Damen und Herren
It aimed to encourage students to speak more “inclusively” and not fall foul of those who may be offended by sex- specific pronouns. But the University of Cambridge’s decision to say Auf Wiedersehen to teaching gendered German has prompted warnings from linguists that students risk making a fool of themselves when talking with native speakers.
[There’s also singular and plural. …students risk making fools of themselves, not a fool of themselves. Subject-object agreement.]
The students have been urged to
use “inclusive language” and “to use gender- and non-binary-inclusive language when we address or refer to students and colleagues, both in writing and in speech in English and in German”.
Language can’t be “inclusive” in that way without ceasing to do the job language is there to do.
Course managers said they encouraged students and staff to choose newer forms with plural nouns.
When writing, they may render feminine nouns unisex by inserting an asterisk before the suffix — a nonstandard usage known as the “gender star”.
Funny that there’s no mention of making masculine nouns unisex. Funny how it’s always women who have to be disappeared, and never men. Ha ha.
A spokesman for the University of Cambridge said: “As it clearly states on the faculty of modern and medieval languages and linguistics website, ‘students are free to choose for themselves how to engage with inclusive language when speaking and writing in German’. To suggest otherwise is entirely wrong.”
But by calling it “inclusive” language they’re implying that the alternative is the enemy of “inclusivity.”
I wonder if they don’t teach politeness levels in Japanese either. After all, in a democratic society we’re all equal, and we need to impose our ideology on other languages.
Weird, I thought the point of teaching German was that the student would learn functional Deutsche.
BoyGenderless Child was I wrong, apparently.The thought has occurred to me, I know loads of atheists who think ‘The God Delusion’ is a great book and laugh about how much it’s existence with that title offends some religious people. Could you imagine what would happen if someone published a book called ‘The Transgender Delusion’? Better yet, ‘Transgenderism Poisons Everything’, in this case language courses at one of the best universities in the world. I’m continually amazed at how much damage people are willing to do to accommodate such an absurd philosophy.
I think they have phrased this badly. In German, the female ending is usually a suffix, like
Politiker – Politikerinnen (politicians male/female)
Traditional German uses the male form whenever at least one male person is included in the group (so-called ‘generic masculinum’) and people claim that the male form is also gender-neutral (however, there are lots of experiments, e.g. by Gygax et al., showing that it is not perceived this way).
For some time, people have therefore started to switch to naming both genders (sexes) explicitly as in “Politiker und Politikerinnen”.
Nowadays, it is common (at least in some circles) to use the genderstar and say Politiker*innen. (Which you pronounce with a brief pause where the star is some kind of glottis sound.)
So the star is added to the feminine form because the feminine form is in itself derived from the masculine.
The feminine form may be derived from the masculine in language, but not in biological reality. There it’s the opposite way around.