Memes

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

Same in Italian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am pretty sure gender norms, even strict ones, occur to grammatically genderless languages, like Hungarian IIRC. So if a Hungarian student used a '*' to be non-binary inclusive, this could not have meaning in this society, because their language is genderless? I doubt it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a deeply laughable situation.

So in German we have different forms of job descriptions depending if the gender of the person. So doctor would be Arzt for a dude and Ärztin for a lass. Now when talking about a mixed gender group of doctors, the plural form of the masculine form would be generally used. This kinda leads to people always thinking about a group of male doctors. To mitigate that, there's been multiple attempts to make more inclusive forms. For the most time listing both forms was the go to, as in Ärzte und Ärztinnen. The gender star was an attempt to combine it into Ärzt*Innen in which the star was read as a little pause. Other ways to write that pause include ÄrztInnen where you just capitalize the I and my favourite Ärzt:Innen, as the : is read as a pause by screen readers while the star is read as it's own word by then. My actual favourite form however is gendering after Phettberg which entirely gets rid of the gender and builds a different plural: Ärztis. It also sounds cute and I'm all for more cuteness. That form sadly is used nowhere.

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

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