Comment on Girl power
zaphod@sopuli.xyz 1 month agoThey didn’t ban the usage of both forms, they banned the usage of new forms, that try to combine masculine and feminine into a gender-neutral form, in administrative texts.
Comment on Girl power
zaphod@sopuli.xyz 1 month agoThey didn’t ban the usage of both forms, they banned the usage of new forms, that try to combine masculine and feminine into a gender-neutral form, in administrative texts.
RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
zaphod@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Yes and no, language is how it’s used, not necessarily the rules someone once wrote down. The problem is if you have a generic form and you start using a different form for women the generic form stops being generic. Eventually everyone will settle on some new generic form or resurrect some old form and we can move on to other problems.
flora_explora@beehaw.org 1 month ago
What? How can this be true? “The generic masculine is gender-neutral”? You see where you made a mistake? German and most other languages revolve around a pretty strong gender hierarchy and patriarchy. So no, its default is definitely not gender neutral! I would be in favor of a true neutral. But we would have to come up with a new form.
RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Yes, it is. It’s a grammatical construct. When someone said “alle Schüler” in the year 2000, they meant all students regardless of their genders. If some meant explicitly male students they’d said “alle männlichen Schüler” for clarity.
flora_explora@beehaw.org 1 month ago
Nope, seeing men as the default and considering everyone else as a secondary option is already a discrimination of the latter. I know that “alle Schüler” is referring to everyone in class, but it is not gender neutral. It assumes male students if not specified otherwise.