomes "das Feuerwehrleut".
Whilst i feel shifting code to das is fraught with a whole bunch of other problems, I adore @truegemuese 's proposition even more than I love the idea with messing with languages that aren't mine.
Yeah this wouldnt fix some ambiguity and would make you still have to use the generic masculine(or something that sounds similar) For example "erzähl das deinem lehrer" is the same when using the neuter gender. it would be great if it was as easy as just swapping to "das" but the mess that are our pronouns make that not viable. there would have to be a gender neutral ending to words aswell for this to work
@@nirichy "Erzähl das deinem Lehrleut!" Someone also suggested "-x" as a neutral ending, I believe. "Erzähl das deinem Lehrx!" Weil, if that's not a German I could get behind, I don't know what is."
the last point you've made also applies to the us (on which you've mentioned in another video if i remember correctly) where the law used "he" as a "gender neutral" pronoun but it was turned into so only males could vote for example
I wouldn't care about the whole topic but some of my friends told me that their professor forced them to use the gender stars or they would get 0 points on their exams
I mean, sure? Professors can force you to do whatever they want when you write an essay or other work for their seminar. They can tell you to only use capitalized letters and replace all question marks with the word 'dog' if they feel like it. That has nothing to do with the debate.
I have a simpler solution. In the legal definitions literally just state that all masculine refer to generic masculine thereby negating the need to explicitly state the feminine in all later uses. Saves a lot of word count too
It's interesting, because most Romance languages inherit holdovers of the Latin 3rd Declension (itself a remnant of the Proto-Indo-European (animate) Athematic declension, which predates the invention of the feminine as a gender) so they have a class of words where the gender is unmarked on the word and usually ends in -e; in Italian and Romainian you get singular/plural -e/-i, Spanish and Portuguese gets -e/-es (we're leaving aside the 3rd Declension descendants that ended up with singulars in -∅), other dialects can have either but also have a tendency to wear it down to -∅/-(e)s---except French which, much like a lot of Germanic languages, wore away noun endings to basically nothing and so doesn't get to reach for that easy solution.
The undermining question is: Does this asterisk actually make it more inclusive? Because to this day I havent seen any reproducable study that confirms that people feel more inclusive if stuff like that is done. Some studies show some things. But is it reproducable? What is the base number of participants? What is the error rate? In particle physics anything under 4 sigma is disregardet being noise. In the social studies non-reproducibility is a huge issue. This spiel is just a politolect, a show off, to tell other people what sort of politics you ascribe to. To make yourself feel good. Worst thing is that the few people that ascribe to it are the ones, that have the time to get into university politics. People that study relevant things don't have time for that. But still have to do assignments etc. with such regulations in place. Or have to read University Mail with this stuff. Because a hand full of Students can't keep their politics to themselves. What is it? Not even 10%? Gives me Headaches. Not to mention all the people with Dyslexia. And I am one of the least conservative persons I know. This is about "is this doing what they say that this is doing", i. e. making language more inclusive. I am not convinced of that.
those irreproducible studies you mentioned or the publicationship bias some woke-leaning social sciences have are a big problem imo. Not only do they create bogus intellectual shields that prevent any real discussion but they also undermine the credibility of those institutions and give right-wingers a blank check to dismiss any research they don’t like… not cool
"I am one of the least conservative people I know" is such a fun statement. I know this wasn't the intention, but do use this opportunity to consider how much your thoughts and opinions dictate your social circle and vice versa. Especially among students, your opinion is not actually as wide-spread as your close environment might have you believe. We sometimes get lost in what we believe is true for all.
Imagine measuring the impact of inclusive writing with a study. Is the fact that millions of people are talking about it not enough of an impact? If it had no significant impact, we wouldn't even be talking about it right now.
In Spain we have a similar thing when you use a masculine word it will usually end with "o" or "e" and when you use a femenine word it usually end with "a", so in some letters (you know when someone make a letter refering to a big group like a class or something) people use the @ as a way to put both letters For example: Vosotr@s, Profesor@s, Alumn@s, etc.
Governments regulating language use almost never works and nor should it. The language should just evolve naturally, and if people collectively want to use this gender star (or neopronouns etc) they should definitely not be banned from doing that in any context.
But the government makes laws, and the laws need to be interpreted uniformly. Different people should not interpret it differently because they use language differently. Take the example of America. Their Constitution was written in 1787. American English has evolved freely since then, with no government interference. Guess what-most of the lawsuits today are based on the meaning of words and phrases used when the laws were drafted. What did "arms" mean back then? The meaning has evolved since. So when we interpret the Constitution today, which meaning should we use? Consequently, every judge interprets the law differently. The Supreme Court itself interprets the Constitution one way one day, then a few years later, in an exact opposite way. So I'd argue that standardization does have value. And people should use the standardized form to avoid ambiguities-particularly in contracts, reports, and any other formal contexts.
@@nHans The US is quite unique in so religiously following such a small number of such old words. Most countries regularly amend their constitutions. And also there's a clear difference between needing standardisation in how a Government's laws are written (the Brandenburg Equality law mentioned in this video), and trying to regulate speech/writing in wider society such as schools/universities and commerce (closer to the Bavarian/AfD laws/proposals).
The thing is, it is first and foremost a change to orthography - politics aside. And all those bans mostly treat it as that: Orthographic errors that need to be corrected or are treated as an error (in a school exam). So while some of that banning is just conservative-actionism-show-off, it _has_ the foundation that is does just "restrict" the use of a new way grammatical construction that only about 20-30% of the population uses. As soon as enough people use it in every day life, it will become normalized and ok for pupils to use. Compare it to replacing the spelling of "through" in official language with "thru". A teacher will mark that as an error at the moment, but when it is good enough and 80% of people use it, it will become standard. And if it peaks at 30%, then it was probably not worth it...
@@nHans It’s not about what _words_ mean, actually, rather how the ideas of the past need to be interpolated into the current day. In fact, what words meant at a certain point in time can be reconstructed fairly easily if we’re talking about a time where a lot of documents survived. E.g. we know very precisely what Latin words meant. For example, it’s clear what public and private communication mean as terms, but from that it’s not trivial to derive at which size of a chat group posting in it constitutes public communication. Is a Facebook post public communication? Generally yes, but what if it’s only visibile to your 30-something friends?
My job is partially making text gender inclusive for local government. If you to ALL the money we put to this initiative, we would be spending 5k or so annually lol. Not even the price of a good copier
As a German, I feel like you oversimplified it a little bit (or maybe it's just my university), but my papers get handed back to me if I fail to gender correctly. In oral discussions, some teachers will ask you to gender if you use the generic masculine. There is, besides the explicit instances, an implicit pressure to always gender in an academic context and I feel like this is the point of contempt for many: it feels obligatory, otherwise you get branded as a sexist.
Possibly, but I feel like that is more of an outside change done in english like people say latineks rather than latinequis personally I prefer the @ or e inplace of the o/a (you can't really say the @ sign though) [also I'm not a native spanish speaker so everything above is from a small amount of research]
as some other people have said, the x is, among virtually everyone I've spoken to from Lat. Am., is an affront to Spanish itself lol. It's an anglicism, many latin americans (if not most, I'm not really sure) just use the masculine to imply neutrality or opt for the -e instead of -a or -o.
I think that omitting the strongest argument against using this language in official documents not only simplifies the topic but most importantly hurts the cause. I mean, the strongest argument (not that I agree with it, but it's the only reasonable one) is that official documents should use only standard formal language, you should have shown a counterargument for this. Again, to the slow thinkers here, I do not agree with AFD motion, and especially for this reason I think this video should have done a better job explaining the issue...
In Polish we have something similiar to the Gendersternchen but we don't use an asterisk * but a slash / or we put the ending in parentheses (), but also we don't have a problem like with 'someone forgot their coat' because for once, in cases like these we would use a reflexive person-neutral, gender-neutral pronoun 'swój' and second is that the word for someone 'ktoś' is grammatically masculine so it would sound incorrect to use a feminine past tense conjugation, kind of like it would sound wrong to use a masculine conjugation for the word 'osoba' (f.) meaning person. so that sentece would just be 'ktoś zapomniał swojej kurtki'
While it is true, that there is no law forcing you to speak/use gender neutral/equal language if you're against it for what ever reason, you're put into a far right corner in the peoples minds. I also heard and got it confirmed by some students that, even though there is no law for using it, universitys/professors could let you fail your thesis/work for not using gender neutral language. You have to at least state somewhere, that you don't value one gender of another even though you're using the including masculine form for the sake of better readability etc... There were multiple attempts to make it law but surveys always showed that ~66% of the people don't want it to be law and council for deciding such thing always said they won't make it a norm. It's possible to use but not even recommended. So is there a law forcing you to use gender neutral language? No, but there are certain factors or places where you might end up needing to explain yourself, which i think creates the feeling of being forced to use it
We have the exact same situation in French, where a new gender neutral pronoun had to be invented, it's a mix of both gendered pronouns being il + elle = iel. It's mainly used for non-binary poeple however as it isn't yet really used for unknow gendered subjects and the general population is unaware of it. It's been in the dictionnary for 7 years now though. The same applies for nouns but some don't have this issue as they have the same pronounciations for both genders they are referencing.
Well, due to how gendered French is, it's not that easy to use. I wouldn't like it to be just "il" with a new coat of paint, it's part of a whole. Now, I'm not against it. I'm all for more inclusivity ofc. Obviously, that's part of a larger issue with French, particularly, when *any* changes is met with particularly harsh backlash. The language hasn't had any proper reform since forever, even in cases that are pretty cut and dry. (l'Académie Française is a scam, but it still has some authority, sadly)
For people who wonder why we would care how other people speak, this is my summary: While 80-90% do not like this gendered language, the majority of the establishment (government, media, Universities, and so on) use this INCORRECT language for political reasons. They try to change the language from the top down against the will of the people instead of letting it evolve organically. Also, forcing universities to use the official and correct German language instead of using objectively incorrect forms for political reasons is not really comparable to infringing on their free speech. Proper use of one's own language is to be expected by schools and universities. Also, the language is way less precise due to this change. Usually, using the female plural form means that everyone in the group is a female and using the male form means that at least one of them is a man. Now, if someone uses the female plural form, i get confused whether it is really all women, or whether i just missed the break signifying gendered language. Example: Lehrerinnen (a group of female teachers) vs Lehrer*innen (a group of teachers not exclusively male or female but rather mixed).
@@everettw.9610 well we have the masculine plural form which refers to men or mixed groups. While you could stop using the female form, it exists, so why not use it to refer to female groups?
@@everettw.9610 you could say that about basically everything. Many languages get along just fine without verb conjugations. Why have those? Many languages get along just fine without complicated case systems, why have those? Et cetera...
while i dont like how they look (sounding similarily clunky to "he or she" to me) im not gonna get on someones ass over writing with them. but personally as someone born and raised in germany, ive always percieved the masculine version as very neutral, and i think its fine to adopt it as a neutral term for these words. like even if words may be rooted in things like sexism, it doesnt mean their meaning cant change and be reclaimed. i find it a little silly to make specifically "girlified" versions of words anyways, and id be very much comfortable with being referred to with the neutral 'masculine' terms if someone was talking about me. i think it sounds nice and simple, and shouldnt have to necessarily mean MAN ONLY similar to how the word "gay" is used mostly to refer to gay men, but can be used for women or anyone else as well as a blanket term i think another reason i dont really like them is because they kind of reinforce a gender binary of "man or woman" personally i just like simple gender neutral terms that encompass all and anyone ^^
00:00 I once heard someone suggest, why not make everything "small"? Instead of "der Stuhl" (the chair), you use "das Stühlchen" (the chair, but small). It's both gender neutral *and* funny and cute! This doesn't really work for people, though, only nouns.
Maybe people just don’t want the older language that was already considered neutral language to become politicized? It’s heavily implied in your video that any resistance to the usage of the new form of gender neutral grammar is far right, and anti-woman. The generic masculine served its purpose and was good enough, and this new required grammar really does not make any tangible difference in woman’s rights, except for your extreme hypothetical case of nazis coming back in power, which I doubt a few words of legislation will stop them if it gets to that point… I think a good compromise would instead be a disclaimer at the front of job postings or legislation, or whatever piece of writing, stating that this is written with the gender neutral generic masculine, and is intended to be applicable to men and women. There’s also the issue of actually this stuff making the language much more gendered with the adoption of this clunky grammar. Now people will think that you absolutely will mean a man when using masculine word endings when using the generic masculine was intended if this kind of new language becomes adopted widely. What used to be considered the neutral generic masculine will then stop existing in favour of this clunky replacement, and anyone that doesn’t adopt the new grammar will be seen as some kind of bigot 🤷🏻♂️
A study has show kids already used to do that, when asked to imagine an Arzt (doctor), they almost all went with a man, when asked to imagine an Ärzt:in the responses were mixed.
@@stewagnerdoes change in wording really make a difference? I speak English as my first language and the word doctor makes me also think of a man even though I have never been exposed to gender language… maybe it’s more a reflection of stereotypes and the actually doctor demographic historically being mostly male? The demographics of German doctors has also basically evened out to 50/50 male-female ratio over the past decade, with more young female doctors replacing retiring older male doctors, so I doubt adoption of this new form of gender neutral new language is going to change anything. Almost all the gender equality that’s been achieved in Germany was done under gender language. And people seem for forget that sexism can still easily exist even without a gendered language, see Chinese, Japanese, and Turkish for example.
@@SupaSupaKewl Why did it make a difference then? Ofc there are general stereotypes, but the language has an effect too, even in cases where women are equally employed for decades, like teachers. It will not solve sexism, but remove an inequality in language , that is all language can do. Idk what ur expectations are. But it makes you aware it could be a woman or a man.
By the way, Portuguese has the same language thing. For "the", we have "o" and "a" for singular, masculine and feminine, respectively, and "os" and "as" for plural, masculine and feminine, respectively. So for the phrase "The football player", we say "O jogador de futebol" or "*A* jogador*a* de futebol". "A person" is "um*a* pessoa". And we also have the "gender star" but we write it as: "O/A jogador/a" or "O(A) jogador(a)" It's kind of cool that Portuguese and German are connected like that.
0:30 Uh, no. That article is inflected for the gender of the coat, not the person that owns it. It really means “someone forgot his or her coat”. Also, the “gender neutral” conventions are nonsense and the male form should continue to be used, and if people *absolutely must* include females, then they should just use both forms.
the article inflects for both the gender of the coat and the person that owns it. "sein" refers to a masculine owner, and "ihr" refers to a feminine owner. the endings of sein and ihr do inflect for the object - in this case feminine, so sein*e* and ihr*e*. yes german is confusing :) as for your second point, simply calling something "nonsense" and prescribing would should be done with no basis or reasoning is not a way you win an argument!
@@yanwato9050 1. Thanks for the correction. Completely forgot about that part. My bad. 2. I’m not trying to “win an argument” here. I’m just stating some viewpoints. The basis and reasoning are that the current system of having the male form represent both males and females is fine now and has always been fine. There is no need to change it. With these things, it’s not about “logic” or “reason”; it’s about having more people on your side than on the opponent’s such that you can force them into submission, if necessary.
For job names, and words that refer to humans generally, I kind of agree. However, grammatical gender is not the same as and not necessarily linked to social or biological gender in humans. The words used are the same by coincidence. The german language requires grammatical gender, that is just how it works. But no one has an issue with gendered nouns as a whole, anyway. This debate is only about words that refer to humans.
@@anzaia2164 I do have an issue with gendered nouns. It's needlessly complicated, doesn't provide any information whatsoever, and only serves to make people fight over the right article for "Nutella".
@@lonestarr1490 It does serve function. The most obvious one being that it helps differentiate between multiple referents. It's pronouns, it's how language works. It's just more useful to have multiple. German has such complicated sentence structure, it needs multiple grammatical genders to keep track of everything. Trying to abolish this central feature of the language is just an asinine idea.
@@anzaia2164 furthermore, redundancy in language can help with comprehension. Suppose you didn't fully hear the noun I say, but hear the gendered article associated with it. It helps narrow down what I said, and you may "hear" me without hearing my full sentence
_"Gender _*_Correct_*_ Language"_ As if anything that doesn't comply with modern, progressive sensitivities is inherently _wrong..._ God, I'm just so tired of all this.
In saxony using the gendersternchen is actually already banned in schools. If you use it on an exam it will be marked as a mistake. Their reasoning was that they don't want "their language to be forbidden", so instead of just letting people decide on their own they just banned it. You can however use "Lehrer und Lehrerinnen" or a gender neutral form (if possible) such as "Lehrkraft" or "Lehrende".
Incorrect spelling gets marked - that’s not exactly news. And _Lehrende,_ while orthographically correct, has a different meaning than _Lehrer._ When I was in school, the quality of handwriting was part of the grade, too.
@@Bolpat jooo bro didn't mean to offend you I just think it's a stupid rule since it's not actually a wrong way of writing. It's just seen as wrong because there isn't an official option how to write it yet. Why should it be a mistake to try being integrating for every gender? Just because your a conservative saying "Ja, aber Damals!", doesn't mean it's better to keep everything the same. I think finding ways for gender equal language is important and banning it is just stupid
This struggle is very common for all latin languages, it's very hard to get people to even understand what being non-binary means when literally every single word (other than verbs, adverbs and prepositions) is usually gendered or is altered by gender it refers to
We've got the exact same problem in French. The use of neopronoun "iel" and "point médian" (ex: "français·e") are used in progressive and queer communities, but it's aggressively fought back by the conservatives. Using it in more mainstream spaces will generally end up with harassement or insults.
Funny update, teachers are no longer allowed to say something like Lehrer-innen while they are talking, but are required to use the generic masculine (at least in Bavaria). This is something they can get sued for called a NORMABWEICHUNG.
I think that you should be able to write and talk informally however you want, while in formal speech and (official) writing only "popular" ways of talking and writing should be allowed like in the case of the Gendersternchen: if it's kind of popular, then why not allow it? I mean it's still probably going to be used in the future. Obviously you can't force any type of speech or writing, at the end of the day languages are always evolving and you can't stop that. I don't really like the Gendersternchen and that's ok if you want to use it, it's also ok, let the people speak and write however they want man. Also, in Italian you can do a very similar thing with most nouns like "boy/girl" you use ragazzo/a, because -o is for masculine and -a for feminine as simple as that. There are some words which add a little bit more to the stem like "teacher" professore/ssa, because in the feminine it is professoressa. A little harder for the articles but eh manageable: il/la (or lo/a depends on the following word) and i/le (or gli/le) in the plural.
I can understand why many Germans find the gender star (or other ways of gendering) unnecessary, I find it annoying to read too. But it's also valid that people want to feel represented within their language. Personally, I think a good solution would be to abandon gendering completely and simply introduce a new way to phrase language in a gender-neutral way. Languages have been changing for centuries and will continue to do so. And I believe that to be a good thing. It's silly to me that we want to make progress in our technology and everything, yet refuse to do the same with topics like language, gender expression, or social constructs. We're in the "modern era", yet a lot of people seem to want to stick to old rules and traditions. But how can we make progress like that? While I as a German don't gender personally, because I find it tedious, I don't mind if others do. I think we should all just be open-minded and kind to each other. Let people do what they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. Thanks for coming to my ted talk :>
nice to see someone with similar ideas, the best way to have a gender neutral language is imo to ditch the -in ending entirely from the language and use just the generic form, which by then wouldn't be masculine anymore. have it be a "weiblicher Lehrer" instead of "Lehrerin". problem solved.
This also happens in so many other indo-european language. Balkan languages even take it one step further where the 3rd person plural even has gendered forms which in german, are just „sie“. For example Bosnian, Croatian & Serbian use „Oni, One, Ona“ (m, f, n) which all correspond to „they“ „sie“. Also Greek with αυτοί, αυτές, αυτά (m, f, n). In all these languages there is a „generic male“ of some sorts that is used most frequently. In all Slavic languages even tenses can be gendered. The past tense for example knows 3 genders (m, f, n and also plural). Like Russian - шёл, шла, шло, шли. Also again in Bosnian išao sam, išla sam… and so on and so forth.
In the German language you cannot leave out: 1. Time, 2. number and 3. gender. In Vietnamese and probably all isolating languages you can. They even have a word "nó" meaning he / she / it (when the context is clear, have a word "người" meaning "human" used in many composition and a word "thợ" meaning "craftsperson" used in composition for any manual work. So, do you want to name anything, number ("one or more"), time ("was, is or will be") and gender (yeah!) to clarify the meaning?
I'm Hungarian and moved to Austria and started learning German here, so I've used both gendered and non-gendered speech in day-to-day life and I have to say, the "confusing" argument is kind of true and I've even brought it up in a paper I turned in in eleventh grade. But not gendered speech in it self is confusing, but the mixed usage. My brain's default is "ő", the only third person singular nominative in Hungarian, so when I see an "er" I automatically assume, that it's generic. The problem arises when I see a Gendersternchen in the same text and suddenly don't know if the "er" was gendered or generic.
@@thenarkknight278Deswegen had ich’s nicht geschrieben. Nur dass man sich endlich für den einen entscheiden sollte. Und dass es staatlich reguliert wird ist ein positives Zeichen.
I have a Turkish friend and an Italian father. Both of them mix up gender - and Italian is even a language that has gendered nouns, so the concept isn’t foreign to my father. Turkish famously has no grammatical gender, and is arguably the pinnacle of equal rights for women (Joke). Me learning Italian, I mix up genders, too. The most generic pronoun in German is _es_ in phrases like _Es regnet_ (It rains). What exactly rains? But aside from that, most pronouns are masculine or neuter, such as _jeder/jemand/…_ (masculine) oder _etwas_ (neuter). Otherwise, a pronoun usually depends on a noun that came before, and then it plays along with that noun’s gender. There’s an exception, though, and that is _Mädchen_ which I’ve heard some people refer back to by _sie,_ which is incorrect in my estimation (I bet most German teachers would mark it incorrect in an essay), but it’s very common to do.
@@lonestarr1490 "ein:e gute:r Spieler:in" is a wreck. Yes it is more clean and tidy because of the colon but linguisticly it is a mess. At least use "ein guter Spieler oder eine gute Spielerin" instead. While also a mouthful, it is at least clear German.
I really appreciate your channel but I can't help but feel you're arguing from bad faith in this video - You argue that the AfD doesn't care about economics and therefore their argument about economics is disingenuous. Just because you disagree with the AfD's policies doesn't mean their disingenuous, this is just an ad hominem - To paint this whole argument as a far-rightwing tool to gain support isn't true either. This would've been an issue even without AfD. I know many left-wing people who get incredibly annoyed at gender sternchen - The CSU isn't far-right. They're the sister party of the CDU and have been in many governing coalitions, but I have a feeling you already knew this - In cases where there is no objective truth it's completely fine to argue that the will of the majority should be respected. You call this populism, most people would call this democracy - It does affect people when these norms are being implemented at universities and schools. I think that's the entire point - You're right that you can't say that gendern is "objectively" more complicated, but I do think most people share this view. I certainly do, as an immigrant in Germany struggling to learn the language - I really don't know where you get the idea from that gendering in laws could potentially slow down future nazism. This is just not how the world works
"Why does the masculine get favored?" This can be observed in sociology with the concept of the "disembodied worker." It demonstrates the subconcious, naturalized notion that the ideal, most capable, more dependable worker is male. They're already assumed to be male and treated as such, and the realization that a woman wants that perhaps male-dominated job position is marked (marked, meaning, recognized as socially deviant). We just talked about binary and gendered speech in linguistics today and this topic is very relevant to the lecture.
Idk with this was common in documents in the before times (and by that I mean before gender awareness), but in Italy documents have been using / as like il/la sottoscritto/a where you read both when you find them, and I feel like it's a lot more elegant than the Sceva/schwa or asterisk
I don't know how fluent you are in German, but to anyone understanding spoken German well I'd like to recommend Alicia Joe. She made a video about that topic a few years ago and there is a newer video (uploaded 3 weeks ago) on her second channel "Genug Internet für heute" where she comments on a talk about 'Gendern' she contributed in and explains a lot of stuff about this topic. I personally like her arguments. I'm just too lazy to put all these arguments in here, hope it's okay to recommend her videos. Also yours are very interesting. I was very excited when I saw that you uploaded a new video.
French has the same generic masculine. My take is that French doesn't have masculine and feminine, but not necessarily feminine and necessarily feminine, meaning that it isn't a neutral that's missing, but a necessarily masculine. Also, the neutral should be shorter than the other grammatical genders.
Hi! The situation is very similar here in Italy: the way words are gendered is similar and that brought to the emergence of a few new ways to make the word ungendered, and that caused a strong response from the right. But the left ist exactly fighting to defend these new forms...
Perhaps this is my english bias showing, but why can't gendered languages who want gender neutrality in their languages, just change the name of their genders? Instead of masculine and feminine, its Set 1 and Set 2, or something similar to that. Nouns can be either 1 or the other, but a person can choose the one they want, or some set of rules thats unrelated to gender. Something like the first letter of your last name determines which set you use. And now, it wouldn't matter if "set 1" covers "set 2" because the set would no longer refer a gender, but a linguistic concept.
That would certainly be a good step towards getting your average layperson to stop associating grammatical gender with sociobiological gender so closely, I'd definitely be for it. After all, 'gender' originally just meant 'kind/type' and was first used in English to refer to grammatical gender. It was only later that it began to take on biological and later sociological connotations. So calling them 'kind 1', 'kind 2', and so on would be a great change. Most African languages use 'noun class' to refer to their gender system (which can number in the double digits!), which some linguists have adopted for gender in general. However, I don't think it would fix things entirely, as people would still have the old associations of masculine and feminine in their heads. Also, there would still be some obviously gendered words which would still fall into separate classes, like names as you mentioned. Names in (European) languages that decline them according to gender generally associate them exclusively with masculine or feminine because each name is inherently gendered (i.e. you wouldn't find a girls' name in the masculine gender), so that would still create a strong association between gender and noun class for most people.
For the gendered names. I feel like there's a solution to that problem, if there's two classes, just make some rule up that fits the name into each. For example, a name would be in class 1 if it starts with the first half the alphabet, and in class 2 if it starts in the second half. Or set 1 if it has an even number of letters, set 2 if odd. That is, of course, if we don't want to add a new class specifically for names and people.
@@casey653 I mean that's all well and good, but you can't just ‘make up new rules’ when it comes to natural languages. Forcing artificial change, especially on such a large scale as this, is practically impossible. Language shift just doesn't happen like that. Not to mention basing your new system on the written spelling rather than the actual spoken language is not going to help matters. Writing isn't language and native speakers rarely if ever pay much heed to it when it comes to actually speaking it (apart from the odd spelling pronunciation that might arise). Native speakers are not necessarily going to instinctively know exactly how many letters there are in the written representation of a word, for example.
i think this would be even harder than just adding a neutral gender to languages that don't already have one. people LOVE categorizing things into masculine and feminine, so in portuguese and spanish for example it would be very hard not think for nouns/adjectives words ending in -a that they don't have a feminine connotation, and same with -o and masculine. i like the proposal, but i just think this is even harder to do than just slowly introducing gender neutral language. i mean how would you even go about making people assimilate this over time?
That sounds nice in theory, but I highly doubt it would work in practice. I'd assume it would be like trying to convince english speakers to assign pronouns randomly instead of using "he" for men and "she" for women. While the end goal of gender neutrality is admirable, there's no way more than a small fraction of speakers of a gendered language are going to agree to such a large change, much less actually impliment it.
In Dutch we also have loan words like directeur/directrice, acteur/actrice, but I had a female directeur (she did not want to be called directrice), so in a way, it's saying, screw having m/f forms and just use m as the use-for-all form. Would be easiest for German speakers also to implement, no star, no 2 words, always 1 form. Simplifying and inclusifying the language. Win win?
This whole video would be totally irrelevant if there's a clause that says the use of masculine forms include all citizens regardless of sex or gender.
Well you think that some feminist would be fine with that? There is no need for a clause, anyway^^ Every German knows that because every German knows that women are human beings even if the German word fo human is grammatical male...
The same exact phenomenon is going on in Italy, with some people using * or ə to make a neutral word, although for us it's way easier since the gender often changes by a single letter at the end lol
