4 ms·

it's a never-ending rabbithole. 'Guardian' is probably more inclusive than 'parent', even... What I really want to know is how whoever is trying to force it de

by canbus 5y ago

it's a never-ending rabbithole. 'Guardian' is probably more inclusive than 'parent', even... What I really want to know is how whoever is trying to force it deals with languages with grammatical genders.

grishka 5y ago
My native language is Russian. There are three grammatical genders, but only two of them are used for sentient beings, to talk about someone in the neutral gender is derogatory af (not that it stops people — I've seen one person call themselves "оно"). Other than this extremely rare occasion, everyone is 100% okay with using gendered words because those are the only ones we have. Hell, we don't even have the word "sibling", it's either a brother or a sister. But we do have another similar phenomenon going on. Feminitives. It's when some people assign the female gender to words that don't have a female form, or that do have one but it's not cringy enough. So автор becomes авторка, врач becomes врачка (instead of врачиха), учитель becomes учителька (instead of учительница), and so on.
- klibertp 5y ago
  That "sibling" thing is quite interesting actually. In Polish, we have "brat" and "siostra" for brother and sister, and we have "rodzeństwo" for siblings (plural), but there is no singular form in the language. Is it similar in Russian? On the other hand, "autor" and "autorka" are normal forms; same for "lekarz" and "lekarka", "nauczyciel" and "nauczycielka". These seem to be equivalent to the shorter forms you list. I'm not sure how to translate your longer forms, "nauczycielniczka"? There's no such word. Interesting to see that different languages can have perfectly opposite grammar rules, even if the words are similar and the grammar also shares some similarities in other areas :)
  - grishka 5y ago
    > Is it similar in Russian? Nope, no equivalent to "sibling" at all, not even plural. If you want to say "siblings", you say "братья и сёстры". edit: "родня" might be kinda like "rodzeństwo", but it's not just siblings, it's relatives in general. > I'm not sure how to translate your longer forms, "nauczycielniczka"? There's no such word. "Учительница" (or short slang form "училка") is the correct feminine form found in dictionaries. "Учителька" is the cringy one coined by feminists. They both mean "female teacher", but apparently the correct one is somehow worse or not modern enough? I don't know.
- jhgb 5y ago
  > There are three grammatical genders, but only two of them are used for sentient beings, to talk about someone in the neutral gender is derogatory af What about дитя? Isn't that a neuter in Russian? I know the equivalent "dítě" is a neuter in Czech. (For obvious reasons this is why the neuter is not being used in Czech either for referring to adult people -- it's completely infantilizing.)
  - grishka 5y ago
    It's kinda archaic. All words normally used for small kids (ребёнок, младенец) are masculine.
gurkendoktor 5y ago
German unfortunately has no equivalent of singular they. The concept is a non-starter because "they" and "she" are both "sie". The new PC spelling is to always write he*she or he:she instead of he/she to make room for nonbinary people, which doesn't make any sense to me. We still don't have a pronoun to refer to nonbinary people, we can only include them if we're not sure of someone's gender. Yay? What I found interesting about this particular bot is that it wants to replace "actress" by "actor". (Yes please!! You don't know how good you have it in English, where most occupations are gender-neutral.) In contrast, the current progressive push in German is to replace generic/masculine Schauspieler (actor) with der*die Schauspieler*in (think "actr*ess"; male, female, and everything in between, a bit like latinx). Maybe it makes sense that German has a tendency to become ever more complicated like C++, while English becomes simpler? But it shows how fad-driven this whole thing is: Either gendered nouns are good or bad, why would it depend on the language?
- jhgb 5y ago
  > We still don't have a pronoun to refer to nonbinary people How could you have one? You have inflected nouns and adjectives -- you'd have to come up with new endings for those if you could use neither masculine nor feminine ones (not the neuter ones in case that this were offensive in German). And teach everyone to use them. English is in this weird place where pretty much the only morphological remnant of gender is in the third person singular personal pronouns. Even if someone felt that to be a problem in general (not everyone obviously does), in other languages, this is either a non-existent issue (say, in Finnish), or an outright unsolvable issue (say, in Slavic languages). So basically English speakers get the benefit of even being able to virtue signal just with tiny language changes that cost you very little. Pretty much nobody else has this option to begin with - either lacking opportunity (like in Finnish) or the ability (like in Slavic languages).
  - gurkendoktor 5y ago
    > You have inflected nouns and adjectives -- you'd have to come up with new endings for those Two proposals that I've seen replace all endings with either -x or -ens. German source - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lann_Hornscheidt#Gendertheorie_und_geschlechtsneutrale_Sprache https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lann_Hornscheidt#Gendertheorie... Now one might think that these are outlandish ideas that will never fly, but... > And teach everyone to use them. ...that's easy, because languages changes are implemented top-down. Considering how unpopular the neutral forms using : and * are in polls, it is absolutely fascinating to see them spread so quickly from academia, to tech (macOS, Spotify), to local governments, to normie coworkers. Nonbinary people wouldn't have to do the teaching themselves. Edit: > ...not the neuter ones in case that this were offensive in German... My first intuition was that using the neutral gender would indeed be offensive. But children (das Kind) and girls (das Mädchen) are neutral - and it doesn't feel rude to refer to them as "it"? I think it could work.
slothtrop 5y ago
They mostly don't, this is an anglosphere obsession. Which is why you'll hear of a device like "latinx" from anglos, but literally nothing else that actually pertains to the way Spanish people speak.

by canbus 5y ago

grishka 5y ago

My native language is Russian. There are three grammatical genders, but only two of them are used for sentient beings, to talk about someone in the neutral gender is derogatory af (not that it stops people — I've seen one person call themselves "оно"). Other than this extremely rare occasion, everyone is 100% okay with using gendered words because those are the only ones we have. Hell, we don't even have the word "sibling", it's either a brother or a sister. But we do have another similar phenomenon going on. Feminitives. It's when some people assign the female gender to words that don't have a female form, or that do have one but it's not cringy enough. So автор becomes авторка, врач becomes врачка (instead of врачиха), учитель becomes учителька (instead of учительница), and so on.

klibertp 5y ago
That "sibling" thing is quite interesting actually. In Polish, we have "brat" and "siostra" for brother and sister, and we have "rodzeństwo" for siblings (plural), but there is no singular form in the language. Is it similar in Russian? On the other hand, "autor" and "autorka" are normal forms; same for "lekarz" and "lekarka", "nauczyciel" and "nauczycielka". These seem to be equivalent to the shorter forms you list. I'm not sure how to translate your longer forms, "nauczycielniczka"? There's no such word. Interesting to see that different languages can have perfectly opposite grammar rules, even if the words are similar and the grammar also shares some similarities in other areas :)
- grishka 5y ago
  > Is it similar in Russian? Nope, no equivalent to "sibling" at all, not even plural. If you want to say "siblings", you say "братья и сёстры". edit: "родня" might be kinda like "rodzeństwo", but it's not just siblings, it's relatives in general. > I'm not sure how to translate your longer forms, "nauczycielniczka"? There's no such word. "Учительница" (or short slang form "училка") is the correct feminine form found in dictionaries. "Учителька" is the cringy one coined by feminists. They both mean "female teacher", but apparently the correct one is somehow worse or not modern enough? I don't know.
jhgb 5y ago
> There are three grammatical genders, but only two of them are used for sentient beings, to talk about someone in the neutral gender is derogatory af What about дитя? Isn't that a neuter in Russian? I know the equivalent "dítě" is a neuter in Czech. (For obvious reasons this is why the neuter is not being used in Czech either for referring to adult people -- it's completely infantilizing.)
- grishka 5y ago
  It's kinda archaic. All words normally used for small kids (ребёнок, младенец) are masculine.

gurkendoktor 5y ago

German unfortunately has no equivalent of singular they. The concept is a non-starter because "they" and "she" are both "sie". The new PC spelling is to always write he*she or he:she instead of he/she to make room for nonbinary people, which doesn't make any sense to me. We still don't have a pronoun to refer to nonbinary people, we can only include them if we're not sure of someone's gender. Yay? What I found interesting about this particular bot is that it wants to replace "actress" by "actor". (Yes please!! You don't know how good you have it in English, where most occupations are gender-neutral.) In contrast, the current progressive push in German is to replace generic/masculine Schauspieler (actor) with der*die Schauspieler*in (think "actr*ess"; male, female, and everything in between, a bit like latinx). Maybe it makes sense that German has a tendency to become ever more complicated like C++, while English becomes simpler? But it shows how fad-driven this whole thing is: Either gendered nouns are good or bad, why would it depend on the language?

jhgb 5y ago
> We still don't have a pronoun to refer to nonbinary people How could you have one? You have inflected nouns and adjectives -- you'd have to come up with new endings for those if you could use neither masculine nor feminine ones (not the neuter ones in case that this were offensive in German). And teach everyone to use them. English is in this weird place where pretty much the only morphological remnant of gender is in the third person singular personal pronouns. Even if someone felt that to be a problem in general (not everyone obviously does), in other languages, this is either a non-existent issue (say, in Finnish), or an outright unsolvable issue (say, in Slavic languages). So basically English speakers get the benefit of even being able to virtue signal just with tiny language changes that cost you very little. Pretty much nobody else has this option to begin with - either lacking opportunity (like in Finnish) or the ability (like in Slavic languages).
- gurkendoktor 5y ago
  > You have inflected nouns and adjectives -- you'd have to come up with new endings for those Two proposals that I've seen replace all endings with either -x or -ens. German source - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lann_Hornscheidt#Gendertheorie_und_geschlechtsneutrale_Sprache https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lann_Hornscheidt#Gendertheorie... Now one might think that these are outlandish ideas that will never fly, but... > And teach everyone to use them. ...that's easy, because languages changes are implemented top-down. Considering how unpopular the neutral forms using : and * are in polls, it is absolutely fascinating to see them spread so quickly from academia, to tech (macOS, Spotify), to local governments, to normie coworkers. Nonbinary people wouldn't have to do the teaching themselves. Edit: > ...not the neuter ones in case that this were offensive in German... My first intuition was that using the neutral gender would indeed be offensive. But children (das Kind) and girls (das Mädchen) are neutral - and it doesn't feel rude to refer to them as "it"? I think it could work.

slothtrop 5y ago

They mostly don't, this is an anglosphere obsession. Which is why you'll hear of a device like "latinx" from anglos, but literally nothing else that actually pertains to the way Spanish people speak.