Gendering weirds language
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WTF of my day: So, this may be hard to translate. So, some explanations first:
The German language has this property where the ending of a word determines its gender. "Der Schüler" is a male pupil, "Die Schülerin" is a female pupil. This, of course, leads to sometimes annoying effects where you have to write both versions in order to be inclusive. Sometimes you simply do it by writing both words "Schüler & Schülerinnen", sometimes you capitalize the I ("SchülerInnen") or you use a * (Schüler*innen) and so on. It's called "gendern".
It's a bit of a mess but, well, it's not the end of the world. For me, at least.
For others, it's the Harbinger of Ragnarök, will usher in Felwinter and lead to the Desolation of All The Things.
Case in point, a politician of our AfD (henceforth called Alliance for Dipshits) was frothing at the mouth due to an article. You see, the male version of a driver while driving is "Der Fahrer" while you might call the female pendant "Die Fahrende". (Highlighted the pertinent end for you)
Which resulted in this:
Translation:
The daily gender idiocy: Now even driving lanes (Fahrspur) are gendered. How about using the good old Duden dictionary instead of left-green ideology?
He obviously thought "Fahrspurende" to be the female version of the word "Fahrspur".
First of all, we Germans only use gendered words for stuff which actually can be gendered (a traffic lane is most definitely not one of those!), secondly, he fell prey to another German property: The habit of simply attaching words after words to yield unwieldy word monsters (Infamous example: Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft - a company for steam boats on the river Donau)
A simple hyphen will make clear where he went wrong:
The newspaper meant a "Fahrspur-Ende". The end of a traffic lane.
Saw that and had some short discussion about it already this morning. I wrote about this on here before, but let's make a thread for it this time, so a bit of a lengthy post to follow...
My first comment was "might as well be satirical." Now, given the general propensity of politicians from said party to spew braindead bullshit, that's not very likely, especially considering the last two sentences. But if you ignored this evidence for the posterior and were to only look at the first sentence, I'd give this a reasonable prior probability.
As you might expect if you follow some of the more personal stuff I wrote in Status / Lounge / etc. I encounter the whole gendering issue somewhat regularly as a member of the LGBTIAQWTFBBQ+ community, and always catch shit if I voice my sentiments against it. In my opinion, the whole thing is ridiculous, ever changing in demands what the "correct" gendering of the day is, and intellectually dishonest.
It starts with what used to be the generally accepted way to form a plural, the "generic masculine" form. Which is to say, plural words are always masculine. Now, just like the gender of words doesn't say anything about the sex of the person/thing itself, neither does the plural form imply an "all male" group. There are special forms of plurals for females, e.g. "Schülerinnen" would be an all female group of pupils, but that doesn't mean that generally speaking "(die) Schüler" means a male only group. That's just not how the language works. Case in point: Not all cats are female, not all dogs are male, and worker bees ("Die Drone") actually are male despite the grammatically female gender. Genus and Sexus are not the same, at best they often coincide.
But the intellectually dishonest debate now starts from the accusation that if I say, e.g., "Lehrer und Schüler" I explicitly exclude the female ones, and so political correctness has forced everyone to extremely longwinded phrases like "Lehrerinnen und Lehrer, Schülerinnen und Schüler." (The female form absolutely has to go first. I don't mind that part, just pointing it out.)
Tangential thought experiment: what do you call the pupils of a class "6a" that happens to have only 3 pupils? I'd simply call them "Schüler der Klasse 6a", but if you have to do "Schülerinnen und Schüler der Klasse 6a" you are factually wrong, because there is either only one male or only one female pupil. The phrase you used implies at least 4 people in total.Since these constructions are so awkward, some people have come up with different constructions that basically make use of a present participle form. What used to be "Studenten" had to become "Studentinnen und Studenten", so they instead came up with "Studierende". Now "der Studierende" (male) and "die Studierende" (female) have the same form, and so does the plural "die Studierenden". Btw., for your case above it normally is "die Fahrerin". The "die Fahrende" is the form described here that explicitly tries to avoid this, but you'd never mix the two as "der Fahrer und die Fahrende". Of course, that's also grammatical non-sense in my opinion (but this is harder to argue conclusively, you might call me wrong on this), as the participle construction of "Student" implies a status whereas a "Studierender" implies an ongoing action. When you go to the students' canteen, most of the "Studierende" eating there aren't, in fact, studying right now. For comparison to English, a chemistry student is someone who "studies chemistry", not necessarily someone who is "studying chemistry" right now.
I find these constructions grammatically unpleasant, but not as bad as the ones in the previous and next paragraph.Yet a different way to do this would be the more classical contraction "Schüler/-innen" and the extremely terrible modern "SchülerInnen". With a "Binnen-I", i.e. a capital latter in the middle of the word. That's just awful. How do you even pronounce that? I've always read it as "Schülerinnen", again ignoring the whole gendering nonsense and pretending it's just using the female plural for everything. But I recently heard one radio broadcaster actually make a pause while pronouncing it, literally saying it like "Schüler Innen".
And it gets worse, last week I saw the word "AnwaltInnen". What the heck is that? The respective plurals are "Anwälte" and "Anwältinnen". Now you have fucked up both forms. Equality at last!Now comes the kicker: When I hypothetically said "die Schüler" above, I really didn't care about the pupils' gender in whatever statement I (didn't) make. I didn't even mention anyone's gender to being with because it didn't matter at all to what I wanted to say. Now the people who think they are fighting against discrimination make you say "Schülerinnen und Schüler" to put things on equal footing, but they have explicitly put gender into a statement that was completely neutral before. And lo and behold, they have actually excluded all people of so called "third", indefinite or non-binary gender. Before someone complains about snowflakes, there are not only actual trans-people and an ever-growing host of less well-defined "gender-fluid" etc. people, but also intersexual people. "These are extremely rare" (roughly about 1 in 5000) is not a good argument in a country of 80 million people, as there actually are more than a few people like this, so the state has finally acknowledged their existence by allowing a third option on official documents that for whatever reason need to state the sex.
So how do you address these people that I never excluded to begin with, but you now explicitly excluded by bringing in gender into a sentence where it is completely irrelevant? Over the last years there have been several, constantly changing, new constructions. All awful from a language point of view. Currently it seems to have settled on a "Gendersternchen", i.e. you now write it as "Schüler*innen". I don't know if and how you actually pronounce that too. Officially, maybe you do, but I haven't heard it so far so I assume even the most hardcore proponents of this deep down know this is far too tiring and annoying to actually do.There's people who fight for legitimate causes when it comes to equal rights, be that feminists or intersexual/transsexual activists. And then there's people who fight imaginary issues that don't exist, and create the opposite of acceptance.
Personally, I refuse to use any of that bullshit, to the point of avoiding it even in singular if it's not needed. I wouldn't gender, e.g., "Du Idiot" to "Du Idiotin". I recently called the female project lead coworker something like "Projektleiter ist Frau <surname>" in an email. I know the woman is a woman, but unlike all the gender talk I actually don't make any distinctions for someone in their work role by their gender.
The more ridiculous it gets, the more I am against any form of it.
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I can't get used to "latinx" as a neutral version of latino/latina. Not on an ideological basis; it's just unwieldy.
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@error said in Gendering weirds language:
I can't get used to "latinx" as a neutral version of latino/latina.
To me, latino is already neutral, but I'm an ESL speaker so I'm likely wrong about that.
Latinx sounds like "Malcolm X".
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Also, the German word for girl is das Mädchen - in other words, it's a neuter noun, not feminine. Grammatical gender don't make no sense sometimes...
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Is there ever a case where grammatical gender adds any clarity, especially since it doesn't always line up with real gender?
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@topspin said in Gendering weirds language:
@error said in Gendering weirds language:
I can't get used to "latinx" as a neutral version of latino/latina.
To me, latino is already neutral, but I'm an ESL speaker so I'm likely wrong about that.
Latinx sounds like "Malcolm X".Español as a second language? Me, too! Yeah, "latinx" sounds weird and is completely unnecessary, which means it's here to stay.
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@lolwhat said in Gendering weirds language:
Grammatical gender don't make no sense sometimes...
Language is hard is
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@error At least us English speakers don't do shit with grammatical gender, and declension is generally limited to pronouns.
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Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
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@error James, while John had had "had", had had "had had"; "had had" had had a better effect on the teacher.
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It is especially fun to learn a gendered language while already knowing a different gendered language. Why is la table suddenly feminine? I'm used to it being masculine, goddammit!
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@topspin said in Gendering weirds language:
@error said in Gendering weirds language:
I can't get used to "latinx" as a neutral version of latino/latina.
To me, latino is already neutral, but I'm an ESL speaker so I'm likely wrong about that.
Latinx sounds like "Malcolm X".Latino is an adjective, and like all Spanish adjectives, you have to conjugate it so that it takes the same gender as the noun it's describing.
When you're describing a masculine noun (ends with -o), you use the masculine form Latino.
When you're describing a feminine noun (ends with -a), you use the feminine form Latina.
When you're describing a non-gendered noun (ends with anything else, usually -e except for loanwords), you use the neutral form Latino.
When you're describing a group of people, and the group is of mixed genders, you use the neutral form Latino.
Note that Latino and Latino are different. The English word Latino (not in italics) is always neutral/non gendered because English nouns and adjectives don't have grammatical gender.
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@lolwhat said in Gendering weirds language:
Also, the German word for girl is das Mädchen - in other words, it's a neuter noun, not feminine. Grammatical gender don't make no sense sometimes...
Not sure of English (or German) terminology, but the chen suffix makes things smaller and is always neuter. The same happens in Dutch: het meisje, derived from de meid which is gramatically female and usually refers to household personnel.
Don't ask me about the etymology either.
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@PleegWat said in Gendering weirds language:
@lolwhat said in Gendering weirds language:
Also, the German word for girl is das Mädchen - in other words, it's a neuter noun, not feminine. Grammatical gender don't make no sense sometimes...
Not sure of English (or German) terminology, but the chen suffix makes things smaller and is always neuter. The same happens in Dutch: het meisje, derived from de meid which is gramatically female and usually refers to household personnel.
Don't ask me about the etymology either.
Its etymology stems from the diminutive form of the word “Magd”, i.e. maid, but that usage is long gone.
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@aitap said in Gendering weirds language:
It is especially fun to learn a gendered language while already knowing a different gendered language. Why is la table suddenly feminine? I'm used to it being masculine, goddammit!
One reason the French and the Germans don't get along is that one thinks the moon is male and the sun female while the other insists it's the other way round.
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@error said in Gendering weirds language:
I can't get used to "latinx" as a neutral version of latino/latina. Not on an ideological basis; it's just unwieldy.
If I don't say Hispanic, I will say Latin. The X is unnecessary.
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@aitap said in Gendering weirds language:
It is especially fun to learn a gendered language while already knowing a different gendered language. Why is la table suddenly feminine? I'm used to it being masculine, goddammit!
I learned German while already knowing Polish and it was no fun at all.
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Re: genderizing. In Polish language, some job titles have masculine and feminine forms, but some have only masculine. Moreover, some feminine job titles sound very condescending so they're generally avoided. A few years ago, our feminists lobbied to make female forms more widely used, and when there's none - make up one. The problem is, in many cases where it's only masculine, the obvious feminine form has been taken by some semi-related item - for example:
- marynarz = sailor; marynarka = jacket
- pilot = pilot; pilotka = old school pilot hat
- żołnierz = soldier; żołnierka = the life of a soldier
- tokarz = lathe operator; tokarka = lathe
There are also some word pairs that sound like it should be the same job but it isn't.
- sekretarz = secretary (of State); sekretarka = secretary (office assistant)
- opiekun = carer; opiekunka = nanny
- ochroniarz = private guard; ochroniarka = kindergarten teacher (archaic)
The movement peaked when one of our ministers demanded to be referred to as "ministra", after which nobody took her seriously anymore. I haven't heard any discussion about this topic since then.
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Neither English or Japanese has "gendered" language in the way I understand German/Spanish to work. There's plenty of English-language stuff with gender (pronouns), but we know where that belongs
Japanese doesn't have really have gendered pronouns.
Sure, there's 彼女 (she/her) and 彼 or 彼氏 (he/him), but when would you use them?
- we omit subjects most of the time because it's implied ("Want another drink?")
- we use names when subject is unclear, even in one-one conversations ("Does Yuki want another drink?")
- we use titles for unknown names ("Would the other Customer-san like another drink?")
- we use "she" and "he" to also mean girlfriend/boyfriend ("Would She like another drink?"), so we need to be careful of implying what we don't know about a relationship status
They do get used, but not anything like English/etc.
Interestingly enough, using gender as an adjective ("masculine, manly") is somewhat gender neutral. For example.
- Garlic is a masculine flavor, but women order it without even thinking of it as not being lady-like
- Sweet is a feminine flavor, and men order it without feeling emasculated
I showed an acquaintance a picture of some food I made, and he said「女子力高い ！」, which is a string of three words: girl strength high! I was a bit offended, it wasn't even like some dainty salad.
Then I learned it's a kind of gender-neutral complement. Nice home cooking, paying attention to your health, dressing nicely, those sorts of things.
This is all still very weird to me. So far as I can tell, the only people who get offended about all this are the LET (Loser English Teachers) who bitch on the forums and in Meetups.
To put LET in context, the only qualifications needed to become an "English Teacher" is a speaking native English and a desire to live in Japan (small town, not big city), while earning virtually no money, It's not real teaching, just knowing native English so you can assist a real teacher. It's a wonderfully fun gig for a few years in your 20s, but you get zero skills out of it, just bitter about how much Japan hates foreigners. You graduate from English Teach to Loser English Teacher once the bitterness sets in, or 30.
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I already discussed "inclusive writing" in French in other posts (but searching... [insert memes]), about everything that was said for German applies to French here, including how some people gets their panties in a bunch about it (either by stridently pushing for it, or by stridently pushing against it) while most people don't give a fuck about it.
The one
thing about "inclusive writing" is that properly you're supposed to use a special character in between bits of the word (so it's not étudiant.e but, uh, let me Google-copy-paste that... étudiant·e), but of course being a special character many people either don't know or don't bother with it, so you can see a regular dot, or a dash, or a slash, or... well, anything that the typist thought of, really.The other
bit is that no-one seems to agree on how those forms should actually be written when there is a plural (the -s applies to both forms, so you might see étudiant·es or étudiants·es, or étudiant·e·s) or when the female ending is not just adding a -e but also changes an accent on previous letters, which is very common in French (e.g. écolier becomes écolière for the feminine, so should it be écolier·e, écolièr·e, écolier·ère?). Combining both mean that "all pupils" might be written écoliers·ères or écolie·re·s or anything else, really.
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@topspin said in Gendering weirds language:
@error said in Gendering weirds language:
I can't get used to "latinx" as a neutral version of latino/latina.
To me, latino is already neutral, but I'm an ESL speaker so I'm likely wrong about that.
I can't speak for all "latins", but not really. It's male. The plural "latinos" however is somewhat neutral because you have to pick one out of "latinos" and "latinas", and you pick "latinos"... because.
On the other hand, the word for person is a female word1, so for describing a group of people you'd use the adverb "latinas" and it would be ungrammatical to use "latinos". shrug
Fake edit:
d by @GuyWhoKilledBear by just 11 hours.1In the four languages I'm thinking of, at least.
Latinx sounds like "Malcolm X".
To a latino, it sounds like "la-tinks".
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@da-Doctah said in Gendering weirds language:
@aitap said in Gendering weirds language:
It is especially fun to learn a gendered language while already knowing a different gendered language. Why is la table suddenly feminine? I'm used to it being masculine, goddammit!
One reason the French and the Germans don't get along is that one thinks the moon is male and the sun female while the other insists it's the other way round.
TRWTF is thinking the Moon (which has an almost-monthly cycle) is male and the Sun (which comes every day) is female.
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@Gąska said in Gendering weirds language:
pilot = pilot; pilotka = old school pilot hat
Beats Português.
- piloto = pilot
- pilota = small dick
For some reason the word for a female pilot is kept as "piloto".
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@Zecc said in Gendering weirds language:
pilota = small dick
See also: пилотка (the second, offensive meaning)
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@Zecc said in Gendering weirds language:
@topspin said in Gendering weirds language:
@error said in Gendering weirds language:
I can't get used to "latinx" as a neutral version of latino/latina.
To me, latino is already neutral, but I'm an ESL speaker so I'm likely wrong about that.
I can't speak for all "latins", but not really. It's male. The plural "latinos" however is somewhat neutral because you have to pick one out of "latinos" and "latinas", and you pick "latinos"... because.
To clarify, I was assuming (wrongly, it seems) that we're talking about English words there. I don't speak Spanish so I have no notion of what does or doesn't sound correct there.
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@lolwhat said in Gendering weirds language:
Also, the German word for girl is das Mädchen - in other words, it's a neuter noun, not feminine. Grammatical gender don't make no sense sometimes...
Mädchen is a diminutive of Mädel, “girl”, or “Magd”, “maiden”, and so literally means “little girl”. As in Dutch (like @PleegWat pointed out), though, the diminutive has become the normal word to refer to a young female human. Diminutives are always neuter in German (and Dutch) and so should technically be referred to using the appropriate pronouns. In German, this is more common than in Dutch, as far as I know: Dutch-speakers are pretty much guaranteed to use feminine pronouns to refer to anyone they have already called meisje, German-speakers may (often?) use neuter ones instead.
@mikehurley said in Gendering weirds language:
Is there ever a case where grammatical gender adds any clarity, especially since it doesn't always line up with real gender?
In languages with grammatical genders, there are usually plenty of words that are much the same (especially in pronunciation; spelling may differ) and are distinguished only by their gender. Evolution of the language often has made this less clear than it was once upon a time, though.
@Gąska said in Gendering weirds language:
@aitap said in Gendering weirds language:
It is especially fun to learn a gendered language while already knowing a different gendered language. Why is la table suddenly feminine? I'm used to it being masculine, goddammit!
I learned German while already knowing Polish and it was no fun at all.
Even with languages as closely related as Dutch and German, there are differences that will catch you out. Of course, this is exacerbated because standard Dutch has mostly rolled masculine and feminine genders into one. Dialects may differ and keep up the distinction, but even there, under the influence of standard Dutch, many speakers have lost intuitive grasp of gender and just refer to everything using masculine pronouns.
@PleegWat said in Gendering weirds language:
@lolwhat said in Gendering weirds language:
Also, the German word for girl is das Mädchen - in other words, it's a neuter noun, not feminine. Grammatical gender don't make no sense sometimes...
Not sure of English (or German) terminology, but the chen suffix makes things smaller and is always neuter. The same happens in Dutch: het meisje, derived from de meid which is gramatically female and usually refers to household personnel.
Don't ask me about the etymology either.
Meid being used for household staff is just an extension of those usually being older girls or young women. People also use it quite frequently in the same way English-speakers use “girl” to refer to a grown woman, for example.
As for using gendered language: Dutch seems to have been going the other way in recent decades. Like German, Dutch has feminine versions of most nouns: a kapper is a hairdresser in general, a kapster is a specifically female hairdresser; a leraar is a teacher, a lerares is a female teacher; etc. (Note that unlike German, there are many different suffixes to indicate the feminine form of the word: -ster, -es, -in, -se, -e, -ice, etc. Some of these are loan-words, though, mainly from French.)
However, in most cases, modern women appear to want to be called by the base/male form, so that the specifically feminine form seems to be falling out of use. A female bus driver is usually not a buschauffeuse but buschauffeur like a male one, for example. (Actually: vrouwelijke buschauffeur, literally “female bus driver” is the form seemingly preferred by news media, which annoys me because nobody ever says “male bus driver” when the gender is irrelevant to the thing being discussed, but they do use “female bus driver” under the exact same circumstances.)
Also, there’s the exception of words ending in -man: brandweerman (“fireman”) has the feminine form brandweervrouw (“firewoman”). I would guess this is because it is just odd to refer to a woman as “man”.
About the only example I can think of of strained language is something that appears to have fallen back out of favour, luckily: use of mens (“human” or “person”) instead of man, in order to also include women. For example, there is the verb bemannen, “to crew”, or literally: “to man”. In some circles, this becomes the awkward bemensen, lit. “to people”
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@topspin said in Gendering weirds language:
So how do you address these people that I never excluded to begin with, but you now explicitly excluded by bringing in gender into a sentence where it is completely irrelevant?
Regexps?
(I know, the Bad Idea™ Thread is
.)
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@Gąska said in Gendering weirds language:
I learned German (...) and it was no fun at all.
: What did you expect? We don't joke here.
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@Gąska said in Gendering weirds language:
There are also some word pairs that sound like it should be the same job but it isn't.
[...]- ochroniarz = private guard; ochroniarka = kindergarten teacher (archaic)
This explains soooooooo much! Are you sure that it's not the same job to Polish eyes?
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@Zerosquare said in Gendering weirds language:
@Gąska said in Gendering weirds language:
I learned German (...) and it was no fun at all.
: What did you expect? We don't joke here.Papers, please! I need to see your license for the Allowance To Use Expressions Of Humor!
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@Rhywden said in Gendering weirds language:
@Gąska said in Gendering weirds language:
There are also some word pairs that sound like it should be the same job but it isn't.
[...]- ochroniarz = private guard; ochroniarka = kindergarten teacher (archaic)
This explains soooooooo much! Are you sure that it's not the same job to Polish eyes?
They don't hire disabled retirees in kindergartens.
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@Gurth said in Gendering weirds language:
As for using gendered language: Dutch seems to have been going the other way in recent decades. Like German, Dutch has feminine versions of most nouns: a kapper is a hairdresser in general, a kapster is a specifically female hairdresser; a leraar is a teacher, a lerares is a female teacher; etc. (Note that unlike German, there are many different suffixes to indicate the feminine form of the word: -ster, -es, -in, -se, -e, -ice, etc. Some of these are loan-words, though, mainly from French.)
However, in most cases, modern women appear to want to be called by the base/male form, so that the specifically feminine form seems to be falling out of use. A female bus driver is usually not a buschauffeuse but buschauffeur like a male one, for example. (Actually: vrouwelijke buschauffeur, literally “female bus driver” is the form seemingly preferred by news media, which annoys me because nobody ever says “male bus driver” when the gender is irrelevant to the thing being discussed, but they do use “female bus driver” under the exact same circumstances.)
Also, there’s the exception of words ending in -man: brandweerman (“fireman”) has the feminine form brandweervrouw (“firewoman”). I would guess this is because it is just odd to refer to a woman as “man”.
And then there's also the weird case like @Gąska already indicated for Polish: A secretary of state uses the male form 'secretaris', but an office secretary uses the female form 'secretaresse', also regardless of their actual gender.
In job ads, function titles are often suffixed 'M/V', for 'Man/Vrouw', which translates as 'Man/Woman', presumably to indicate both genders can apply. Though I don't pay much attention and it may have fallen out of favour.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Gendering weirds language:
When you're describing a non-gendered noun (ends with anything else, usually -e except for loanwords), you use the neutral form Latino.
This is part of the issue though. The neutral form is almost universally the same as the male form.
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@PleegWat said in Gendering weirds language:
And then there's also the weird case like @Gąska already indicated for Polish: A secretary of state uses the male form 'secretaris', but an office secretary uses the female form 'secretaresse', also regardless of their actual gender.
That is quite a special case, unrelated to particular language. AFAIK this is based on one particular case where group of friends distributed state position among themselves and the "steel one" (they all used nicknames like that) was left with the position of a secretary. They made fun of him for being just a clerk, but in the end he SHOWED THEM ALL!
But I might be wrong, maybe this was already a thing at the beginning of 20th century, somewhere?In my own mother tongue, the word for "secretary as a leader" is completely different (it's actually calque made by translating the word "secret") and available in both genders with equal meaning. Actually, the masculine version "secretary" is also a furniture (just like in german). That was not such a big problems before WW2 (both genders of "secretary" are quite often seen/herd in 1930s/1940s movies), but apparently in 1950s it was too popular source of jokes about generals' desk with many drawers....
now that I think about it... that Sekretär/Sekretär dual meaning should have been also a popular source of jokes in GDR, but Ulbricht still was "Erster Sekretär". Maybe the jokes were forbidden 
?
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@error_bot dinosaur-comics gendered nouns
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Dinosaur Comics said in http://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1916 :
okay so i kinda had more positive things i wanted to say about gendered nouns today but t-rex would not allow it; i will try again tomorrow
each tooth in your mouth is a sexy lady to the french! and every night you brush them all with an equally feminine toothbrush. yowza.
genders to upside nouns, OR, utahraptor's table has seen some Things
(via http://www.ohnorobot.com/index.php?s=gendered+nouns&Search=Search&comic=23)
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@error_bot dinosaur-comics gendered nouns are good
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Dinosaur Comics said in http://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1917 :
the language we use affects the thoughts we think! or, in french: the female language we use affects the female thoughts we think!
do the hypothetical german women and spanish men i've imagined know that i am free tonight??
APPARENTLY the longer i go without eating chicken wings, the more characters discuss how delicious they are in my writing
(via http://www.ohnorobot.com/index.php?s=gendered+nouns+are+good&Search=Search&comic=23)
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@Gąska said in Gendering weirds language:
Re: genderizing. In Polish language, some job titles have masculine and feminine forms, but some have only masculine. Moreover, some feminine job titles sound very condescending so they're generally avoided. A few years ago, our feminists lobbied to make female forms more widely used, and when there's none - make up one. The problem is, in many cases where it's only masculine, the obvious feminine form has been taken by some semi-related item - for example:
- marynarz = sailor; marynarka = jacket
- pilot = pilot; pilotka = old school pilot hat
- żołnierz = soldier; żołnierka = the life of a soldier
- tokarz = lathe operator; tokarka = lathe
There are also some word pairs that sound like it should be the same job but it isn't.
- sekretarz = secretary (of State); sekretarka = secretary (office assistant)
- opiekun = carer; opiekunka = nanny
- ochroniarz = private guard; ochroniarka = kindergarten teacher (archaic)
The movement peaked when one of our ministers demanded to be referred to as "ministra", after which nobody took her seriously anymore. I haven't heard any discussion about this topic since then.
My favorite is
- literat = writer (novelist); literatka = small glass (oficially for tea, but everyone knows it's really for vodka)
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Just a few weeks ago, I have seen related WTF bite somewhere. Some self-professed "linguist and English language expert" ranted about the singular they and SJWs in general and he finished with this gem:
If I wanted to use genderless language, I would speak German!
I think that after reading this topic, even the most hardcore single-language Americans could appreciate the deep
-ness of this quote.
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In Spanish when you describe a group of people with both men and women, you must use the masculine plural. Our former president and current vice-president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner famously used "todos y todas" (which means "all men and women" as opposed to "todos" which means "everyone") as her trademark. Most people didn't care, it was the least batshit insane thing she did. So the far left-wing wackos decided to make up their own "inclusive language" where you must refer to any group of people with more than one gender with a new plural form that ends with es. So "todes" instead of "todos". Even the left-wing lunatics speak this new inclusive language only for propaganda and indoctrination, and even when they do use it, they use it inconsistently.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in Gendering weirds language:
Just a few weeks ago, I have seen related WTF bite somewhere. Some self-professed "linguist and English language expert" ranted about the singular they and SJWs in general and he finished with this gem:
If I wanted to use genderless language, I would speak German!
I think that after reading this topic, even the most hardcore single-language Americans could appreciate the deep
-ness of this quote.
-
@Gąska said in Gendering weirds language:
They don't hire disabled retirees in kindergartens.
Discrimination!
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@Jaloopa said in Gendering weirds language:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Gendering weirds language:
When you're describing a non-gendered noun (ends with anything else, usually -e except for loanwords), you use the neutral form Latino.
This is part of the issue though. The neutral form is almost universally the same as the male form.
Come back to me with a real problem.
The only reason SJW types care about this, at all, is that the grammatical forms are called "male" and "female" and SJWs CTRL+F their way through life looking for things that are "male" so they can find the next thing to be offended about.
If the grammatical forms were called "Type A" and "Type B," or "Odd" and "Even", or "Jets" and "Giants", or "Ford" and "Chevy", or pretty much any other pair of opposites, nobody would give a shit.
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@PleegWat said in Gendering weirds language:
And then there's also the weird case like @Gąska already indicated for Polish: A secretary of state uses the male form 'secretaris', but an office secretary uses the female form 'secretaresse', also regardless of their actual gender.
There are men who say their job description is secretaresse? I’d not heard of it, and it kind of surprises me.
In job ads, function titles are often suffixed 'M/V', for 'Man/Vrouw', which translates as 'Man/Woman', presumably to indicate both genders can apply. Though I don't pay much attention and it may have fallen out of favour.
I think that fell out of use quite a while ago. It began appearing ca. the 1980s, I think, because of laws requiring equal treatment of/opportunities for men and women, and employers wanted to be seen to conform to those laws. Could even be it was mandatory, but if it was, then I doubt it still is.
@Kamil-Podlesak said in Gendering weirds language:
@PleegWat said in Gendering weirds language:
And then there's also the weird case like @Gąska already indicated for Polish: A secretary of state uses the male form 'secretaris', but an office secretary uses the female form 'secretaresse', also regardless of their actual gender.
That is quite a special case, unrelated to particular language. AFAIK this is based on one particular case where group of friends distributed state position among themselves and the "steel one" (they all used nicknames like that) was left with the position of a secretary. They made fun of him for being just a clerk, but in the end he SHOWED THEM ALL!
But I might be wrong, maybe this was already a thing at the beginning of 20th century, somewhere?In Dutch, I suspect that what happened is that women began being hired to perform secretarial functions ca. the late 19th, early 20th century, and as was normal at the time, the feminine form of the word came to be applied to this. But because of course you don’t give a woman the same kind of responsibilities as a man, the meanings of the masculine and feminine forms began to diverge. In Dutch, if you say you’re the secretaris for a club, people will assume you’re one of its leaders; say you’re a secretaresse and they’ll assume you type up things other people wrote.
the masculine version "secretary" is also a furniture (just like in german).
In Dutch, the name of that is the French loanword secretaire.
@topspin said in Gendering weirds language:
@Gurth said in Gendering weirds language:
vrouw
German joke that
the rest of usI don’t get?
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@Gurth well, not really funny, I guess. I just was confused as heck at first what that combination of letters was supposed to mean. Looked completely indecipherable. Then I realized that it’s basically the same as “Frau” but presumably pronounced a bit differently (I’m sure there’s some dialect here that’d pronounce it similarly), so it’s really quite simple but it just looks so weird to me.
To put it another way: now that I know what it means I think if I heard you say it I’d immediately understand, but the spelling looks completely alien.
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@Gurth said in Gendering weirds language:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in Gendering weirds language:
@PleegWat said in Gendering weirds language:
And then there's also the weird case like @Gąska already indicated for Polish: A secretary of state uses the male form 'secretaris', but an office secretary uses the female form 'secretaresse', also regardless of their actual gender.
That is quite a special case, unrelated to particular language. AFAIK this is based on one particular case where group of friends distributed state position among themselves and the "steel one" (they all used nicknames like that) was left with the position of a secretary. They made fun of him for being just a clerk, but in the end he SHOWED THEM ALL!
But I might be wrong, maybe this was already a thing at the beginning of 20th century, somewhere?In Dutch, I suspect that what happened is that women began being hired to perform secretarial functions ca. the late 19th, early 20th century, and as was normal at the time, the feminine form of the word came to be applied to this. But because of course you don’t give a woman the same kind of responsibilities as a man, the meanings of the masculine and feminine forms began to diverge.
My personal theory is similar, but slightly different. It wasn't about not giving women the responsibilities. It was about middle-aged not-so-successful men wanting a woman to order around and sit close to them all the time, instead of a man.
@topspin said in Gendering weirds language:
@Gurth said in Gendering weirds language:
vrouw
German joke that
the rest of usI don’t get?No. It just looks stupid.
