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| ▲ | MaKey 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It removes gender speech (Leser*innen becomes Leser), which can be awkward and hurt the reading flow. | | |
| ▲ | mmyrte 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It seems like you would lose meaning by automatically replacing words, no? Why would you want to censor your internet experience, just because you find someone else's use of language awkward? | | |
| ▲ | MaKey 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's still the same word, just as generic masculine. Gender speech isn't part of the German language but an add-on with no standardization (that's why there are multiple different approaches). Apart from looking awkward one of the main criticisms is that it hurts the reading flow. Following that point the extension improves the reading experience. | | |
| ▲ | mofeien 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | To prevent accusations of "masculinism" or sexism and to have a stronger case on having the goal to improve readability the add-on could include an option (or even make it default) to replace by generic feminine instead. | | |
| ▲ | MaKey 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The times where you have to try to appease small but vocal perpetually outraged groups are over. The German language has no generic feminine so adding it to the extension would contradict its goal. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > The times where you have to try to appease small but vocal perpetually outraged groups are over. Zwei Punkte: erstens, nein, such times are never over. Only thing that changes is who is outraged and by what. Zweitens, you're a demonstration of this right now by caring. To be clear, I'm not criticising you for this, you're allowed to care about stuff, but you're literally promoting an extension that rewrites someone else's word choice because you don't like it. Es ist dasselbe, und ist gründlich no different to how English Sprachbewahrer complain about the split infinitive in Star Trek's "to boldly go" or common use of the phrase "very unique" (unique means one-of-a-kind, how can you be "very" that?) > The German language has no generic feminine so adding it to the extension would contradict its goal. Die deutsche Sprache ist keine constructed language like Esperanto, whose rules come from a book, it's a natural language whose rules are discovered by observing those using it. As people change what they say and how they say it, so too does language change over time. The German language is what those using it, do. On the basis of the political adverts I see around here, this includes the conservative CDU borrowing die englische Phrase „Made in Germany“: https://www.cdu.de/aktuelles/cdu-deutschlands/mainzer-erklae... | |
| ▲ | mofeien 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The goal as stated on the extension page is to improve the readability of texts by replacing :, *, _ forms. So some customizability to the user's wishes would be quite nice. My calculus textbook (Königsberger, 2004) in university used alternating generic masculine and feminine in its exercises, which I found a delightful use of language. |
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| ▲ | lmf4lol 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Germany didn't have “gendered” language, until it was introduced some years ago. It’s a terrible reading experience and super annoying. Imagine the sentence: The teachers explain to their pupiles that the managers work only for the shareholders. it was Die Lehrer erklärten den Schülern, dass die Manager ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber arbeiten. and it became: Die Lehrer:innen erklärten den Schüler:innen, dass die Manager:innen ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber:innen arbeiten. It’s insane. | | |
| ▲ | mmyrte 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Forgive my ignorance, but it seems that there is more information in the "explicitly inclusive" form than the "implicitly inclusive" one. Doesn't the existence of the inclusive form allow you to explicitly use a non-inclusive form? So in this case Lehrer being explicitly male
and Lehrer:innen being explicitly inclusive? I appreciate that this seems to be an emotional topic, but if people choose to use language in a new way, would it not be best to not withhold that information from you as a reader? Someone else wrote that it's like using an ad-blocker, but if I were to read an article, I would want to read it in the exact form someone wrote it, no? It's a bit like Americans auto-replacing "fucking" with "f***g" in their browsers to avoid an annoyance, but they lose information in the process. | | |
| ▲ | lmf4lol 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | As a German, you don’t really loose any information. it was introduced somewhere in the 2020s and is not (yet) standardized - and probably wont be. We Germans know that the generic masculine includes both genders by default. It’s how we use the language. |
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| ▲ | pjc50 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | When was it introduced and why? It seems in the opposite direction of travel from many languages, which have been trying to make more gender neutral options available. (exception: Chinese didn't really bother with gendered pronouns until about the nineteenth century, due to the need to translate European languages, so some had to be introduced) | | |
| ▲ | lmf4lol 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | German feminist are looking for a long time to eliminate the generic masculine form. But unlike English, which allows you to use they/them to refer to both genders - and which i kind of like - German doesnt have such an option. So since my youth, multiple proposal have been put forward, among which the gender-star. Lehrer -> Lehrer*innen, Lehrer:innen. It was never taken seriously, until we got a left wing government (2022 or so) and since then its getting more and more used. Especially in progressive media. Some even speak it. With a short break that represents the star or :. Sounds pretty stupid, but people do it. In my mind, its the ultimate form of virtue signalling :-) but hey. to each their own. I just prefer to ignore it if possible | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It was definitely introduced before that point, I saw people complaining about it back in 2018 when I arrived in the country. |
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| ▲ | bmn__ 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | People use the extension for the same reason people use other content blockers against advertisement, notices banners, social media widgets and so on, namely not to suffer avoidable annoyances. > you would lose meaning No meaning is lost that has not been there before. > someone else's use of language awkward Most would judge that it's not just awkward, but grating. |
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| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | lmf4lol 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I edited my comment to include an answer to your question. | |
| ▲ | mft_ 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'd like to know too. I struggled to understand the description of the extension - is it an anti-woke thing, or some sort of modern approach to German removing the traditional (i.e. non-political) genderisation of some words, or both, or something else? | | |
| ▲ | MaKey 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Example: Reader In German: Leser (masculine) Possible forms of inclusive speech: Leser*innen, Leser:in, Leser_innen This extension removes these possible forms of inclusive speech. Arguably they hurt the reading flow and the German language has the generic masculine. However, proponents of inclusive speech feel that the generic masculine isn't inclusive. | |
| ▲ | input_sh 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A bit of both? Imagine every time you read the word "actor", it is instead spelled something like "actor:ress", or "actor_ress", or "actor*ress" (because the separator hasn't been standardised). Personally I'm in favour of it, but I will concede that if it's done enough times throughout the text (as German has way more gendered nouns in common use than English) it does come with the downside of breaking the reading flow. | |
| ▲ | plucas 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The first. In German, many words that refer to a person (e.g. Fahrer/Fahrerin, male/female driver) have a plural which is identical to the male singular. For a while now, many writers have used a typographic style to make the plural gender-neutral by writing the male plural, an asterisk, and then the female plural suffix (e.g. Fahrer*innen). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_star | | |
| ▲ | mft_ 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Thanks - that's really interesting, in a weird-interesting way. I'm far from an expert in such things, but I'd observed that the approach in English to gendered words (actor vs. actress) seemed to be, over time, to drift towards calling everyone an actor - as a neutral term, to avoid treating women differently, rather than a male term per se. In German, from your explanation, it's gone the opposite way - aggressively maintaining the female option because of a dislike of broad adoption of the male version as a neutral default. | | |
| ▲ | input_sh an hour ago | parent [-] | | It's not "aggressively maintaining the female option", it's just a language quirk. English has a gender-neutral "the" article which you put in front of every noun, German has three different variations of "the" depending on the gender (der/die/das). Literally every noun has a gender, including inanimate objects such as a piece of furniture. "The table" is always masculine ("der Tisch"), "the lamp" is always feminine ("die Lampe") and "the bed" is always neutral ("das Bett"). Sometimes changing the article completely changes the meaning of the word, for example "der See" is the lake, but "die See" can be the sea or the ocean. Only living things can have more than one gender and in that case, not only does the article change, but so does the suffix. There is no "singress" in English, only "singer", but in German there's "der Sänger" or "die Sängerin". Calling a female singer "der Sänger" would be grammatically-speaking completely incorrect. The only thing that changed fairly recently is that more and more people intentionally try to maintain gender ambiguity when they don't intent to specify a gender, in which case "the singer" becomes "die Sänger:in", or even "der:die Sänger:in" if you want to be even more pedantic. |
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| ▲ | philipwhiuk 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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