This Asterisk Is Shaping German Politics

[@kklein]

Learn any language with professional tutors and native speakers on LiveXP & enjoy these exclusive discounts: Your first $0,99 trial lesson Promocode: KKLEIN Or follow the link:livexp.biz/KKLEIN 30% off monthly or quarterly subscription: Promocode: KKLEIN30 Or follow the link: livexp.biz/KKLEIN30

[@thepenguinofspace9291]

wait how have you put this comment 5 hours before the release of the video ????

[@thepenguinofspace9291]

scheduling of the video can you add the comment before the release due to you scheduling the video and typing the comment then ????

[@gabor6259]

If you ask me, an apostrophe is better than either the asterisk, the slash or the colon.

[@alecity4877]

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.

[@nk-dc5gc]

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. :)

[@lyfja64]

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(!).

[@shannonmikko9865]

@@bloom1934you have a woman as your pfp

[@scappley1735]

​@@bloom1934 womp womp

[@shrouddreamer]

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.

[@applesushi]

@@shrouddreamer I mean they do have the word "hoden" (German for testicles) right their in their name...

[@HeliouHyios]

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

[@bananenmusli2769]

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"

[@ultimatejager4058]

No one today is so stupid to seriously claim a word in a law using neutral masculine only refers to men

[@H.J.Fleischmann]

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.

[@gooseh4638]

Same in the United States, “all men are created equal” changed interpretation a lot

[@TheSuperRatt]

​@@H.J.Fleischmann Cope.

[@bananenmusli2769]

@@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.

[@lol-xs9wz]

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.

[@paulhein9815]

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

[@GameTornado01]

​​@@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.

[@lonestarr1490]

​@@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.

[@lol-xs9wz]

@@hawkanonymous2610 Germans say "Ich studiere" all the time even though they aren't currently studying. I don't think your argument holds.

[@HeliouHyios]

@@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^^

[@eddiemcguire1049]

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."

[@callyral]

I pronounce that as "suh'hee" in my head

[@dorukaltinok5530]

Me when voiceless aspirated postalveolar fricative

[@anoukk_]

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.

[@il-dottore]

@@anoukk_ "He-or-she told his-or-her friend about his-or-her pet dog" vs "they told their friend about their pet dog"

[@somewhatfunnyguyy]

@reiianytAlso, singular you came after plural you and some people fought against it at first continuing to use thou. Arguably, singular you is more confusing and has less of a reason to exist than singular they and people who don’t like singular they should definitely not like singular you.

[@kamikitazawa]

Here in USA, it's easy to think that Europe is somehow immune to the culture wars that are raging over here. Seeing videos like this reminds me that that is very much not the case.

[@kakahass8845]

@truegemueseSame thing here in Brazil. Bolsonaro literally copied Trump almost exactly we even had our own version of January 6th and voter supression.

[@saoirsedeltufo7436]

It's a big thing in the UK too, particularly with respect to trans people

[@alexcrazy1492]

@truegemuese it’s so much worse. They managed to ban these things in a couple of states they do not stop renting on about immigration and how any form of social acceptance is like they literally use language that was against the Nazis. They quoted Churchill on trans. I’m not making this up. Please help.

[@feralcatgirl]

​@saoirsedeltufo7436 that's more other countries' transphobes copying from britain's though

[@Samuel-p17]

You guys really had an impact on our CDU/CSU and other conservatives, they always talk about wokeness, I'm sometimes don't even sure, wether they know the meaning of the term or not.

[@cormacpalmer5967]

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

[@bertdog2119]

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.

[@panzrok8701]

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]

​@@bertdog2119 "men" as used in those documents means mankind. as in human. but it can be twisted into meaning only men, which is what was done.

[@bertdog2119]

@@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.

[@Persun_McPersonson]

@@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.

[@Tudsamfa]

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".

[@bertdog2119]

“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]

Here the thing for a long time English also used a generic he as some people got pissy at singular they because it wasn't "grammatically correct"

[@andreasrumpf9012]

@@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.

[@extra7646]

@@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!

[@andreasrumpf9012]

@@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.

[@scribblecloud]

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

[@famijoku7631]

(or a hangover)

[@LarthV]

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...

[@Bolpat]

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.

[@Bolpat]

@@LarthV _Geschwister,_ while derived from _Schwester_ approx. 1000 years ago, is totally gender-neutral today.

[@MCArt25]

@@Bolpat lol who actually says "Kätzin" what nonsense

[@starsky43]

In russian we use brackets for the same: Он ходил в парк🧍🏻‍♂️ (he was going to a park) Она ходила в парк🧍🏻‍♀️ (she was going to a park) Он(а) ходил(а) в парк🧍🏻(she or he was going to a park)

[@danhorus]

Same in Portuguese, and that's been a very common way of using gender neutral in writing for quite a long time. It's a bit awkward when spoken, though, so some people are now starting to use another vowel to differentiate between gendered (o/a) and ungendered (e) nouns.

[@mattynek2]

We do that in Czech too. We may also use slashes, like udělal/a or udělal/udělala

[@SimgeTopuz-w9q]

"we"... how are these we? a bunch of stupid weirdos

[@rainbs2nd]

​@@danhorusUsing "(a)" in Portuguese isn't exactly genderless though. It's a great way of being generic and it works very well for that, but it only works as a generic way of referring to men or women, it fails on representing non-binary people. Same in Russian. In order to fix that, it'll take a long time, cuz using "a third" pronoun for addressing non-binary people is still very controversial for some reason.

[@markojojic6223]

Does 3rd person epicene exist in Russian?

[@sebbrennan3574]

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 :)

[@tomquirk9411]

Good luck with your exam!

[@emdivine]

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 ;)

[@highqualityorangejuice420]

How was the exam?

[@MisterPyOne]

how did it go?

[@sebbrennan3574]

@@emdivine thanks, the exam went well! I spoke about the topic and used facts from the video!

[@glo_bin]

Think of all those gender stars you have to print whenever you use gender-correct language. Ink doesn't grow on trees!

[@candiman4243]

But paper does!

[@OfflineLukas]

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

[@Bunny_Bill]

* I hastily cover my ink tree* haha....yeah...

[@nordsued346]

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)

[@Andreas-pj6np]

Yeah right, it definetly takes more ink to print Politiker*innen instead of Politiker und Politikerinnen.

[@akaSmth]

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.

[@Masterchief_Tito]

Banning it is the only way of avoiding that teachers force it onto the students.

[@everettw.9610]

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!

[@ventreal4292]

@@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.

[@everettw.9610]

@@ventreal4292 Banning all but one way of teaching a language is the textbook definition of forcing that view onto people lol

[@scribblecloud]

@@Masterchief_Tito how are they forcing it onto anyone..? are teachers forcing students to use the gender star?

[@3.saar.a]

7:11 People who think (some policy) is bad: 1. They think its motivation is misplaced to begin with. 2. They don't think it has a significant advantage over the status quo. 3. They think it's not aggressive enough as a solution to the current situation.

[@raeplaysval]

some* people who think (some policy) is bad:

[@A-A_P]

​@@raeplaysval am I missing something here?

[@kutkuknight]

Right wing conservative politics are objectively worse than left wing ones Only insane people can deny it

[@MCArt25]

4. They think it's pushed by a Soros-backed gay communist globalist Muslim conspiracy.

[@3.saar.a]

just wanted to point out that "xy% of people think something is bad" really is a vague thing, and doesn't say as much as it would appear - with an inferred context, which is the usual setting.

[@77dreimaldie0]

There's been a court case in Germany about the „Gleichstellungsbeauftragte,“ a legally mandated position. According to literal law, this position may be held by a woman or a man and they are elected to help women and men. Because both genders were explicitly named when the law was written, before nonbinary identities were officially recognized mind you, the judge ruled that nonbinary people were explicitly excluded and cannot hold the office or benefit from it. This should by extension support your warning, that generic masculine laws could be read as definite masculine

[@rgbx6923]

It is actually the other way arround, because without the specification "man or woman" nobody would be excluded.

[@aggressive_pizza1279]

It might sound controversial but I never got why there's no movement which tries to instead separate grammatical gender from the social understanding of gender. For example, if we wanted to make them sound distinct, we could call "masculine nouns" and "feminine nouns" "nouns of class I"/ "dictionary form nouns" and "nouns of class II" or something along those lines. This way, people would focus on the phonetic aspect of grammar instead of the innate gender of things. An example of this would be how in Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese, the "feminine" class of nouns ends in a clearly audible vowel whereas the "masculine" ones end in a consonant or specific set of vowels. Likewise, if we end up separating these two concepts, the next question would be "why would we need a second way of saying teacher, player, singer etc?", to which I'd say that we could just drop the "feminine" version and instead focus on the "dictionary form" as the default (kind of like in English nowadays if we exclude words like "actress") This way, we could just say "Lehrer" and not have any implicit bias towards men because people simply wouldn't associate it with the male gender to begin with. Thank you for listening to my TED Talk

[@ultimatejager4058]

In italian almost every word ends with a vowel. Generally O for masculine and A for feminine (I and E respectively for the plural forms)

[@TheBlindingStorm]

Without getting too much into 'why', simply put, it's because the two are *already* different. What you call the social understanding has its own word already, namely, sex. Gender was specifically created as a word to describe grammatical phenomena in the Middle Ages, but that ceased to be the case in the latter half of the 20th Century for...reasons. Again, I won't get into the why. But thank you for coming to *my* TED Talk. 🙃

[@nuklearboysymbiote]

If i had to guess, i'd say that queer people whose first languages are the ones you mentioned are already implicitly part of this hypothetical movement you speak of.

[@Alexis-lt3zy]

​@@TheBlindingStormI would argue that there are really 3 categories: sex, gender, and grammatical gender. Sex is an organism's reproductive traits, and (sometimes) very closely knit secondary sex characteristics. Gender has to do with the way people are generally expected to act, often having categories that somewhat overlap with sex. Grammatical gender is a linguistic feature that really doesn't have much to do with the other two, but can also have categories of male and female.

[@bobboberson8297]

Having gendered language is arguably an advantage for a language to have because it reduces ambiguity. If you say "teacher" that could be anyone, but if you say "actress" then you can only be talking about half as many people. In the context of a real conversation this is actually a pretty substantial amount of information to be able to add to your sentence. In english we often get the best of both worlds because we have gendered words and non gendered words, so depending on the level of precision needed/wanted we can choose between them. But yeah for the majority of words in a language, they have nothing to do with human gender so it doesn't make much sense to relate them to human genders. But for the ones that actually do have to do with humans, I'm not convinced that eliminating it is the best idea

[@Annatomyy]

The right: FREE SPEECH Also the right: *bans the use of the gender star*

[@JudgeHill]

only banning the COMPELLED use of the gender star. do keep up!

[@xp7575]

😂​@@JudgeHillyou have that literally backwards

[@eggplant4367]

you can say whatever you want as long as it is approved by me first

[@eleos5]

That's the historic German right

[@neruval8998]

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.

[@RougeEric]

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.

[@zsqu]

i’m quite dumb but why would trans men need assisted reproductive technology

[@zsqu]

oh wait

[@maidifferent]

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

[@m_lies]

But its good that they exclude Trans Men (born woman that identify as Male) because they generally want to be not sees as Woman?

[@floptaxie68]

Trans men are women. Only women have uterus.

[@CocoTreb]

People who can't pronounce "worcestershire" when I pull up 5:31:

[@cornelisvreeswijk186]

But have you heard about the Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz?

[@Magst3r1]

Easier to pronounce than worcestershire, as you actually pronounce all letters normally, as opposed to worcestershire, which somehow turns into wustuhshur

[@RikaMagic-px6bk]

​​@@cornelisvreeswijk186 Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft 😂

[@skylark.kraken]

@@Magst3r1 Well, "worcestershire" follows the same rules as other place names "wor" like with "Worthing" vowel shift the "o" to get "wuh"; "cester" like with "Leicester", "Bicester", "Towcester", and "Gloucester" becomes "s-ter" (however not all, "Cirencester" is "siren-ses-ter"); and "shire" is usually "sheer" (although I think "Herefordshire" and "Warwickshire" might be "shur", but as long as you don't say "shy-ur" I doubt anyone would care). So the only acceptable way to say it wrong is "wuh-ses-ter-sheer" (or "wuh-ses-ter-shur" - people aren't going to be picky about sheer vs shur) at which point you realise that sounds clunky and drop a syllable

[@Mulmgott]

Actually easier to pronounce since no letters are omitted in the pronounciation.

[@ultrio325]

This is why I write everything in (RegEx|Regular Expressions) so that (any|every)one can pick and match sentence parts

[@stewagner]

Not optimised: This is why I write everything in Reg(Ex|ular Expressions) so that (an|ever)yone can pick and match sentence parts

[@ThisNils]

That's why I .+

[@antifa_communist]

Sentences bouta give me a stroke anytime I want to use any special character\.

[@anoukk_]

In dutch we have something similar to lehrer and lehrerin: 'leraar' and 'lerares' but we also have a neutral 'leerkracht' which translates to teachforce

[@nuvaboy]

Yup. That exists in German, too, it's "Lehrkraft". Though I'd translate it to "teaching force" (force as in workforce)

[@anoukk_]

@@nuvaboy I mean couldn't you just use Lehrkraft as a neutral term or wouldn't that be fully interchangeable?

[@deaf_dog-]

​@@anoukk_some people do. but it's really hard to find words like that in every situation. there's also words like 'Studierende' ('the studying') rather than Studenten/Studentinnen and in other cases it just makes sense to use both the masculine and the female form (especially when speaking) but that gets really repetitive if you have to use it more than once per paragraph. The main benefit of the Genderstern is that it works for almost all words.

[@timecrayon]

@@anoukk_you can! and in fact i'd say "Lehrkraft" has now become the dominant word to say "teacher", at least in writing. the issue is really that not all words have such nice neutral forms

[@lonestarr1490]

​@@deaf_dog- I claim you can do something like this in every situation--sometimes by re-arranging the sentence. Heck, I wasn't sure whether to address my girlfriend's parents by "Du" or "Sie" for almost a year and I managed just fine by simply phrasing everything in a way that circumvented addressing altogether. The German language is extremely versatile when it comes to weaseling out of inconvenient situations.

[@xwolpertinger]

I've heard people irl arguing that "It sounds weird" like "A glottal stop, in German? Inconceivable!" As if that isn't one of the defining characteristics of our language.

[@JudgeHill]

it's weird sounding and annoyingly and unnecessarily political. I loathe it and will advocate for its ban.

[@xwolpertinger]

Okay.

[@xp7575]

​​😅@@JudgeHill aDvOcAte FoR bAnNinG wOrDs

[@aliin8763]

​@@JudgeHill i'm of the same opiniom but let people use it if they want to. No need to police language for something this small, especially if it is more comfortable to some

[@rechnerfuchs]

@@JudgeHill "it's [...] unnecessarily political. I loathe it and will advocate for its ban."

[@b33thr33kay]

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.

[@Martykun36]

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.

[@CarMedicine]

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.

[@dancieta]

I've never seen "miembra" in my life

[@Someone45356]

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.

[@Bexchoklad]

Some people are replacing the -a or -o with an -e to make it more pronouncible

[@heartwarden]

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.

[@calebweldon8102]

I really love how English is non gendered because it makes language so much easier

[@GoldsteinGuy]

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

[@pasoska_kontrola]

Serbo-Croatian is a language that differentiates between masculine and feminine forms of words as well, with for example ‘sudija’ meaning judge (m) and ‘sutkinja’ meaning judge (f). (Although the making of feminine nouns isn’t as simple as adding -in in German. Sudija becomes sutkinja (sud + kinja), but prodavač becomes prodavačica (prodavač + ica) etc.) It also uses the generic masculine, similarly to German. However, an interesting solution to the problem brough forward at the end of the video I have seen in some Bosnian and Herzegovinian laws that I have had the chance to read is that they usually contain an article where they specifically state something along the lines of ‘the usage of any gender does not exclude the other gender unless stated. A feminine or masculine form of a word apply to both men and women’.

[@xCorvus7x]

That's what German texts do too. Beyond that, it should suffice to take over the spoken custom in German of stressing the last syllable (which is the one that defines a word's gender) if you really only mean a male subset of some group. Other words use diacritical symbols to express such pronunciation, so we could just do that and be good.

[@AmberPearls]

In Icelandic we have the / instead of the star. It's very common and I've never heard of it being controversial honestly, it's just how we write

[@JudgeHill]

no, it's now "how you write" it's how someone just made it up about 10 minutes ago.

[@DoxxTheMathGeek]

In Germany there also is the /, but I never use it because it only implies (wo)men.

[@martijnjanssen7789]

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.

[@luiginotcool]

@@JudgeHill take your meds

[@vignotum132]

@@JudgeHillthat’s… how standardised language works?

[@gregordroge6309]

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...

[@romanski5811]

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.

[@Bolpat]

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.

[@Bolpat]

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.“

[@madelyneation]

@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.

[@madelyneation]

(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.

[@luizfellipe3291]

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]

How do you read it out aloud?

[@luizfellipe3291]

@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.

[@nHans]

​@@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]

I've heard about neologisms such as Ume jogadore famose from a person from Brazil. Sounds pretty cool, how often is that used?

[@luizfellipe3291]

@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

[@chose8942]

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")

[@erikno2992]

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

[@erikno2992]

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)

[@chose8942]

@@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]

@@chose8942 I would NOT call that easy at all, we are desperately trying to do smth with the limited options we have

[@chose8942]

@@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)

[@EnigmaticLucas]

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.

[@shrouddreamer]

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?

[@melonenstrauch1306]

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)

[@shrouddreamer]

@truegemuese The most German argument since the dawn of time. This speech is taking too long, I need to get back to wörk!

[@lonestarr1490]

​@@shrouddreamer German has no history of a generic feminine of any kind. So this would be quite a hard thing to establish.

[@aeleron0577]

​@@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).

[@Stowy]

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...

[@itisALWAYSR.A.]

Bless KZbin trying to make that into hyperlinks

[@mrrandom1265]

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.

[@CarMedicine]

"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)

[@KurosakiYukigo]

​@@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?

[@JoaoP.434]

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):"

[@schwambibambi6492]

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.

[@marieobst8850]

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.

[@LarthV]

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.

[@Makutros]

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.

[@LarthV]

@@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.

[@Makutros]

@@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.

[@LarthV]

@@Makutros Ok, that makes sense! Yeah, masculine has effectively _lost_ the ability of being universal due to said reasons.

[@marinmilevoj4829]

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.

[@shrouddreamer]

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...

[@JudgeHill]

they should have referred to him correctly as...."attention seeker"

[@xp7575]

​​@@JudgeHill is seeking attention for his childish temper tantrum with all the comments he's left

[@antorseax9492]

@@JudgeHill You say in the comments of a non-binary person's KZbin channel.

[@shortposeidon]

@@antorseax9492 Wait for real? Didn't know that, what pronouns do they go by?

[@Y_David_Tang]

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.

[@stewagner]

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!

[@Bolpat]

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]

@@stewagner I’d never use _alte Freundin_ for an ex, if any adjective, it would be _ehemalige._ That could also be a former friend, though.

[@stewagner]

@@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.

[@EvdogMusic]

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)".

[@epicnan1855]

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

[@Bolpat]

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.

[@MCArt25]

@@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.

[@sevelofficial2696]

In 2020 I took a gender studies course and we read an article about gendered language and it had an emphasis on German and Dutch feminist attempts to make the language more neutral. Having just finished 3 semesters of German I found this very fascinating. Another thing some people were trying to implement was introduce "frau" in place of "mann", as well as "herrlein" as a counter to "fräuline". This interested me so much that I asked some German friends and the female ones actually said they don't care about the gender in language, they just wanted equal pay and treatment and could "be referred to as a lizard for all I care" if paid and treated equally.

[@cutmasta-kun]

"if paid and treated equally" That's the thing, the german language enforces sexist stereotypes in a way, that makes it easier to not treat and pay women equally.

[@sevelofficial2696]

@@cutmasta-kun that's a damn good point actually

[@stewagner]

I've noticed "frau" in women's magazines where the person referred to is clearly not male, and it kinda fits imo, or just general articles, but have never heard "Herrlein" ever. "Fräulein" is seen as antiquated term that is basically sexist so there is no need for a gender-swapped version.

[@Bolpat]

Look, here’s how you know it’s all ideology and gender studies types have zero clue: There is a word that relates to _Fräulein_ for men: _Junker._ So if anything, they could have simply argued to use _Junker_ again, a word that already exists. Also, _Fräulein_ fell out of use in the 70s; while it’s still understood, it’s not used in formal addressing.

[@Bolpat]

By that logic, Turkey should be the pinnacle of equal pay, since grammatical gender is entirely nonexistent in the Turkish language.

[@03thinking]

3:31 in French they do something similar a lot, in Portuguese you can see it sometimes too. In my classes I use to show inflections of any type, like the past regular suffix in English [ dance.d] or a word inflection [um.a.s]

[@xovvo3950]

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.

[@2-_]

your name K Klein is pronounced like Cakeline

[@deutschermichel5807]

No

[@calsta619]

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

[@JoRdi-ul4xg]

This isnt a solution lol

[@DoctorSpaniel]

this is such an incredible video. thank you for making it! being a Canadian, I don't know a lot about European politics but this is incredible to see how even just gebdered language can cause such things. hope to see more of your stuff in the future!

[@jacobparry177]

Love how all of those arguments against the use of gender neutral lingo are the exact arguments that anti-Welsh language folk try to use against Welsh speakers wanting to (checks notes) use their first language- the language they have these best grasp on, that they use to engage, not only with people in their daily lives, but with the state that they're part of and pay tax too ( thus paying for bilingual signage and documents). Like, get a grip, not being a twat to people isn't going to make you combust (The above obviously applies to other minority langs, but Im Welsh and hesr this crap on a nigh weekly basis, so im just speaking from my experiences)

[@marcasdebarun6879]

Same as with Irish. 'Oh it's so complicated!' 'It's a waste of money having to print all official documents and roadsigns in Irish!' 'No one actually wants to use it anyway!' etc. etc.

[@MrMyzel]

well the video was kinda making the arguments bad there are 1. better arguments against the gender star than he presented, like easier alternatives that make the language gender neutral. 2. the populism argument isn't stupid or invalid or whatever he said. language is formed by the people, not academics. if they don't want it, it simply will never stick. doesn't even matter if it's better or not. and it's not like it's a close call. the overwhelming majority of people don't want it. i don't know anything about the issues in other countries tho, just wanted to tell you this.

[@nashvontookus7451]

​@@MrMyzel no, right wing populism is in fact stupid

[@stewagner]

@@MrMyzel Problem is these alternatives have even less support/are not known

[@MrMyzel]

@@stewagner unfortunately, they really should be. there is literally a perfect option for everyone in my book, but it's not being talked about at all because the wokies want to feel nice and woke and the right wing populists just want the annoying form of gendern to fuel their campaigns...

[@RedsTom_]

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...

[@Mimimo02]

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

[@LandgraabIV]

The situation in Brazil is a bit different. In Portuguese it's pretty common to write "professor(a)" if you mean "male and/or female teacher", like on an add or form. The feminine suffix "a" is not the only one to be used this way, it is also commonly used for the plural. "O professor ensina" could be written "o(s) professor(es) ensina(m)" to be either singular or plural. As far as I know, no one is opposed to such usage and it's widely used - it's everywhere. As for the order of gender, it makes sense to add the feminine ending after the masculine "default" form because that's how the language works (the feminine gender is the only one to have a suffix "-a", like "-in" in German, just like the plural is the only number to have a suffix , "-(e)s". Some people may write "aluna(o)" or "mestra(e)", and although it may make sense politically, that doesn't make much sense linguistically since "o" and "e" there are thematic vowels, not gender markers, and it doesn't work with words that end in a consonant or tonic vowel (ex: professor(a), freguês(a), espanhol(a), peru(a), guri(a), etc). In speech, it's common to repeat the word like "professores e professoras" or "alunas e alunos", and both orders (feminine or masculine first) work fine. Some people think it's silly but I've never seen a big backlash against that (like trying to outlaw it). The main backlash is against non-binary and gender-neutral neologisms, like "-e" or "-u" to mark it (professore, alune, elu, etc), many city councils and state assembleys tried to ban and outlaw it.

[@kahlilbt]

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

[@simmi5646]

I find that it is a very slippery slope to directly connect opposing the usage of the asterisk, unpronounceable constructs and wrong grammar in official document. When looking at survey it can be found that 70% - 80% of the population oppose it, while the AfD would get between 15% -19% of the overall vote. It is also fairly interesting to observe that among all parties in the Bundestag a majority of their voters oppose it. So it can be said that there are way more people who oppose it and would never consider to vote far right than far right voters. The AfD is mostly going for the low hanging fruits. I personally support the new laws in Bavaria and Hesse because they are, when you don't pay too much attention to the populist outrage and take a deeper look into them, surprisingly reasonable and mindful to the whole debate. It's not that genderlanguage will be banned from official communication. The laws are aiming for a middleground of genderneutral paraphrasing and the usage of neutral forms of words inatead of asterisks. Something that is way more accepted in the general public and also mostly compatible with current grammar.

[@andreasrumpf9012]

Es basiert trotzdem alles auf Lügen und ist so dumm, dass ich es meinen Kindern nicht erklären kann. "Die Autofahrer schließt Frauen nicht mit ein (Hä?!) darum sagen wir jetzt die Autofahrenden (Hä?), auch wenn sie gerade nicht am Steuer sitzen."

[@petersmythe6462]

"don't you want every possible roadblock against fascism put up?" This is AfD we're talking about. I'm really pretty sure they don't want that.

[@egggge4752]

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.

[@thenarkknight278]

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.

[@MisterPyOne]

I think, if you actually want neutral speach in german, that is the best way to do it

[@MCArt25]

Reminds me of our dear old Frau Landeshauptmann

[@lizkeres2593]

I disagree, It sounds wrong. There's no harm in saying Lehrerin and nobody has to wonder why you just called a woman a man

[@Bolpat]

@@lizkeres2593 It sounds wrong _to you._ Especially in eastern Germany (former East Germany), that way of speaking is common.

[@SirioResteghini]

I'm from the country that borders San Marino and we have the same exact issues

[@RougeEric]

French/American person here; French has the EXACT same problem; and our current "punctuation inside the word" solution is a middle point (joueur/joueuse -> joueur·se / or joueu·r·se). It's a decent visual solution because it's compact in most fonts, keeping the visual integrity of the word, and isn't present anywhere in our written language (contrary to the ones you have cited for German). The issue of ordering masculine and feminine is very much a thing, though it's easy to swap them (joueuse·r / or joueu·se·r), which I have seen people do based on personal preference or who holds the majority in a group (but most people tend to just go masculine first because it fits with the mentality of masculine being the "standard" that we have been taught for decades). One main issue with this is that all the pronouns and articles get really cumbersome, so a partial solution some people are starting to use is a bunch of mashed-together versions (il/elle -> iel ; le/la -> lae ; du/de la -> de lae) which often have the feminine "part" first because it makes it distinct when pronounced, which helps compensate for the words where a middle point is used typically having masculine first. To be clear, I find all this to be a relatively bad solution... but have yet to find anything better that would ever be adopted (like fully creating a neutral third gender, which some people have suggested, but is such a drastic transformation of the language that I cannot imagine people ever picking it up)... so I tend to use this system for the moment, waiting for something better to come along. PS: for people who haven't installed/edited a custom keyboard layout, many people tend to use a simple period instead of the middle point when typing (joueu.r.euse), which is... fine? PPS: a similar system has actyually been in use for decades in some specific situations (some official documents, academic papers, and even some journalism) but used either a shash (joueur/euse), or more commonly parentheses (joueur(euse))... which has a whole bunch of potentially problematic implications.

[@sakurayuki5301]

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 ^^

[@RenardoJS]

One thing that always baffled me as a German: Why is the argument for including women grammatically mentioning them with their own gender specific term, when in english it seems to be exatly opposite? Take the phasing out of the term actress in Hollywood. There it is deemed sexist to not use the same word Actor for men and women. - Honestly any idea? This truly baffles me.

[@insignificantfool8592]

I believe that's because it feels like going back 70 years in language development instead of progressing. At least that seems the common reason given when proponents of Genderdeutsch are confronted with this option. Activists are either not smart enough to understand the beauty of eliminating female suffixes or they just don't like the idea for activism sake.

[@Aryan-mh9vd]

You don't understand the logic. The proper rationale is to assume it's sexist, and then to find reasons for why it's sexist. Hope that helps.

[@yds2m]

Because "actor" is already gender neutral. But for words that aren't (e.g. policeman, fireman), there has been equal pushes to make them inclusive for women (police officer, firefighter).

[@yds2m]

​@@Aryan-mh9vdread my comment above ^

[@insignificantfool8592]

@@yds2m how can "actor" be gender neutral when there's the word "actress?" The Germans would insist to explicitly mention women and so to always say "actors and actresses" to make women more "visible"

[@catomajorcensor]

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).

[@davins6095]

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.

[@prywatne4733]

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'

[@territicus]

The same is true for Chinese: the word for “they” is “他们，” the masculine form, and only changes to “她们” if all are female and “它们” if all are not human.

[@siryessir1639]

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.

[@Icetea-2000]

The generic masculine is definitely way more natural to speak if you know German. I work at a german company with an entirely female lead and in scientific writings they also instruct us to use the generic masculine term. It’s ridiculous to act like it excludes women, or that only the far right is in favor of it. It just completely drowns all discussion on it by acting as if the only way you could be opposed to that is if you also are far right.

[@Loanshark753]

Same in Norway, e.g. old school is lærer and lærerinne, which have merged into lærer. So the masculine form is preferred, the feminine form faced out.

[@SocialDownclimber]

Young people will always innovate in the language they use. After a certain age, most people lose the capacity to react positively to these innovations and instead react with disgust. Certain political movements co-opt this to encourage their followers to associate that disgust with the people using the language, not just the language use itself.

[@Nachtara-nr1pv]

You explained that better than anyone else I've seen discussing that topic. Well done! I'm a german tutor and absolutely don't have a Problem with some stidents writing "Viele Schüler*innen sind in der Schule", for example. It gets trickier with words that dont just use the ending with -in, but also change the Word itself like Arzt (doctor) or Bauer (farmer) The female words for those are Ärztin and Bäurin So you'd have to write Der*Die Bauer*in (oder Bäu*rin??) to somehow make that clear - and it would still be completely false. That's why so many people are annoyed by this topic, i believe 😅

[@Bolpat]

It is _Bäuerin,_ not _Bäurin._

[@kakahass8845]

By the way the tiny text is easily readable at KZbin's highest resolution (On this video) and possible to read the 360p.

[@zsqu]

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 😕

[@davidpacifico1019]

Maybe listen to the next part of the video?

[@counterfeit1148]

My opinion on it, not that anyone cares, is that the "*innen" way of being inclusive just fucking sucks and if it were banned I'd be happy, while spelling out both the masculine and feminine versions of the noun is probably the best way despite its length.

[@lajawi.]

9:13 "Babmoozled"! I think I might just start using it like that!! XD

[@kittyvlekkie]

thanks for the clarity and explaining the situation, these videos are important

[@Mr_Onion_Youtube]

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

[@osanixian1499]

Sadly, K klein wrote Babmoozled instead of Bamboozled 9:12 :(

[@kklein]

i was too babmoozled to write properly

[@itisALWAYSR.A.]

Heck! Babmoozled again!

[@DeFaulty101]

Would it be too awkward for them to just have gender indicated by pronoun, and use "das" instead of "der" or "die"?

[@anzaia2164]

​@truegemuese That sounds pretty rad actually. I think this is my new favourite.

[@lonestarr1490]

​@truegemuese I suggested a singular form of "Leute": "das Leut". To achieve basically the same thing. "Der/die Feuerwehrmann/-frau" becomes "das Feuerwehrleut".

[@itisALWAYSR.A.]

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.

[@nirichy]

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

[@lonestarr1490]

​@@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."

[@iFuzzle]

Just my thoughts and some additional information/clarifications to this topic from my perspective: 1. there are multiple studies already, varying between 60-80% of people not wanting to gender. 2. The issue with the cost is not, that it's expensive to pass a law (even so it is, but we pass so many it doesn't count) - the issue is, if we would pass a law we would have to rewrite every single official document. We forced that on banks to some degree, as some people (especially one old lady) sued for it. ALSO you mentioned the law books that are not in gendered language - we would need to rewrite it completly or get into a state where some parts are still using only the masculine - making the situation you've shown at the end of the video even worse! (Reminder: We simply can't change the first 20 laws in the Grundgesetz.) 3. fully agreed 4. fully agreed What I am missing is: that there have already been cases where universities enforced a specific gendered version. If you did not follow, you would be graded way lower - which is also going to far in my opinion. There have been official statements for communication in, in between and towards other for Ämter or the public sector in general. Plus, you are clearly in an academic bubble, which is great. My (political) world view was also different when I was closer to studied people and has changed since I am in contact with people without Abitur AND people with degrees. Also just comparing the way of life in West- and Eastgermany shows, that there are large differences in the public opinion, so depending on where you are studying you are also biased by that. Just some reflections on this topic. I am NOT pushing for a ban on the Gendersternchen (just realized how hard it must be to pronounce it with the mixed languages) I am at the solution you stated at the beginning: Everyone can use it or not, but don't blame the other side for their decision.

[@Kitrill]

Best Video I've seen on this topic so far!

[@hahani17]

As a German myself, your point at 10:53 is actually really eye-opening. It really puts into perspective just how much these people WANT you to get caught up in these arguments (even as someone on the opposite side of the spectrum!) just so it may reach a wider audience and so allow them to appear to their supporters as someone they are not. You can't ever forget that you can't fall into anger when dealing with guys like this. Thank you for making this video. As for the language aspect, I'd like to commentate on it as well. Personally, I actually welcome this way of addressing people, because I myself always found it weird how the generic masculine seemingly excluded the feminine. To some extent, it made me uncomfortable (even as a guy, mind you). While the current way in which it is written is undeniably a bit clunky, to me, if it's in service of making the language more inclusive, then I think it's more than worth it. I kinda just want my language to stop appearing in this patriarchal-feeling tone man

[@Bolpat]

There’s a difference between how people speak personally or regional variations of language, and politically motivated speech that is used in public broadcast and imposed on students in universities. Bavaria’s use of force is necessary because it’s the only language radical leftists understand. This isn’t a left-wing vs. right-wing issue, a majority of voters of each major German party rejects this. Let me spell it out for you: A majority of Green party voters reject this. This so-called inclusive language is nothing but virtue signalling. “I myself always found it weird how the generic masculine seemingly excluded the feminine.” Only because you misunderstand what words mean. “I kinda just want my language to stop appearing in this patriarchal-feeling tone.” Then stop using female-specific forms. Using those implies that women are fundamentally different in whatever role than men. If it’s the same, call it the same. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

[@paulhein9815]

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

[@JoRdi-ul4xg]

based prof.

[@lonestarr1490]

Which faculty at which university?

[@RuthvenMurgatroyd]

​@@lonestarr1490 Why? What are you going to do to him?

[@BlueGamingRage]

@@JoRdi-ul4xg based on what?

[@Kuhmuhnistische_Partei]

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.

[@jamiewindle1575]

Hey I've noticed your speech is very noticeably partially rhotic in this video, when I can't say I've noticed it ( at least not to this degree ) in past videos ? Do you know where this comes from ^^ ?

[@BenjaminCherkassky]

I think this is one of your best videos; it just explains ev'rything so concisely and effectively!

[@Enfjscrolling]

"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.

[@NithinJune]

The non compromising solution is to stop speaking german

[@stewagner]

Unironically I sometimes prefer English bc it is neutral on that

[@izumemori]

Holy shit based

[@franzyuri5751]

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...

[@stewagner]

That is an argument to change the standard then? I don't see the difference.

[@אוריאיזנברג-ס4ו]

Hebrew has something very similar, we use / or . to be gender neutral. For example אוכל/ת or אוכל.ת

[@cuileth3369]

Excellent video! Thanks for making it!

[@olived9560]

amazing video, super informative and really well and clearly presented. danke schön!

[@schlaumayer3754]

12:30 The legal argument isn't really convincing, after all is laws would use the masculine and feminine form the argument that actually nonbinary people aren't included in a lot of laws would be stronger

[@kklein]

the argument is that the * actually represents the non-conforming identities. but interesting point

[@UniDocs_Mahapushpa_Cyavana]

The law 📜 should be gender neutral to avoid discrimination creeping in through precedent. *Especially* replacing husband/wife with spouse or (preferably) marriage participant.

[@counterfeit1148]

​@@UniDocs_Mahapushpa_Cyavana Calling someone a marriage participant is just a weird thing to me. But maybe for a law one would be expected to use big words.

[@wurstkocher842]

I think the best long term solution to all of this would be to remove gender information completely from most words so that only a generic form exists

[@wurstkocher842]

@kaiserfranzjoseph9311 Nah I think at least for like job names that approach is very reasonable

[@anzaia2164]

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.

[@lonestarr1490]

​@@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".

[@anzaia2164]

@@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.

[@BlueGamingRage]

@@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

[@gugusalpha2411]

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.

[@TypeQ53985]

In Greece, there are also 3 grammatical genders and it's also quite difficult to have a gender neutral language. Grammatically masculine>feminine>neutral, however in written speech the "/" is often used, e.g. φοιτητής/-τρια (student), similar to German's student/-in. In politics, though, there are nouns that have only one masculine form with no feminine equivalent. A statesperson is called "πολίτης", whether a man or a woman. The same goes for "πρόεδρος" (president), "βουλευτής" (member of Parliament), "δικαστής" (judge) and many other professions.

[@arabellefellinger6865]

as a francophone, i can attest that we have the same struggle here (at least where I'm from, in Québec). Our language is very gendered as well: for example, a female director would be ''directrice'' while a male director will be ''directeur''. A lot of people don't want to get behind this new ''langue inclusive'' (inclusive language), which uses a dot to include both male and female variations, like saying ''directeur.rice'' instead of directeur. It isnt as big as a polemic as in Germany, I think. But I know in France, some professions sometimes dont even include a female version, which to me is even more alienating. Like if they were to talk about a female writer, a lot of French people would use the masculine ''écrivain'', while the term ''écrivaine'' actually exists. It's like saying some jobs cannot be accessed by women. Language IS a reflection of social issues!

[@insignificantfool8592]

No, it's like saying that anyone can be écrivain, not just men.

[@cornelisvreeswijk186]

The job thing is indeed misogyny added to our language by that damned Académie française. The rest of it is fine and this directeur.rice.s business is certainly not needed

[@DylanSargesson]

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.

[@nHans]

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.

[@DylanSargesson]

@@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).

[@LarthV]

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...

[@Bolpat]

“Governments regulating language use almost never works and nor should it.” France and Iceland entered the chat.

[@Bolpat]

@@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?

[@le_plankton]

frewnch has the same problem. here is Quebec we use (e) or (elle) or (ette) or other extentions for feminine inclusion

[@eiavops4576]

Why is this a problem? How does this affect the real world? Are you going to get a rash from it or something?

[@Hiljaa_]

> fr*ew*much :sob:

[@ForestHermit.]

This is why I like Finnish. It avoids all this bullshit by simply not having gendered pronouns in the first place. You want to say she? Hän. He? Hän. Boom, done.

[@GameTornado01]

Truly envyable

[@Kiyoliki]

Most languages are like this. My native also uses non-gendered third person pronouns.

[@Bolpat]

Some European languages like Finnish, Turkish, and Hungarian have no grammatical gender, and they’re not Indo-Germanic. I wonder if that’s a coincidence. (It’s not.)

[@OfficeDuck-]

So simple

[@frederiklenk7756]

I encountered this in a museum recently for the first time. It was on audio and i thought they were simply using feminine as the default. Then i read it and it was very distracting. Im not often in Germany though i am a native. Anyway, so after the museum visit i talked to my relatives about it and they seemed to unanimously agree that they disliked using deliberately gendered languange in their daily lives. In specific the female family members argued that they felt that the use of gendersternchen was putting emphasis on their gender as opposed to the function they perform (e.g. Lehrer vs Lehrer*innen). This also sums up my gripes with the whole thing. I use danish in my daily life where the largest gendering headache is words containig "man". Though Danish also has the ability to feminize words through the addition of "-inde" this is only used to explicitly specify gender when relevant and the "masculine" version is used in all other cases and is considered neutral. I believe laws should by default include all humans, only when explicitly specified with no ambiguity should it apply otherwise. This allows for simpler prose in law and none of the technicalities bullshit which expludes people from their rights based on gender

[@udgeyjudge4289]

We have EXACTLY the same situation with Hebrew in Israel, down to the details! The generic masculine covering the feminine, using masculine plurals if even one of a group is a man, and we have the same alternatives (we usually use a slash or a dot, like אנשים.ות or אנשים/ות, and we also sometimes repeat the phrase like you mentioned, e.g. "the teachers(m) and the teachers(f)...") In my experience the opposition to these alternatives isn't quite as strong here as what you describe in Germany, but many people on the political right think it's a "stupid progressive thing" with no consequence.

[@buurmeisje]

I don't really care if someone uses the asterisk, but I personally don't and think it looks pretty rediculous. I also speak Dutch and in Dutch you also gender words, but there is no movement at all to create such gender sensitive language, people just default to the masculine and that's about all there's to it.

[@vinnie144]

In Dutch the gendering doesn’t go as far as in German though, Dutch only has de and het instead of Der, die, das. Most words with ‘het’ in Dutch will use ‘das’ in German, also the words for professionals aren’t always gendered (anymore), many words don’t have a specific feminine form (that I know of as a native speaker) or have one that just isn’t used much and instead there is only the form which sounds more masculine and originally probably was masculine for words such as rechter (judge), that are considered gender neutral by most. The issues with he and she are the same as far as I know. (I don’t know that much German)

[@buurmeisje]

@@vinnie144 The thing is that for words where there is no 'female version', that is usually the case, because it has fallen out of usage, but it did historically exist and modern Dutch now only uses the masculine form. So it's not like words aren't gendered, it's that the masculine version has become so dominent that it has become 'gender neutral' because the feminine doesn't even exist anymore.

[@vinnie144]

@@buurmeisje that’s true and I tried to imply that, currently they are basically gender neutral in many cases

[@Bolpat]

@@vinnie144 So, if Dutch can do it, why couldn’t German ditch the female-specific nouns for professions and such? East Germany already did that, actually.

[@Bolpat]

@@buurmeisje “the masculine version has become so dominent that it has become 'gender neutral' because the feminine doesn't even exist anymore” That’s actually wrong. The masculine was always generic, and the pattern (in German still active) is as follows: For a concrete person, if you use the masculine form, it implies male, because you could have easily used the female-specific version if it applied. Consider _Fräulein:_ Before the 70s, when it fell out of use, using _Frau_ implied married, because unmarried women were called _Fräuleins._ Today, using _Frau_ implies nothing about marital status. Ditching _-in_ forms would lead to the same outcome: Today, _mein Deutschlehrer_ would be seen as implying your German teacher is a man because otherwise, you’d say _meine Deutschlehrerin,_ but if the _-in_ falls out of fashion, that pattern doesn’t apply anymore.

[@friedrichfreigeist3292]

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.

[@Leo-ox4ju]

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

[@BryanLu0]

Watch 12:00 - And apparently, this has happened historically (in Switzerland)

[@itsafeh0007]

"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.

[@theconnotationofmemedealer3795]

@@itsafeh0007 This is true in both directions though. Students speak with high degrees of unearned profundity all the time.

[@Tumbolisu]

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.

[@enderteck3273]

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.

[@shytendeakatamanoir9740]

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)

[@enderteck3273]

@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 Yeah having gender neutral nounds is a long way off but we'll see what happens I guess.

[@donnaprisbrey1452]

I think it interesting that English handled this by dropping the femine word for things. Recently, for example, "actress." But that there is a long list of professions that used to have gendered terms. Baker and baxter for example. What is intersting is all the differnent ways languages can adapt to similar social changes.

[@thomashedorfer2905]

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.

[@stewagner]

@kaiserfranzjoseph9311 popular is relative, a bunch of ppl use it.