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.
Comment on Girl power
RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago[deleted]
flora_explora@beehaw.org 7 months ago
RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months 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 7 months 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.
RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Obviously partriarchies exist and they probably originated in the grammatical masculine as the default.
But I doubt that patriarchal power or even violence is a systemic issue in Germany today and I think addressing it via centrally trying to change the language is laughable.
Let’s take Turkey for example: Turkish is gender neutral, there is no grammatical gender. How did that help equal rights?
zaphod@sopuli.xyz 7 months 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.