You think we have problems? [LWN.net]

You think we have problems?

Posted Jun 9, 2009 4:32 UTC (Tue) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331)
In reply to: Gender neutrality: Not that hard by kevinbsmith
Parent article: Jetpack: Firefox extensions as they should be

Here's an excerpt from Mark Twain's "The Awful German Language"

I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:

"Gretchen.
Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm.
She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen.
Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm.
It has gone to the opera."

To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female -- tomcats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it -- for in Germany all the women either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.

The confusion doesn't seem to have caused the Germans any great hardship. Gender neutrality in English is overblown at best: no reasonable person is going to suppose that female programmers don't exist merely because an article uses 'he' in an impersonal context; nor will someone who habitually thinks of male programmers suddenly revise his mental model because an article uses a plural.

It's useless at best to go around asking writers to contort perfectly good sentences on the account of the dubious idea that changing a pronoun will fix society. I imagine there are countless ways to address inequality that have the twin advantages of being effective and leaving our language intact.

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You think we have problems?

Posted Jun 12, 2009 6:47 UTC (Fri) by kreutzm (guest, #4700) [Link]

You display the issue simpler than it is. This problem exists in German as well, for example in law you often write things like: "The actor/actress who uses his/her ..." (except for laws dealing with maternity). And we infrequently discuss simmilar issues like those in earlier comments (for example the German word for university student is "Student" but this is also the male form, so a gender neutral form "Studierender" is often used, although this is strictly speaking not the same).

And as a side note, not all genders are "random" in German. For example the neutral gender of maiden you used in your quote is actually based on a rule. In German words ending with "chen" are denoting small things of something usually "larger", e.g. Brot -> Brötchen (bread -> rolls). Those words are always neutral, independent of the gender of the originating word. The confusing issue here is that girls are small woman (the old, no longer used word in German was "maid") but boys are not called small man. Maybe the inventor of German language did not know if boys really where small man, while he was sure for woman :-))