We're excited to announce our support of two independent, open source projects: Ladybird, an ambitious project to build a completely independent browser from the ground up, and Omarchy, an opinionated Arch Linux setup for developers.
Just remember that from his perspective, you are arguing against grammatical rules that are at the core of his communication experience due to his first language being German.‘so perhaps his initial reaction was confusion because he didn’t understand the angle - he thought he was being inclusive? Maybe?
I dunno I’m probably playin devil’s advocate without all the information here; I’ve just been resisting making jokes connecting grammatical pedantry to Germany the whole time.
It’s actually a very contentious grammatical issue in Germany from what I have been told by a German friend. That there is definitely a contingency of people pushing for more gender neutral language and a large amount of pushback from those who think the entire idea is absurd because of how gendered the language is.
I can see a bit of both sides of the argument. It’s important to make people feel welcomed and not like being a male is the default for everything. On the other hand, language evolves often very slowly and you can’t just force people to change the language entirely overnight. It does sound like much of the pushback is less political in nature and more grammatical as adding neutral phrases to a gendered language becomes quickly a complex task with complex new words. However, some of the pushback is also political in nature, so it’s hard to gauge whether the Ladybird situation was truly political or more grammatical at it’s core.
Yep. I’m a native Spanish speaker and I’m also old. Spanish is similar to German in that the male version of words is already gender neutral. But there’s a huge effort to make it truly gender neutral, and I understand the reason and support the idea. Having lived many years in an English speaking country and in corporate environments, I use “they” in English without even thinking. It comes naturally to me, especially as a manager talking about people I manage, to protect their identity.
But there’s no way in hell I’m using gender neutral Spanish because it sounds extremely stupid to me. It’s a complete distortion of the language, and I have to make a huge effort not to think less of people who use it. None of my friends or family uses it.
Just remember that from his perspective, you are arguing against grammatical rules that are at the core of his communication experience due to his first language being German.‘so perhaps his initial reaction was confusion because he didn’t understand the angle - he thought he was being inclusive? Maybe?
I dunno I’m probably playin devil’s advocate without all the information here; I’ve just been resisting making jokes connecting grammatical pedantry to Germany the whole time.
Pretty much yeah, he thought he was already being inclusive, and I don’t blame him for doubling down initially given how awful that github thread was
It’s actually a very contentious grammatical issue in Germany from what I have been told by a German friend. That there is definitely a contingency of people pushing for more gender neutral language and a large amount of pushback from those who think the entire idea is absurd because of how gendered the language is.
I can see a bit of both sides of the argument. It’s important to make people feel welcomed and not like being a male is the default for everything. On the other hand, language evolves often very slowly and you can’t just force people to change the language entirely overnight. It does sound like much of the pushback is less political in nature and more grammatical as adding neutral phrases to a gendered language becomes quickly a complex task with complex new words. However, some of the pushback is also political in nature, so it’s hard to gauge whether the Ladybird situation was truly political or more grammatical at it’s core.
Yep. I’m a native Spanish speaker and I’m also old. Spanish is similar to German in that the male version of words is already gender neutral. But there’s a huge effort to make it truly gender neutral, and I understand the reason and support the idea. Having lived many years in an English speaking country and in corporate environments, I use “they” in English without even thinking. It comes naturally to me, especially as a manager talking about people I manage, to protect their identity.
But there’s no way in hell I’m using gender neutral Spanish because it sounds extremely stupid to me. It’s a complete distortion of the language, and I have to make a huge effort not to think less of people who use it. None of my friends or family uses it.
If it’s written in German, I’d agree. In English, no he is just wrong. But perhaps is English just sucks, I don’t know and I don’t care to find out.