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Comment by tallowen | Hacker News Reader

> English is not a language that traditionally deals well with gender, in that the language’s pronouns can be a little clumsy.

I think it is really interesting to deconstruct this. Most European languages have gender as a more central concept in the language; as the author points out "In Spanish, if referring to a group of friends containing both genders, you would use amigos, clearly favoring the masculine form". It seems like these languages would be even more clumsy around these non gendered cases!

Perhaps not having gendered nouns causes other gendered grammatical constructs (in this case personal pronouns) to stand out more. Do speakers of other languages with gender as a key construct see changes happening in those languages to make the language more gender neutral or does the high prevalence of gendering make that too intractable?

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> Do speakers of other languages with gender as a key construct see changes happening in those languages to make the language more gender neutral or does the high prevalence of gendering make that too intractable?

Not as far as I can tell in French.

Keep in mind that many adjectives are modified by gender (eg. la belle chaise, le beau fauteuil, where belle is used for the feminine and beau is used for the masculine form) and that there isn't a non gendered form, unlike German.

Sometimes, both forms can be used (for example, "les ouvriers et ouvrières" where both gendered nouns are used) but it gets cumbersome and clunky rather quickly, and is discouraged in certain style guides from what I recall.

When the plural masculine form is used, it's generally considered ambiguous as to whether it's a mixed gender group or a solely masculine group. In cases where the gender of the constituents of the group is actually relevant (it often isn't), typical usage will refer to both gendered nouns then will just refer to the group as "vous" (closest equivalent in English is the plural you, as in "Male and female workers of Foocorp, you have done a great job this year. Your dedication has...") to avoid having to carry both nouns throughout the text.

In French, we do have 'écriture inclusive' which tries to make things more neutral, by mentioning both feminine and masculine. For example, instead of saying 'lycéens' (high schoolers, which uses plural and masculine to designate both genders), écriture inclusive recommends to use lycéen·nes.

There was a wave a few years ago, but it was not very successful as far as I know, since it can get pretty complicated (du·de la boulanger·ère) and is not meant to be used verbally, only in written form.

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