Oh gendered pronouns are fun in german.
Especially when combining the male and female version of a word to one gender neutral word.
For example doctor:
Arzt (male) + Ärztin (female) = ärzt’in (Singular) / ärzte’innen (Plural)
Are you sure? I think for plural it would be ärzt*innen, without the e, but i’m no expert
Could be i wasn’t sure about that one
You’re right but tbh I think it’s so silly that using* stars has become the defacto politically correct way to address gendering in the first place. It’s such an eyesore
If you use it, I much prefer a :, like Arbeiter:innen.
It’s still dumb. When we’re at a point where we have to butcher our language with asterisks and colons to please Karens we’ve gotta admit that the language itself is heavily flawed.
Turns out English and Asian languages without gendered pronouns are simply superior
please Karens
what do you mean by that?
gotta admit that the language itself is heavily flawed
Are you proposing to get rid of the German language because it is flawed, instead of adapting it? First time i heard that idea
There’s also the Binnen-I, like ArbeiterInnen
I mean there are no formal rules on how to form a gender neutral noun yet afaik, but what you stated is the form that would be used most commonly. Ärzte’innen is definitely nothing that I’ve seen so far, especially with the ’ character. Usually * or : is used
I tried using the * but then my text just went bold so yeah
English should absolutely do this you’d end up with some really cool words. Also because Jodorowsky was absolutely right - emperoratrix is a fucking kickass title
Emperoratrix sounds really clunky to me, -atrix is the feminine counterpart to -ator. Imperator, dominator, navigator, etc. I’m particularly fond of the overextension that is ‘alligatrix’ myself.
Fine fine, then Emperoress instead. It’s what the actual English translation of The Incal uses
Why not ‘Empress’, I wonder? Nothing actually wrong with any of the options, just rings strangely to my ears.
Kalian punya kata ganti?
I’ve stopped learning Chinese when I left the country. I’ve only had HSK 2, but man do I miss no conjugation, you ate an apple pie for breakfast this morning? Well "This morning breakfast I eat an apple pie.
You already told it was this mornings breakfast with context.
This is something you really see when discovering another language that is not yours. I’m on Modern Speaking Arabic right now and I see it a lot
doesn’t Chinese have pronouns though?
她 she 他 he 它 it
or am I missing something ?
Cries in HSK 0
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Then you have Welsh where a lot of things are double affirmed in sentences removing ambiguity. even for the word yes you conjugate your reply as it depending on the quesrion they asked you.
Wyt. (Yes, you are. when asked as Am I?)
Ydw. (Yes, I am.)
Ydy. (Yes, he is.)
Ydy. (Yes, she is.)
Ydych. (Yes, you are. when asked as are We?)
Ydyn. (Yes, we are.)
Ydyn. (Yes, they are.)
How do you pronounce Ydw, Ydy and Ydych?
Seems to be like “Eh-dew”, “Eh-dee”, “Eh-dich”, so eh- or uh- for the Y at the start. Welsh IPA guide on wiktionary says Y at the start is like the a at the start of “about”, when it’s not either a single-syllable or in the last syllable of a word, in which case it’s an “eee” sound, like the end of “happy”.
Wait until you hear about languages where everything is gendered.
We’re currently debating, whether BürgerInnen, Bürger:innen or “Bürgerinnen und Bürger” is the proper way to address all citizens. This is not even about anything LGBTQ, it’s simply acknowledgement of the concept of non-male people (which is really hard for some conservatives).
I prefer the elimination of gender by using the participle because I think it’s easier to read and say, e.g. instead of Student:In you say Studierende (I guess also using the genderless plural of the participle, similar to the English concept). I’m not sure what the equivalent for Bürger would be though. Geborgene?
Bürgende?
“Liebe Mitmenschen”, meistens ist es nicht nötig, nur diejenigen mit der Staatsbürgerschaft anzusprechen, sondern alle, die in dem Land leben
Why not just use the generic plural form (Bürger) as people always have? It has always been used for mixed groups so why shouldnt it continue to? And sometimes it doesnt even work (eg. for “Bauer”. The plurals would be “Bauern” and “Bäuerinnen”.
The problem people have with the Generischer Maskulinum is, that it is exactly that, the male plural form.
Grammatical genus is not the same as biological gender. Or do people that are biologically neither male nor female need a third plural form?
That would be another advantage if we had a form that clearly eliminates the gender.
Or, you know. Just Bürger, the generic masculinum. That all-inclusive. And it worked for a long time. It’s only because some snowflakes thought they needed something to complain about that we’re having this whole debate.
No it’s not and there’s scientific evidence. Studies have shown that female children will name career paths as their dream job less often if only the male version is shown to them, presumably because they think it’s not an option for them, as it’s perceived to be only possible for males to follow that path. Explicitly mentioning both genders suddenly makes girls also want to become doctors.
You might not like it, but there’s enough evidence to show that it has merit.
“scientific evidence”.
Just like the ‘scientific evidence’ that, for whatever reason, in countries where women are way less free than in the west, many more women go into STEM?
According to https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/200758/umfrage/entwicklung-der-anzahl-der-medizinstudenten/ since at least 2010 there are way many more women studying medicine than men.
You might not like it, but just because it’s “Die” Sonne And “Der” Mond, That Does not suddenly mean that the moon is male and the sun is female, just how “Der Schüler” Does not imply that they are male or female.
This whole discussion about grammatical gender is stupid and biased as fuck by “researchers” who come to the conclusion they want to come to. I work in academia myself, I know how much bullshit gets pushed through.
Don’t get me wrong, I support anyone being able to do whatever they want. Women can do engineering just as much as men can, same for medicine and everything else. The literal only upside that men have is - on average - higher physical strength. And that just means that a higher percentage of men is strong enough to do certain physical job than the percentage of women. Doesn’t mean the women strong enough to do that job do it any worse than men.
women right? so annoying…
I wouldn’t mind a generic feminimum just as I don’t mind a generic masculinum. Grammatical gender doesn’t have anything to do with actual gender. It’s just a quirk of the language.
Der bre benutzt einfach “snowflakes” unironisch, was ist das, 2016?
Ja, Kumpel * in dud * in bro* sephine. Diese ganzen Gendersternverherrlicher innen brauchen einfach etwas worüber sie innen sich aufregen *innen könn *innen.
Ausserdem, bro *sephine, hast du mein Profil soweit durchgeschaut dass du rausgefunden hast dass ich männlich bin, oder hast du gerade mein Gender assumiert? Hier hättest du, um deinen eigenen Standards zu entsprechen, ein Genderneutrales Pronomen verwenden sollen, Bro *sephine.
Gerade nachgeschaut. In meinem Profil steht überhaupt nichts zu meinem Gender. Du hast also zwangsweise einfach mal so angenommen, dass ich ein Mann bin. Stimmt das mit deiner Ideologie überein?
Bro ist mir egal ob du den Stern nutzt oder nicht, du bist nur bissl cringe im Internet unterwegs und ich wollte mich drüber lustig machen.
Dass du da nen ganzen Paragrafen schreiben musstest, ist schon telling ne
Is Bürger not just “citizens”
Male citizens.
Portuguese! Even the f…ing objects are gendered!
Me, a german: Why would they not be gendered? At least you have only 2 genders
nO tHeRe ArE iNfInItE gEnDeRs!!!
Most things in Portuguese are gendered, yet we sometimes care fuck all about them (e.g: Sandwich is usually feminine, but it can be masculine depending on who you talk to).
Source: I’m Portuguese.
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In brazil sandwich is male and we speak portuguese
I’m brazilian too and my sandwich is also male! ♂️
“mmm this table looks quite feminine to me”
Spanish.
The Austrian state I used to live in (Niederösterreich) actually just outlawed gendering words like that on any government documents. Absolutely idiotic.
In French we have a similar problem. Currently the most popular form is “citoyen.ne.s” or “citoyen.nes” (besides the good old “citoyens” or “citoyennes et citoyens”), which sometimes gets rendered as a website by some text displayers (e.g. les habitant.es). It’s technically supposed to be a middle dot (citoyen·ne·s) but nobody has that on their keyboard (I literally had to copy-paste it from wikipedia) so people use the point instead. We used to use parentheses like “citoyen(ne)s” but these have vastly be replaced by the dots.
Interesting. In German typography we used to use lower quotation marks at the beginning of a quote and lower quotation marks at the end of a quote, both in handwriting and print:
„Amazing“
But the lower version isn’t found on the default QWERTZ keyboard layout so in personal digital communication (instant messages, emails, etc) especially you find double upper ones a lot:
“Amazing” or ‘Amazing’
The formal spelling rules haven’t been updated and you may still find the lower-upper vision in professional publications where the software adjusts the quotation marks according to a global setting. But most anything that is typed directly by a user will use the lazy lower-lower version.
We actually have the same issue with our « quotes » and accentuated capital letters in French, so « l’État » sometimes becomes “l’Etat”.
FYI, hold Alt and the press 0 1 8 3 then release Alt.
Doesn’t work on a phone/tablet
If it’s an Android and using Gboard you can go to the symbol tab and hold - to choose the · symbol.
In German:
Man = male (der Mann)
Woman = female (die Frau)
Boy = male (der Junge)
Girl = neutral (das Mädchen)
No idea why lol.
Also I’m learning French and everything has a gender but I don’t see any pattern to it at all. Pizza is female, books are male, a suitcase is female, hats are male and so on.
Also in French, the names of numbers go absolutely mental once you go above about 50. That’s got nothing to do with gender but I want to complain it whenever I can.
French here. If you learn in Belgium or Switzerland, they have “septante” and “nonante” for 70 and 90.
It’s for sure more intuitive, but you have to admit that saying “four-twenty-twelve” (non-french speakers: that’s literal translation for 92) is sooooo cool!
I’ll just leave this one for you :)
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They obviously ran out of fingers and toes at fifty, so they traditionally never went any further.
So french is just like portuguese, but in portuguese you normally know if something is male or female by the ending of the words (with a feel exceptions), for example pizza is female because ends with “a”
This is the same in french, the gender of words is generally determined by their ending. (Which is not pronounced.)
Good to know, french is on my list of languages that i wanna learn someday
But French is so hard to find rules about that compared to say Spanish.
English French Spanish ? a mouse une souris el raton / el mouse so in French “-is” is a female ending? a mouse pad un tapis de souris una afombrilla de mouse no, tapis is male, even if souris is female a cable un câble un cable ok, if it ends in “e” it’s male? an icon un icône un icono yes, ends in “e” it’s male! the memory la memoire la memoria no, ends in “e” it’s female! Spanish is much simpler: ends in ‘a’ it’s mostly female (except stupid poema, and a few others), ends in ‘o’ it’s male (except foto, and a few others). If there’s a rule to French I don’t know it, and none of my French teachers knew it. If you’re French, you just grow up learning which words are male and which are female, so French speakers just naturally know and can’t explain it.
Yeah, there are quite a lot of exceptions but “-e is female, otherwise is male” works most of the time. Then if you want to be more precise you can remember some generic exceptions like -age, -isme are male and -tion, -té is female. You’ll still have some exceptions like une souris, une vis, une dent, un câble, un graphe, un cône, une image (exception to the exception) but it probably works in about 80-90% of cases.
(Also “icône” is actually female in French)
German is so weird. They came up with the concept of a neutral gender, but objects that obviously have no real gender (tables, boxes, sunglasses) don’t use neuter.
Like, what’s the process when they create a new word.
“Computer”… hmm, I think it’s female.
Nah, it’s neuter.
You guys are idiots, he’s obviously male!
Oh yeah, Gunther is right! Look at him!
My favourite is some words having different pronouns in different regions. Like der/die/das Nutella, der Butter, das Joghurt 😳
Who the fuck says “der Butter” or “das Joghurt”? Nutella is difficult, because it’s a name.
Einige Regionen in Bayern. In Teilen Österreichs auch gerne feminin die Joghurt
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Because we already had a word for “computer” (literally: calculator) which had the male article so when we started using the English word “computer” we kept the article :)
Computer means Rechner, which is obviously male, because women can’t math. It’s easy if you just think about it.
I’m really curious what the process for it forming was like too but just gonna put it out there that gender in language generally has more to do with tracking what the word is than literally thinking stuff has gender. Originally there was a proposal to call it left and right to make it clear that it’s just a split.
In gendered languages the “gender” of things other than people doesn’t really relate to human gender at all. It’s just a grammatical construct.
Mostly yes, but a few gendered languages (Wikipedia lists the Yeniseian and most Dravidian languages, Dizi and Zande) use strict semantic criteria, so that the grammatical gender does correlate strictly with the actual gender 99% of the time.
Mädchen is neuter because it is diminuitive.
Das Häuschen Das Bäumchen Das Hügelchen
and so on. Diminuitive is always neuter, and Mädchen is diminuitive of Magd (or Maid, I forgot).
Girl = neutral (das Mädchen)
No idea why lol.
Mädchen is a diminutive, and all diminutives are grammatically neutral.
It’s the same in Dutch btw, and my girlfriend who is learning Dutch is frequently abusing this as a cheat code: whenever she doesn’t know the gender of a word, she’ll just use the diminutive and it will automatically be neutral.
I just might have just learned smth about my native language.
I think it’s das Mädchen because it’s a sort of diminutive (by use of chen). But it’s been a while since I studied German.
Aber was machen Sachen :o
Afaik it comes from Magd, which is female lol.
related to maid, mädel. confer “maiden” in English
Correct, all diminutives are neuter in German. In this instance the base word is die Magd (historically the maiden, nowadays the maid), which is grammatically female.
In contrast to Mädchen the equivalent for Junge, „Jüngchen“, has not entered officialese and is seldomly used in colloquial language.
And it is also „das Jüngchen“.
Austrians: da buah
Ohh oui, french numbers I think they go mental after 69 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
70: 60+10 (soixante-dix)
91: 4x20+11 (quatre-vingt-onze)
Why? No clue I am not french.
May or may not have some relation, but next to France/part of, lies the Basque country, where all numbers under 100 are base 20+10, except 11 and 19…
57: 2×20+10+7 (berr-ogei-ta-hama-zazpi)
79: 3×20+19 (hiru-r-ogei-ta-hemeretzi)
French (in Belgium, Switzerland, and former colonies) also allows simple base 10:
70: 70 (septante)
91: 90+1 (nonante-et-un)
…so the geographic location seems to have an impact.
And just next to it, in Spain, everything is base 10… except 11 to 15 change the order from n×10+m, into 1+10 to 5+10.
Italian does the same, except it’s 11 to 16… just like in French.
English has a hiccup with eleven and twelve, then goes to n-teen, before going base 10 with n×10+m above 20.
German does the same, except it goes to m+n×10 above 20.
Overall, 20 seems to be a magic number, France just seems to have mixed in different ways of using it.
Ah, yes the famous quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (commonly pronounced “quatre-vingt-deez-nuts”). Numbers are quite a mouthful in French. One of the reasons I erased it from my memory the moment I didn’t need it no more.
No idea why lol.
This always confused me, even as a native speaker so I looked it up some. Ultimately it’s because modern German is the confluence of multiple older, historic languages one of which came from a tree with a strict male/female rule for nouns while the other one’s grammar defaulted to a neutral case.
As languages merge or adopt from others they often becomes a conjoined mess of multiple rules coexisting at the same time. A contemporary example is that in English the plural of a word is usually formed by attaching the suffix “s” to the singular form, aka house becomes houses. However there’s plenty of exceptions (mouse, mice) in particular if the words stem from a different language (octopus, octopi but nowadays octotuses is also acceptable). In that sense to people not privy to the etymology of words and who only study/learn the language per se there would be no perfectly accurate mechanism to predict the plural of a word.
Also bonus content:
singular: “das Mädchen” (neutral) - the girl
plural: “die Mädchen” (female) - the girls
So in the plural form you have to use a female article again, but the actual spelling of the word is unchanged. Go figure 🤷♂️ 🇩🇪.
In plural every gender has the article “die”
Well at least it consistently unlogical. But wait: it actually depends on the grammatical case for example:
die Mädchen = the girls das Haus der Mädchen = the house of the girls // the girls’ house
So depending on context male, female, neutral articles are all used (der Mädchen, die Mädchen, das Mädchen) 🤷♂️
That’s not a male article, that’s the genitive plural article
“Die” is always the plural article:
DAS Auto - DIE Autos / DER Baum - DIE Bäume / DIE Fliege - DIE Fliegen /
The simple past of read is read, but you pronounce it like red. I assume ever language on earth has its quirks.
It was to make the male seem more important. Even in English the word “woman” comes from “wife man”. Everything was about the pecking order in history. Gender bias was a major part of that.
That’s a misrepresentation of old English. Man used to be neutral, and was modified by were and wif respectively for man and woman. Wife comes from woman, not the other way around.
I only speak English but I have always thought we should pronounce 11 through 19 as tendy one, tendy two, tendy three, tendy four… tendy nine, twenty.
so you pronounce eleven as tendy one?
Eleven through nineteen do not follow the same naming convention that the twentys, thirtys, forties and so on do. For example, fifty one, fifty two… Instead of eleven it should be tenty one. The pattern should match.
I don’t know why, but that’s disgusting
I hate to break it to you bub, but it appears that you don’t speak English either.
Huh?
Me whose native language conjugates verbs and adjectives according to subject’s gender:
wasz język nie wymaga sprecyzowania płci podmiotu w każdym zdaniu?
Also Chinese kind of has gendered pronouns: 你 and 妳, both mean ‘you’ and are pronounced the same but the latter is used in writing to address females specifically. Though this is Taiwanese Mandarin-specific.
edit: 他她 as well obviously
Yeah Chinese isn’t a perfect example with the existence of 你妳 and 他她, etc. Though to be fair I’ve noticed native Chinese speakers get pretty confused by English pronouns and tend to mix them up since it’s mostly optional in Cheese.
Optional in cheese sounds like a lactose intolerant thing (my autocorrect tried putting in optimal and lacrosse, which was funny to me)
How about Optimal Cheese Macross
I was so confused when I saw your comment abou lactose intolerance and was wondering what it has to do with “optional in Chinese.” It took longer that I’d like to admit to realize that the original comment and yours said “cheese.”
In Finnish: hän = he/she. No need for gendered pronouns.
Wow! TIL this. I was under the impression that all European languages have gendered pronouns.
Finnish has ‘hän’ which is an ungendered pronoun. We use that for pets. Often we refer to people instead as ‘se’ which means ‘it’.
Honestly I wish English was less gendered than it is.
E.g. Nephew/Niece, why is there no proper gender-neutral one. This isn’t just for LGBTQ stuff, just seems silly to have everything gendered in general
The gender neutral for nephew/niece is nibling
See: Nibling
Nibling is a great word. But we need a neutral version of aunt or uncle.
nunt?
Aunticle
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Fair enough, learn a new thing each day haha
Altho I think it still says something about how we use English that I don’t think I’ve ever heard that used
Pibling (parent-sibling). Spanish speakers also have Titi (combining tio and Tia) and Italians (but NOT French) can use Zizi.
There’s also Unty and Auncle. I like Piblings though.
but NOT French
What happens if they try? Do they go to jail or is it just a fine?
The Académie Française shows up and threatens your family.
Zizi is French slang for “penis”
Oh! Yeah, I guess calling your relatives that could become slightly problematic… 😂
Agree. Your point still stands. I just like that word.
There is: cousin
A cousin is your aunt/uncle’s kid, a niece/nephew is your sibling’s kid
My language doesn’t even have a word for sibling which has annoyed me every since I learned English 15 years ago.
We have a pretty good genderless pronoun, but have also decided that to not assign a gender to a person makes them not human. I’ve been hoping we’d challenge that preconception. Anyone can call me, “it”, anytime.
Based, I feel the same
I call animals “it” sometimes cause their sex is wildly irrelevant to me, and people get so offended lmao
My native language is genderless so I really dislike all the gendered grammar and words in different languages. English is very easy but in other cases when you start to have a male and a female version of each word which sometimes can be irregular and give you the clue that ohh yeah this should be male but noooo it’s female and in many cases there is just simply no logic behind them it is just the way they are.
English is barely gendered. In Slavic languages, as someone said, verbs are conjugated differently based on gender. In Serbian for instance, to say “I saw him”, you would say “Video sam ga” if you were a man, and “Videla sam ga” if you were a woman. In Arabic I think even more things vary based on gender, like “to you” has different forms based on whether “you” are a man or a woman. It might not be specifically that, but I distinctly recall Arabic using gender-based forms for something that Slavic languages don’t.
Hell, German has three genders. “The” is translated der, die or das depending on the noun
Three genders, and 5 words for “the”: der, die, das, dem, den. Depending on the gender of the noun and its function in the sentence.
And uses some of those words for “the” to be different versions of different genders in different cases.
Der nominative male, der Dativ female.
But call also be “that” or “which” or “who” depending on context.
Not to mention declension of adjectives.
Different declination for all three genders plus plural, plus differences for negation, no article, definite article, indefinite article all in in nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, version
If Excel spreadsheets for different versions of “the” turn you on, then German is your language.
Yeah Arabic is pretty gendered
German even has a neutral gender because two aren’t enough of a headache lol
Plus 4 cases which makes it so that there are 16 (Masc, Fem, Neutr, Plural X 4 cases) different ways of typing an article depending on the gender of the word and what the word is doing whereas in English this is all replaced by “The”. And don’t forget about declining the adjective and the noun in some cases.
Rant over.
So just get the whole country to use one “the”, simple 😎
And then like half of the articles are “der” and you just have to use context to figure out which one it is
Edit: I was randomly reminded of this graffiti I saw in Berlin:
… Aaaand as it turns out, most European languages are gendered. At least more gendered than ours.
In most European languages you have to worry about misgendering a table.
I recently started very casually learning Chinese, this absolutely blew my mind along with the fact that verbs don’t have a billion different forms depending on time and the object of the sentence like all the other languages I know.
So there is 他／她, but only in writing so you can be very disrespectful and your conversation partner is none the wiser.
They don’t have pronouns in my mom’s native language so when she talks to me in English, she always mixes up he and she and it can get really confusing.
The argument seems to be that, in a language with ungendered pronouns, all genders are included, so you don’t need neopronouns for the purpose of inclusion. Nevertheless, you could still replace an ungendered pronoun with a neopronoun to be more accurate, or for other purposes.
For the lazy:
“Do you use gender pronouns?”
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In French (and probably many other languages) first person plural is more polite. People in England started defaulting to “you” as it was a safer bet socially, and “thou” fell out of use.
English also used thorn (þ) before for “th” but printing presses didn’t, and substituted “y”, which I suspect contributed.
Wikipedia confirms, in particular on this page on the expression ye olde.
Interestingly the you / thou distinction existed because of French / Latin influence (see the T-V distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T–V_distinction). Thou was generally for addressing intimate / inferiors. English just drifted to using the more formal “you” across time and dropped the thou.
Well, when thou disappeared you took it’s place.
No you
Interestingly, written Chinese does have a gendered ‘she’ pronoun, 她, but it’s pronounced the same as the male one, and it’s a recent invention meant specifically to improve compatibility with Western languages.
Also, if you want a sample of how this works in English, the narrator / main character of Ann Leckie’s “Ancillary” trilogy doesn’t understand gendered pronouns and constantly gets them mixed up.
This is true today but for a while in the 20th century 伊 was used for “she”
Except in that trilogy, in their language everyone’s a “she”. So, it’s not like the narrator constantly flips back and forth between “he” and “she” randomly, it’s just that the default is “she” when talking about a person, and the narrator has to make a real effort to use “he” when it’s appropriate.
It’s different following a story from someone who speaks a language without genders (say Chinese) or one with different rules about genders (Spanish). A Chinese person will often just use the wrong gender, and won’t be consistent about it. What’s really weird is that in Spanish the gender goes with the object being possessed, not with the possessor of the object. The third person pronouns don’t have gender of their own, it’s just “su” or “sus”. So, “his house” is “la suya” because houses are female, her books are “los suyos” because books are male. That leads to all kinds of confusion over things like “his wife’s friend” or “her brother’s job” when trying to translate to English on the fly.
