Talk:Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender

message: I will be modifying the overview section of the article. It only has one citation at the moment of writing this. I will try to find resources to support the statements in the section, but I will have to remove and modify several parts. Also, I will change some of the given examples to Spanish since I am fluent in Spanish, and I feel more comfortable finding resources in Spanish. Besides that, I will do my best to keep all the topics mentioned in the overview section, but I will be adding citations. --Edpe77 (talk) 07:30, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: Section overview - Needs citations

message: 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)
thread_title: German: Das Kellner?

message: "Swedish adjectives used to be inflected for gender as well". Gender (grammatical gender) is still a compulsory inflection category of Swedish adjectives. What is optional and likely to disappear is inflection of adectives for sex (semantic gender). Since grammatical gender in modern Swedish has nothing to do with male or female the description in the article is not good.
85.231.217.218 (talk) 20:03, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Swedish

message: Why is English listed here instead of at Gender-neutrality in genderless languages? English clearly does not have grammatical gender. — D. Wo. 23:00, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Correct, and neither do the IALs Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua. On the other hand, at least English and Interlingua are not genderless languages either, as they do have personal gender (he, she, it; ille, illa, illo). (So do Esperanto and Ido, I think.) So maybe the word "grammatical" should simply disappear from the title of this article? – McDutchie (talk) 10:00, 10 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The article genderless language says "A genderless language is a natural or constructed human language that has no category of grammatical gender." (Italics added.)  The article grammatical gender defines this term as "In linguistics, grammatical genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words."  By these definitions, English, Esperanto, Ido, and Interlingua are all genderless languages even if we leave out the word "grammatical".  So all of these should be exclusively in Gender-neutrality in genderless languages.  Note that Ido, but not the others, is already there.  75.183.96.242 (talk) 16:37, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Removed.--Beneficii (talk) 11:19, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  English? 

message: Bob A (talk) 06:34, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Section on hindi needed 

message: Since a separate article was already created, the current content can be summarized.
In the Spanish section, the la secretario example is a bit confusing.  The gender of the article ad the word are not in agreement.  Is that intentional?  Sepideh (talk) 11:30, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I significantly shortened the Spanish section so that it is now more of a summary of the full article. Linguist97 (talk) 05:03, 14 June 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Section of Spanish and German is too long 

message: If there is any regulation in English, "You cannot swim here (the current is too strong)" it actually means that swimming is forbidden there (just expressed a little less harshly). 
"You cannot smoke here! (= due to explosive chemicals nearby, you might cause the building to blow up by just one spark)". But in fact, albeit only "forbidden by common sense", it is forbidden after all.
So that's why in German, you ought to translate the "cannot" (in nearly all cases) by "Sie dürfen hier nicht..." or "Man darf hier nicht...". This is a general rule, which may (mainly in spoken language) have its exceptions from time to time: "Sie können hier nicht parken, mein Herr!" might be a strong advice if you've tried to park your car near a higher-class hotel exactly where the firemen will need to exit in case of a fire. However, it means that it is not allowed to park here. But the doorman (porter in Britain) would rather use können nicht instead of dürfen nicht due to his employer's code of politeness. Still, it does not mean that it will always make sense in everyday language as well. -andy 77.191.218.155 (talk) 13:38, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  German: "cannot" is more like "must not" on signs, regulations...  

message: I notice that this article has a good deal about grammatical gender and its relation to male/female distinctions.  But is there any information on how gendered languages deal with people who are genderqueer?
75.88.45.82 (talk) 18:48, 16 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: In case of German there are forms like "Lehrer_in", "Lehrer*in" which some claim to be completely gender-neutral while feminists forms like "LehrerIn" are sexists and emphasize a male-female bipolarity. There might also be forms like "Leh_rerin" with a "replaced" underscore. But anyway: _ and * are rare and only used by the politically left. -93.196.227.10 (talk) 17:21, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Neutrality for genderqueer people? 

message: "some university communities are replacing Student (grammatically male college student) and Studentin (female college student) with the nominalized participle Studierende(r), meaning "the studying person" (male with the "r", female without), which does not face quite as many problems with declension."
* "male with the "r", female without" -- that's (kind of) wrong. It's "der Studierende" (masculine/male) and "ein Studierender" (masculine/male), but "die Studierende" (feminine/female) and "eine Studierende" (feminine/female), so it can be masculine/male even though there's no "r" ("der Studierende").
* "which does not face quite as many problems with declension" -- that's correct, it's easy to decline, but other (well-known) problems arise:
** "Nominalizations" of participles such as Studierender and Lehrender do often refer to other people than Student and Lehrer do. E.g. somebody studing some old book (e.g. the Bible) is a "Studierender", but not necessarily a "Student" (someone studying at an university etc.).
** "Studenten" aren't always "Studierende" (people who study ATM), sometimes they are e.g. "Schlafende" (people who sleep ATM) or "Feiernde" (people who party ATM). Also "sterbende Studenten" (dying students) makes sense, but "sterbende Studierende" (dying people who study ATM - i.e. people who study and die at the same time) is awkward.
-93.196.227.10 (talk) 17:21, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  German participles 

message: Why are both on same topic? The changes presented to Spanish makes no sense in Portuguese. There are ways make Portuguese sound gender-neutral, but they are either the use of extreme generic language or the use of foreign symbols and syntax. The Spanish rules are not useful for a Portuguese speaker. --189.90.187.242 (talk) 18:03, 19 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spanish and Portuguese on same topic? 

message: "For gender-neutral pronouns, "elli" and "yel" are common, with the same conjugation as il / elle / on, and "yels", with the same conjugation as ils / elles.[4]"
This is absolutely wrong: that someone merely invented them does not make them common. A partisan website should not be used as a source. A) These pronouns are not the only proposition made. B) It's not the most prominent. ("ille(s)" is more common). C) Very few people have even heard about it.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.215.94.125 (talk) 17:26, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, and have no idea why someone added this extremely obscure thing, much less tried to present it as "common". I have removed that line entirely. (Edit: The original addition was here on 2016-01-23) Thelo (talk) 06:00, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gender neutral pronouns in French 

message: This artical does not appear to cite many sources (if any) for most of its sections.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rebellaserbrain (talk • contribs) 23:41, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Does this need more citations? 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20051220122557/http://www.homunculus.com/babel/aesperanto.html to http://www.homunculus.com/babel/aesperanto.html
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 10:18, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I think that's a little oversimplified -- it wasn't all that long ago, in language history terms, that the -tar/-tär suffix was basically required in more or less the same range of contexts as the German -in(n) suffix, and it still seems to occur in some words... AnonMoos (talk) 08:20, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Finnish has no gender markers in the language" 

message: In section 5.4, bearing the same title as this talk page post, you forgot a few exceptions to the rule which says "words ending in -z are usually feminine", and I am talking about the words "lápiz" (pencil) and "pez" (fish), which end in -z but are masculine, "(el) lápiz", "(el) pez". --Fandelasketchup (talk) 12:55, 29 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:   Spanish and Portuguese 

message: The flowing data is from my daily experience, from living in Hebrew speaking country, and mostly backed up by (1)
I'm not a wikipidian and therefor i will only put the information here for the future editing. 
There are two more recent forms of writing that are inclusive for all genders.
the one is using dots "." instead of slash "/", this is also used in case of non-binary people seeking for non-gendered way of writing.
The second one is combining both forms of the words into one word, this work mainly in plural case. The writing is very similar to the one with dots, but without the dot and the reading as follow.
kid(ילד) -> kids(females,ילדות), kids(males,ילדים) -> kids(inclusive, ילדים.ות), kids(inclusive, joined form,ילדימות/ילדיםות)
there is also two ways to write depend on the order of suffixes, e.g ילדים.ות or ילדות.ים, and ילדימות or ילדותים.
The joined form is readable (by reading the two suffixes), while in the other case it unclear the right why to read or if it even readable. 
As far as i know it is much more common to use the joined form on human related nouns (kids,peoples, teachers etc.) then on any other nouns and verbs.
While in some times this form is only referring to non-binary people. 
(1) https://hebrew-academy.org.il/
another less formal source (also in hebrew) can be this.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.137.117.71 (talk) 11:12, 17 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some remarks on the Hebrew section. 

message: This article (along with many many other flaws) fails to mention much at all about how non-binary, genderless, and genderfluid people are considered. This feels like something reaaly notable that should be mentioned..... Nithin🚀 talk 02:30, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Non-Binary People 

message: Part talking about Serbo-Croatian language has many problems. Let's just look at the example showing words for coach: masculine word is trener (Latin only script because I don't have Cyrillic keyborad) and in article it is written that feminine form is trenirka and it is written that it means female coach and track-suit, but it only means track-suit, feminine form of word trener is trenerica, same goes for profesorka which is incorrect: right form is profesorica, profesorka doesn't mean anything. 
Article also uses only Serbian vesion of some nouns: veštak is vještak in Croatian, this is also incorrect, vještak and vještakinja mean male/ female expert and vještac and vještica mean male/ female witch.
Etiktov (talk) 19:37, 1 June 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Serbo-Croatian Language 

message: The article states: "Nouns referring to people are mostly masculine or feminine, corresponding to their sex."
As a native German speaker, I have to say: This is absolutely not true. The thing described here as "Grammatical Gender" is not called "gender", but "Genus" in German, because it is independent from the described persons gender. There's a footnote stating "Mädchen" (girl) as an example, but this is only the tip of the iceberg: Most German nouns are technically independent from their gender. There are "female" nouns used also for men ("Geschäftsführung", "Fachkraft", "Autorität" and many many others), there are "neutral" words used for all genders ("Mitglied") are "male" words used also for women (like "Gast", "Prüfling"). Most words for people that have a "male" genus however, can be turned into a female version which is actually gender-specific using the ending "-in" (similar to the English suffix "-ess"). This way, a "male" word will be used gender-neutrally (when talking about a group of people, an unknown person, the abstract concept of a social role, a non-binary person), but most commonly, when the gender is known, the gender-neutral version will be interpreted as male (similarly to the English word "actor").
In Germany, it is currently controversial whether women and non-binary people should be included into the male/neutral words (like in English, by calling women "actor" instead of "actress") or whether the neutral word should be turned into a male-only word, enforcing mentioning both forms ("Schauspielerinnen und Schauspieler", "actresses and actors") or a combination of those words ("Schauspieler:Innen", "act:ress") when referring to all genders. The latter approach is often described as "gender-inclusive language" or "gender-sensitive language", but it obviously is not gender-neutral. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Janopae (talk • contribs) 20:46, 2 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Grammatical gender in German 

message: — Assignment last updated by ACHorwitz (talk) 20:19, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: Gender and Technoculture 320-01

message: — Assignment last updated by Zisha68 (talk) 02:34, 29 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: Psychology of Gender