[Lexicog] Gender neutrality in German

[Patrick Hanks]

> the beautiful gender-neutral word "Mensch",

Ah, Fritz, yes -- but how curious that the grammatical gender of "Mensch" 
is masculine - "der Mensch".  Don't you feel that, for the sake of consistency, 
it ought to be neuter - "das Mensch"?  Maybe we could start a movement
in favour of "das Mensch und die (singular) Mädchen"? Or are my intution 
about this based on the fact that, as a native speaker of English, I am 
insensitive to the truly arbitrary nature of grammatical gender in those 
languages that have it?  I.e. does the fact that Mensch is grammatically 
masculine and Mädchen is grammatically neuter bother only English 
speakers -- or only me -- and not German native speakers?

Returning to Germany in 2003 after a 40-year absence (I spent a few months
in Berlin when I was a student), I was struck by several language changes, for 
example:
  
"Fräulein" had become politically incorrect during my 40-year absence. 
Now all women are addressed and referred to as "Frau X", without regard
to age or marital status.  Progress?  I think so.

Considerable ingenuity is used to maintain gender-neutrality in communications 
like emails, using slashes, parentheses, and word-internal capitals.  So, 
someone wanting to start an email. gender-neutrally with the words "Dear 
Colleagues" (plural) will write "Liebe KollegInnen" with a capital I in the middle 
of the word.  The singular of this is "Liebe(r) Kolleg(in)".  Probably there is a 
study of all this somewhere but if there is,  I don't know it. 

The problems of using English "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun
(which goes back at least to the 18th century and the use of which in a 
lexicographical context was pioneered in the Cobuild dictionary in the 1980s)
pale into insignificance compared with equivalent problems in German. 

And oh, by the way, another thing that changed in my 40-year absence -- 

There are still strikingly more notices in Germany than in England telling 
you that you are not allowed to do something, but now they tend to say 
"nicht gestattet" (not allowed) rather than "verboten" (forbidden).  I'm not 
sure what the pragmatic force of this is. Can you shed any light on it? 

-- Patrick 

Current Address:
    Dr Patrick Hanks
    Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache,
    Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften,
    Jägerstrasse 22-23,
    Berlin 10117,
    Germany.
    Phone: + 49 30 20370 539
    Fax:  + 49 30 20370 214

 
 
 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Fritz Goerling 
To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com 
Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2005 4:07 PM
Subject: RE: [Lexicog] Re: lexical entries as singulars or plurals



Not quite, Bill,

sg. Mann (man)               pl. Männer (men) 
sg. Mensch (person)      pl. Menschen (people)
As we have the beautiful gender-neutral word "Mensch",
we don't have that problem/issue of inclusive language in German which
for most non-anglophones is a non-issue, "much ado about nothing."
A  man is a "Mann" and a woman is a "Frau" in German. So noone has a 
problem with the fact that "wo-man" is derived from "man" (wif-man) which has
given rise  to strange coinings like "womyn" (sg.) and "wimmin" (pl.)
in order to avoid the word "man."

Fritz Goerling




If I'm not mistaken, another "split" example in German is:

mann "man"      maennen "men"
mann "person"      leute      "people"


--
Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer at alum.mit.edu

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