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Comment by neuronic | Hacker News Reader

While I generally support gendering and think it is important, I am not a fan of the extreme form of it either, but honestly stop exaggerating... no one is hurt by this text.

Ctrl+F ':' just shows 'keine:r' as the _only_ kind of weird example of gendering, the other instances are all very well established. It's only natural that people are overzealous with it at this point as the whole thing is fairly new and there's barely any good intuition for it.

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They are absolutely _not_ well established, the Council for German Orthography explicitly discourages the use of asterisks, double colons etc. for gendering substantives. This university is disregarding the official grammatical rules to push its desired political agenda, which in the context of science is undermining its scientific credibility.

Seriously: try to focus on the content of the article instead of on the delivery, that would be much more productive.

The council explicitly favored gendered speech ("Der Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung bekräftigt in seiner Sitzung am 26.03.2021 seine Auffassung, dass allen Menschen mit geschlechtergerechter Sprache begegnet werden soll und sie sensibel angesprochen werden sollen."), but doesn't want to be decision maker of the specific format. Straight from the horses mouth: https://www.rechtschreibrat.com/geschlechtergerechte-schreib...

Yes, within the established rules of German grammar. This allows constructs such as "Studierende" ("people who are studying"), "Mitarbeitende" ("people who are employees"), but forbids constructs such as "Mitarbeiter:innen" or "Student*innen", which deviate from the purpose of the double colon or asterisk.

> This allows constructs such as "Studierende" ("people who are studying")

Note that "Studierende" ("people who are studying") and "Studenten"/"Schüler" ("students") are technical not the same group. The latter are only part of the former group if they are actively studying (e.g. reading a book to study), at the moment in time. Once they stop, they continue to be students, but they are not "studying" anymore.

Hence, replacing "Studenten" with "Studierende" is or was (depending on who you ask) a semantical change to what is being expressed.

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