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MaKey 3 hours ago

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.