Talk:Gender-neutrality in languages with grammatical gender

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[edit] German: Das Kellner?

Years ago I had heard that one of the German governments (Don't remember: East? West?) had made a move in the 1970s to change professions to neuter, in order to desex them. I'd hear the term "Das Kellner" and "Das Lehrer" thrown around, but can't find reference any more. Has anyone else heard this? samwaltz 04:16, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Artificial languages

Quite a number of artificial languages stil have the echoes of gender. I took the second paragraph of my update directly from the page Esperanto and Ido compared#Affixes. It looks like it is a perfect fit with the article, which is not explicitly limited to natural languages. samwaltz 00:35, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Hi. I understand that there is a connection, but it seems to me that it's very arguable whether any of the languages you mentioned has true grammatical gender -- see an objection here. For this reason, I placed the artificial languages at Gender-neutrality in languages without grammatical gender some time ago.

You can always use the text you've added to enrich the Constructed Languages section of the other article... FilipeS 12:40, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Ergh... Well, I suppose there is the grey area as to what constitutes a gender; I generally maintain that any language that implements a distinction such that you know the state of someone's genitalia based on a descriptor other than "male" or "female" (or its immediate parallels) is still a gendered language - any language having separate words for sister and brother, for example. Basically, one of the objections of Ido, when it forked from Esperanto, was that, although claiming to be genderless, Esperanto still had a slightly gendered vocabulary. samwaltz 06:32, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I suspect that, according to your definition, all natural languages mark gender. For example, they generally have different names for males and females. FilipeS 13:37, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

On second thoughts, I think I'm moving the Constructed Languages to this article. Although it's arguable whether we can speak of grammatical gender in their case, they were modelled after Indo-European languages, which typically do have gender, and so they belong to this group, at least in a genetic sense. FilipeS 22:56, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] German: "neologisms"

"In some cases, neologisms may be formed: some university communities are replacing Student (male college student) and Studentin (female college student) with the participle Studierende(r), meaning "the studying/college-going person", which does not face quite as many problems with declension"

"Studierende", which is not AFAIK particularly neologous (ha), means lit. someone who is studying. When I go drinking, technically I am no longer a "studierende" but still a "student".

Thus this illustrates a certain semantical distinction being thrown out of the window (knowingly/unknowingly) in the name of gender-neutrality and not so much a willingness to coin neologisms.