I have to say I kinda agree. There's plenty of idiosyncrasies in language and it doesn't have to be gendered at all, but it is how we communicate and it is important people remain able to understand it. If anything, adding an asterisk to a word might even exacerbate the problem.
Is there a single documented instance of people successfully forcing language to change this drastically
The post-revolution Russian language reforms?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthography#The_post-revolution_reform
Simplified Chinese was developed in the 50's by the Communist Party as part of their modernization, as Traditional Chinese was considered too complex. The other example I know of is Hangul, the Korean Alphabet, was created by a king 500 years ago who decided Chinese characters were too complex which resulted in low literacy rates among the poor, Hangul was designed to be extremely simple to learn and became the primary writing system for the peninsula.
Obviously Deutsche isn’t a Romance language, but how would gender neutral wording work in Romance languages, if at all? Feminine/masculine forms are very prevalent in those languages.
It really wouldn't, everything over here is either male or female. We don't even have an "it" pronoun or a neutral gender like German.
Not to mention trying this sort of changes will probably get you chased by the Crusca academy with torches and pitchforks
part of the reason both of these worked are because pretty much everyone were illiterate back then, and so they're just learning it from scratch easier instead.
Oh yeah, we are going back to this. We already had that once and it was ridiculous back then as well. Meaning you have to include, out of courtesy, the word in the opposite gender. Meaning a calculator gotta be like this
der Taschenrechner (male), die Taschenrechnerin (female) = der/die Taschenrechner/in
I wonder what they will do to neutrums (no gender)
what the hell is the difference between a female calculator and a male calculator
Gender neutral words only work in English as far as I'm aware, since we've got they/their/them as third person singular pronouns and the language easily accommodates the usage of them.
Exactly, it was ridiculous and did not really help the issue they wanted to fix back then.
Well, English and any language that doesn't pointlessly gender every word
I said "as far as I'm aware" since I'm sure there's others that do a similar thing.
Does Finnish?
We don't even have gendered pronouns, let alone nouns.
Danish has De(They) which is used as a honorific.
As far as grammatical gender works, we have the greatest word-classes. Essentially, there are two genders: No gender, and both genders. This means that a car (en bil) is both-gendered, while a plane (et fly) is no-gendered, unless you use the full word equivalent of an aeroplane (en flyvemaskine), which then makes it both-gendered.
TL;DR: Denmark thinks cars and aeroplanes are futas.
Over in France they just approved allowing feminine versions of job titles as well as masculine and it's being seen as a big step forward so I guess every language handles this stuff differently
Official guardians of French language approve ‘feminisation’ of ..
I can confirm, i've seen evidence of it on the Internet
Please don't cause those anthro plane weirdos to move here, we already have enough weirdos with the mainlanders.
Oi fuck off you probably-copenhagenish prick!
The case of job titles is weird, some of them were already gendered according to the person that practices it (a teacher = un instituteur [m]/une institutrice [f]) but sometimes even synonyms were not (a professor = un professeur [m]). Most of the time making feminine equivalents is as easy as slapping an "e" at the end (une professeure [f]) or just using the appropriate determinant (the judge = le/la juge). But then you've got absurd stuff where ambassadeur [m] means ambassador but ambassadrice [f] means the ambassador's wife... Then again language changes and that's kinda sexist so I doubt people will take issue with making that the female job title.
But that's the easy part, once you've made gender specific versions of each profession, you have to find a gender neutral way of referring to them, for when gender is not specified. Otherwise you end up with rules like "male is the default" which feminists already decry. The problem is there are no neutral gender or even pronouns in French, so the idea is to smash gendered forms together. He (il) and she (elle) become a singular they (iel), same for plural (ils/elles->iels) which honestly looks and sounds terrible. Then in writing you put a dot between gendered forms to give a "neutral" form (les professeur.e.s, les institut.eur.trice.s) which can look cluttered in writing if the gendered forms are very different. The oral equivalent is even more inconvenient (les instituteurs et/ou institutrices) and I'm sure that sooner or later people will complain that the male form is mentioned first by default.
I suppose it could be worse, unlike what diwako said, it only applies to words that refer to human beings. "Calculator" is female in French and nobody has taken issue with that (yet).
I think it's fucking hilarious that french has this high cabal of weenies attempting to dictate how the language is to "defend" it, which literally any linguist will readily point out the complete impossibility of since that's literally not how language works.
it kind of works in spanish, but still most of the times its unnecessary and sounds wrong or dumb
Simplified Chinese shouldn't really be held up to a great standard since it was partially an attempt at changing the meanings of a lot of old characters, as well as make it harder for Chinese citizens to read up on old history. The simplified system wasn't even the original idea that the CCP had, they originally intended to replace the traditional writing system with Roman letters. This video down here explains it better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAFlQbE6euc
God bless them they try though.
Spent years trying to convince everyone to say the cumbersome "courrier electronique" instead of email, until 2003 when they decided it would be acceptable to use "courriel". The idea of a country being so against loanwords is bizarre coming from a native English speaker's perspective.
Forcing a language to change its orthography is actually fairly easy. Wikipedia has an entire list of spelling reforms. As the article notes, they aren't attempting to change how German works, they are instead altering spellings, or replacing words with technically valid (though somewhat clunky) alternatives.
in finnish everyone is it
what is it?
its it
Maybe that Russian rocket that shot down MH17 was just drunk on vodka and extremely horny.
The words itself? Nah, because there's literally no need to do so, and people who still support this idiocy would be laughed at (or hopefully beaten)
The orthography? Many times. Only we did it correctly though, still waiting on others to grow some balls to do the same
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