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French dictionary accused of "wokeism" over gender-inclusive pronoun
- Thread starter DiipuSurotu
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The first character is saying "Iel doesn't exist, that word was made-up" and the other answer back "Go ahead, speak with words who weren't made-up":
By : https://twitter.com/petitpieddessin
By : https://twitter.com/petitpieddessin
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how can someone even write "Inclusive writing is not the future of the French language" in the internet and not facepalm immediately
Problem is in a lot of cases there's not an obvious suffix. Do you say "iel est foufolle", "iel est secsèche" "iel est très grandande" "iel est mignononne" ? Also, is it "un acteurice" or "une acteurice"?
And the Star Wars article is interesting but again it makes it seem like it wa just a question of using a neutral pronoun but does not adress hpw the translator wanted to deal with adjective an nouns.
Iel sounds like a solution, but would need to give them a masculine or feminine gender as soon as they do stuff in the past or have adjectives applied to them (and in many other situations).
For "they went", do you say "iel est allé" or "iel est allée"?
I assume iel is pronounced with the "i" sound from il, then "elle" at the end.
Maybe it can default to masculine like many other things, but that's solving one problem with another problem.
It'd make my attempts to learn French a lot easier if they made everything gender-neutral, but fundamentally changing how a language works is a big ask.
For "they went", do you say "iel est allé" or "iel est allée"?
I assume iel is pronounced with the "i" sound from il, then "elle" at the end.
Maybe it can default to masculine like many other things, but that's solving one problem with another problem.
It'd make my attempts to learn French a lot easier if they made everything gender-neutral, but fundamentally changing how a language works is a big ask.
Gendered nouns are tough, I don't think there's an easy way to modify a language like that. But since you're not talking about people I'm not sure it's really as important.
Semitic languages have the same issue. Speaking Hebrew and learning arabic & French it gets hard to keep track of which gender a goddamn table is in each language.
Semitic languages have the same issue. Speaking Hebrew and learning arabic & French it gets hard to keep track of which gender a goddamn table is in each language.
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The solution is very simple actually. You do what the other person prefers, just like you did for the pronoun itself:
Even though I dislike they/them for feeling clunky, at least the language was ready to go.
As has been said, transforming some languages to allow for gender neutrality is going to be a fucking nightmare. Necessary, but it will take a long time because those languages just are not built to express that thought well.
I think resistance to this daunting task is not immediately bigoted. The guy in the OP definitely is though.
This on is funny too, it's about French spelling (it has human-made French subtiles and the machine-made English subtiles are not so bad):
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If you are writing it : allé·e
If not, it doesn't matter, most people would not pronounce the e at the end of allée.
So basically the easiest solution for translating a game offering a non-binary option in French would be to use iel and ask the player wether they want to be addressed in masculine or feminine? Seems easy enough if that would be enough.
The same could be applied to books then. Just have to add a sentence specifying how the character wants to be addressed as.
I've seen some examples of inclusive French grammar and they're usually way too complicated to be applied imo. However the aforementioned method only works if you know how the person wants to be addressed as. It doesn't work for a neutral situation when you don't know their preference.
The same could be applied to books then. Just have to add a sentence specifying how the character wants to be addressed as.
I've seen some examples of inclusive French grammar and they're usually way too complicated to be applied imo. However the aforementioned method only works if you know how the person wants to be addressed as. It doesn't work for a neutral situation when you don't know their preference.
Thanks, that makes sense, though it seems odd (as an Englishman) to ask someone, "okay, so you're non-binary, but which gender do you prefer?"
I'm sure there are more tactful ways of asking, so it doesn't come across as offensive.
Bon soir, et bonne soirée!
I fucking hate being non-binary in Europe, especially in a country that also has gendered language like France does. People just either don't give a fuck or will yell about how disgusting non-binary people are & how we should just get over it & either accept feminine or maculine pronouns & accept we're actually just cis lmao. 90% of the time it feels like I simply don't fucking exist & the other 10% it feels like other people outright don't want me to exist, it's beyond tiring.
I really, really wish non-LGBT+ people would at least pretend to care about neo-pronouns. I know they don't always sound elegant since we actively had to make that shit up ourselves, but ffs it takes barely a few minutes to read up on them & get how to use them. "iel" doesn't even sound bad when used unlike some German neo-pronouns lmao. I think the most common one in Germany is dey/dem which is taken from they/them & just made easier for Germans to pronounce. Personally prefer that over any of the other ones.
Also don't hate using ono/oni instead of ona in Bosnian & Croatian for myself even if it's not like I'm out to more than handful of people who speak those languages, but obviously using more gender-neutral language in general is utter hell. Slavic languages are such a pain in the ass lmao.
Anyway, thankfully using gender-neutral pronouns for a person =! making languages gender-neutral as a whole which I think is also something too many people don't understand. We're not trying to get rid of il/elle, er/sie or on/ona & all the different suffixes & conjugations that come with them, just like people in English-speaking countries didn't wanna get rid of s/he, but instead simply want an additional personal pronouns for fucking non-binary people that prefer something more gender-neutral. Yes, making gendered languages totally gender-neutral would be fucking hell & nigh impossible, but again, that's not what we're trying to achieve, we just want pronouns that don't make us feel gross. :<
It's obviously still not braindead easy as it is in English due to suffixes & conjugations, but 1. simply fucking ask actual non-binary people in your countries how they use their own language to describe themselves, what they do & how they are in all tenses & 2. it's not impossible to add new suffixes & conjugations that'd fit the gender-neutral pronoun. Sure, it'll take time, but I promise you lots of us for who it actually fucking matters will prefer to have people stumble a bit with those until we've got it all figured out over having to put up with getting misgendered in dozens of different ways. You do have some non-binary people who additionally use masculine or feminine pronouns, but not everyone is comfortable with that hence the need for gender-neutral pronouns.
Man, I've been waiting for non-binary people to get properly acknowledged in Europe outside of LGBT+ spaces like they are in English-speaking countries for fucking years, but I'm also terrified of it since so many people are already fucking transphobic so I wouldn't want to see just how much worse it could get once we're more in the public eye.
I really, really wish non-LGBT+ people would at least pretend to care about neo-pronouns. I know they don't always sound elegant since we actively had to make that shit up ourselves, but ffs it takes barely a few minutes to read up on them & get how to use them. "iel" doesn't even sound bad when used unlike some German neo-pronouns lmao. I think the most common one in Germany is dey/dem which is taken from they/them & just made easier for Germans to pronounce. Personally prefer that over any of the other ones.
Also don't hate using ono/oni instead of ona in Bosnian & Croatian for myself even if it's not like I'm out to more than handful of people who speak those languages, but obviously using more gender-neutral language in general is utter hell. Slavic languages are such a pain in the ass lmao.
Anyway, thankfully using gender-neutral pronouns for a person =! making languages gender-neutral as a whole which I think is also something too many people don't understand. We're not trying to get rid of il/elle, er/sie or on/ona & all the different suffixes & conjugations that come with them, just like people in English-speaking countries didn't wanna get rid of s/he, but instead simply want an additional personal pronouns for fucking non-binary people that prefer something more gender-neutral. Yes, making gendered languages totally gender-neutral would be fucking hell & nigh impossible, but again, that's not what we're trying to achieve, we just want pronouns that don't make us feel gross. :<
It's obviously still not braindead easy as it is in English due to suffixes & conjugations, but 1. simply fucking ask actual non-binary people in your countries how they use their own language to describe themselves, what they do & how they are in all tenses & 2. it's not impossible to add new suffixes & conjugations that'd fit the gender-neutral pronoun. Sure, it'll take time, but I promise you lots of us for who it actually fucking matters will prefer to have people stumble a bit with those until we've got it all figured out over having to put up with getting misgendered in dozens of different ways. You do have some non-binary people who additionally use masculine or feminine pronouns, but not everyone is comfortable with that hence the need for gender-neutral pronouns.
Man, I've been waiting for non-binary people to get properly acknowledged in Europe outside of LGBT+ spaces like they are in English-speaking countries for fucking years, but I'm also terrified of it since so many people are already fucking transphobic so I wouldn't want to see just how much worse it could get once we're more in the public eye.
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Interesting conversation in this thread. I'm always suspicious of people that seek to dismiss it outright, rather than aiming to speak to non-binary people within France (and elsewhere for other gendered languages) to see how they're using it and what their thoughts are. After having had the "it's impossible" line thrown back many times in the past it's nice to actually get some news around what is being used at the moment, even if it's early stages and figuring out of what could work for them.
Fucking LOL @
So it'd honestly have to be #1, but that's also not without its issues. :\
That's... so brazen. Just being openly proud of being non-inclusive. Piss off.
This is also bullshit. Adding pronouns doesn't pit anyone against anyone. It's adding. Not removing. Christ.
The problem with #2 is that it's just not sustainable. There's way, way too many words to take into account, and many of them would sound horrible or clunky when merged like that, and then there's the é/ée words... Like, there's already tons of resistance for iel, if you add this layer of complexity on top of that, good luck, you need to reinvent the entire language in itself.
So it'd honestly have to be #1, but that's also not without its issues. :\
To expand on this: transgender has the generally accepted definition amongst trans people to mean "anyone who doesn't associate with their assigned gender at birth." This definition covers everyone who doesn't consider themself to be cisgendered.
That said, there are people who don't feel comfortable calling themselves trans for any number of valid reasons who would otherwise fit that umbrella. At the end of the day, it's up to the individual to decide how they want to define themself, and for everyone else to (hopefully) respect and refer to them as such.
(Edit) somehow missed there were 2 other pages in this topic, so it may have already been addressed
Btw, conjugation is the inflection of verbs; nouns and others get declined.
(I believe that image first made me think about the pitfalls of fully gendered grammar)
(I believe that image first made me think about the pitfalls of fully gendered grammar)
They're not scared, they're lazy.
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User Banned (3 Months): Concern trolling and dismissing concerns with regards to transphobia, previous severe ban for concern trolling with regards to sinophobia
Sérieux les insultes… Ça donne quoi à part de passer pour un ado boutonneux vénère ?
Argumente au moins..
User Banned (1 week): Drive-by concern trolling with regards to inclusive language, account in junior phase
You'd think lessons would be learned from the whole latinx thing
I didn't like they/them at all back in the day, but now I'm used to it, and it feels fine. I'd play Saints Row 3 in which the NPCs would be like "they're behind the crate" or whatever and I'd be like "😕", but now I'm impressed by how ahead of their time Volition were linguistically.
I'm in stitches at how really bad the moral panic over "inclusive writing" looks to outsiders. Whoever came up with the name did a great job.
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Ah, j'ai trouvé le macroniste
(genre j'ai besoin d'argumenter alors que rien que le contenu du sujet actuel suffit, mais si ça te défrise c'est pas grave hein)
I understand that language needs to be more inclusive and that it needs to address all people even when it is to difficult.
But it would be way to much changing gendered nouns in general. In the end who cares that la voiture (=car) is fenimin in french or der Stuhl (=chair) in german is masculin? Those words aren't referring to people.
But it would be way to much changing gendered nouns in general. In the end who cares that la voiture (=car) is fenimin in french or der Stuhl (=chair) in german is masculin? Those words aren't referring to people.
Ah j'ai trouvé le Melanchoniste de base … Effectivement les arguments c'est pas inné dans le groupe,les insultes oui... Désolé de t'avoir importuné, c'est vrai la république c'est vous !
I hated Spanish class because the singular They was off limits. Nah, gendered languages are archaic.
This is really tricky for me. I am lucky that in my language of English here in Australia I have an easy option, although I mainly just use it online and not in my personal life. but the culture I come from is extremely conservative and would likely have issues with this. I know I tell my white/western friends that I am comfortable with in Australia about things my family would have said or done along the way (I haven't really come out on anything but just examples of what could be said, or when I displayed boyish tendencies as a girl) and they have been shocked, your parents would be racist, homophobic, transphobic, non accepting.
This is not the case in my mind, my parents love me but I find a trend of white people coming in and telling me that they are awful because they come from a very different world.
I don't know much about french or their quest for what pronouns work for their community but I would defer to the the french speaking community and the lgbtq people affected before passing judgement. This feels like some other white, american centric stuff which is supported by perhaps a slight majority of white, american lgbtq people but then the actual people they are talking about are secondary to me. But again I don't have contact with any french people really. Ultimately people should be able to use a pronoun and some dictionary won't change that luckily.
This is not the case in my mind, my parents love me but I find a trend of white people coming in and telling me that they are awful because they come from a very different world.
I don't know much about french or their quest for what pronouns work for their community but I would defer to the the french speaking community and the lgbtq people affected before passing judgement. This feels like some other white, american centric stuff which is supported by perhaps a slight majority of white, american lgbtq people but then the actual people they are talking about are secondary to me. But again I don't have contact with any french people really. Ultimately people should be able to use a pronoun and some dictionary won't change that luckily.
What do you mean off limits? Spanish gets away with it because pronouns are almost never used when conjugating. The problem then becomes how to ungender nouns but again spanish has such a clear masculine and feminine suffix that in most cases people just put an -e or an -i instead of -o/-a.
My guess is that in any language class you would have trouble trying to go for an inclusive form. Teachers tend to be pretty conservative in that sense. Atleast at school.
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User Banned (Permanent): Transphobia, account in Junior Phase
Fetishizing pronouns in non-English languages and reading sexism into the masculine gender as a neutral option in Romance languages is a hilarious bit of colonialism on the part of English speakers. English is, as far as I know, the only language where grammatical gender is structured around human sexuality. There are many ways to refer to women in the masculine gender in Spanish, and vice versa. The truth is, masculine and femenine are labels that were invented relatively late in the evolution of IE languages. Long ago, the two genders were common and neuter, and common eventually split into masculine and feminine, so the former common gender being used as an all-encompassing gender when referring to multiple people is logical. Also, English words barely have any gender markers. If you try to sound perfectly gender neutral in heavily marked languages like Spanish or Italian, you end up having to "soft-ban" words like child (because there isn't a gender neutral word, so they say "infancy", which is hilarious), or repeating every. single. adjective. in every sentence. But I guess this isn't a problem if you think everything should be like in English! In reality, the masculine gender in these languages is unmarked, so that's as close to a neutral gender as you're going to get without the need to add things that have been conceived solely for the convenience of English speakers, and in contempt of the languages they're trying to force this onto.
That new pronoun won't solve any problems, it introduces more rules to the language, and these rules are extraneous, based on English conceptions of grammatical gender, and they're only kicking the can down the road. In two weeks there will be people who will say they don't identify with iel becuase the "i" is too masculine or something, so they'll come up with a fourth pronoun, adding more rules and exceptions to the language.
That new pronoun won't solve any problems, it introduces more rules to the language, and these rules are extraneous, based on English conceptions of grammatical gender, and they're only kicking the can down the road. In two weeks there will be people who will say they don't identify with iel becuase the "i" is too masculine or something, so they'll come up with a fourth pronoun, adding more rules and exceptions to the language.
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Ah, silly Spaniards. They should let me, an American, fix their language for them based on my rudimentary knowledge of their language and blatant disregard for what they think sounds natural. Your post is about as reasonable as getting mad because the keys to your car don't open my car. Why should you be mad that you can't use a plural pronoun to talk about one person, just because it's okay in whatever random language you speak?
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Any reason why "on" can't be used as a neutral pronoun ? I really don't know how it's different to the english "they" in term of multiple meaning. The literal definition is "pronom indéfini neutre qui réfère à une ou plusieurs personnes, sujet de la phrase. Ce pronom ne s'emploie que pour désigner des êtres humains" so it doesn't have the problem of "it" and yet I see nobody talking about it.
If publishers refused the idea immediately, the translator had no reason to search how to tackle the most difficult cases. Maybe it would prove to be impossible, maybe it would need countless hours of head scratching, but well, translators are expected to be inventive and really really good at writing texts in the final language of the book.
Every panic surrounding a word is a reminder that René Goscinny was a genius:
From Lucky Luke - The Oklahoma Land Rush.
It feels like a straw man. As far as I know, no one is asking for that: people just want a way to speak about themselves that respect their identity.
"The masculine gender, being the most noble, must predominate whenever the masculine and feminine are found together." Claude Favre de Vaugelas in Remarques sur la langue française, 1647
"Spelling will be used to distinguish people of letters from ignorants and simple women", from the draft of the first Académie's dictionary, in 1694.
"The male gender is considered nobler than the female gender because of the superiority of the male over the female" Nicolas Beauzée a French grammarian, in 1767.
"The masculine prevails over the feminine" My teachers in elementary school, and every teacher in every elementary school in France.
Silly English speakers indeed.
Before that last rule was enacted, "gendering" adjectives and nouns followed two other rules: a proximity rule and a number rule.
A couple of examples:
-- Proximity rule :
"Those men and women are beautiful" must be translated "Ces hommes et ces femmes sont beaux" (beau = French masculine form of beautiful, with an x to denote plural) in order to follow today's official rule (masculine > feminine). Under the proximity rule, it's translated "Ces hommes et ces femmes sont belles" (belle = French feminine form of beautiful, with an s to denote plural). The beauty of this rule is that it's allowing everyone to write as they see fit: if someone does not want to use a feminine form, they just have to write "Ces femmes et ces hommes sont beaux" and voila.
-- Number rule :
"This 8th of March, thousands of protestors hit the street to ask for more equality" must be translated "Ce 8 mars, des milliers de manifestants ont marché pour demander plus d'égalité" to follow the official rule, despite the fact that, like every 8th of March, women vastly outnumbered men among the protestors. Following the number rule, because they were more women than men, it's translated "Ce 8 mars, des milliers de manifestantes ont marché pour demander plus d'égalité" (manifestante with a e is the French feminine form of protestor).
It's just a guess (because I don't know), but it could be because it's an indefinite pronoun.
All of these things were written millenia after what we now call masculine gender became the neutral one, which took place when it wasn't called "masculine" and it didn't exactly refer to men. Again, we're using English as a reference for what the grammatical gender really is.
The proximity rule still exists in Spanish, for example, and it's a beautiful example of how grammatical gender doesn't have to be a sandbox for one's identity. Proponents of neutral language would have you say "Esos hombres y esas mujeres son bellos y bellas", which is a good way to illustrate to the English people reading this how cumbersome this is in other languages. But none of this makes getting angry because you can't use a plural noun in singular any less childish and colonialistic.
Bah Blanquer c'est un gros tas de merde oui, on l'a vu à maintes reprises ces dernières années. Entre sa pseudo croisade contre « l'islamo-gauchisme » et le « wokeisme » (il sera content quand ça arrivera dans le dico je pense), son caca nerveux contre les réunions non-mixtes, la polémique à deux balles sur les habits des collégiennes/lycéennes…
Un vieux réac qui vaut pas mieux que la droite « normale ». Des gens doutaient encore de la couleur politique de l'équipe LREM, il a eu le mérite de faire tomber les masques…
(Ceci dit la droite n'a pas le monopole côté reac, on a vu un paquet de gens de gauche chouiner sur le wokeisme)
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The French language itself wasn't even a millennia old when those quotes were written...
And even ignoring the many words French loaned from other languages, using Latin is a foolish endeavor:
- Neutral Latin words became both masculine and feminine French words.
- Feminine Latin words became masculine French words and vice versa.
It was just a little strange to see some posters not familiar with gendered language not understanding how difficult it is to implement.
Using they/them dosen't change much in the flow of the spoken language, while constructed solutions in other languages still feel rather awkward.
In written german for example it is no problem to include the gendersternchen. But to use it in every day spoken language dosen't really work - at least right now.
So what does this tell you about gender in French as opposed to gender in a language like English where it's unequivocally tied to human sexuality.
I know, I'm German. That's what I meant. "Er, sie, "insert genderneutral pronoun here"
Plenty of people already explained why it could be difficult, with proper examples related to what is discussed here (i.e. how to allow non binary people to speak and write about themselves in a way that respect their identity).
That the rule "Masculine is neutral" you are defending is a rule that didn't exist in French before those quote were written. If that rule existed like you believe, Neutral Latin words would all have become Masculine French words. They didn't, hence, that rule didn't exist.