Gender-neutral GCSE French lessons trigger international row

Exactly what I thought!

😂
But I’m sure the French, Spanish etc will be duly grateful at being shown the faults in their languages.

And to come back to German despite the pushbacks there is definitely a lot of use of "gendering" if you don't know about it, even if you don't useit, you're definitely at a disadvantage.

Button is really(in German at least) a part of feministmovements to use it, disregarding the recent incursion, if you will, of a gendered identity aspect. For eg I will "gendern" because otherwise the words I'm using cuts me out of things.

My favourite AF 'keeping Anglicisms at bay' is instead of 'walkie talkie' they went with 'talkie walkie'.

Also instead of the French being happy about the world using a French word 'computer' and running with that, they had to force people to use a different word 'l'ordinator'.

I find this aspect of learning French baffling and fascinating.

To be fair the Academie is notoriously conservative. They fought “Madame la présidente” for decades after the Québécois allowed it. Gender neutral speech is a fight within French speakers. That said I wouldn’t start teaching it when there isn’t any consensus.

in Spanish there’s a different trend: adoption of feminine specific nouns for traditionally invariable ones. La jueza, la jefa, la presidenta. “Latinx” is hated by most actual Spanish speakers but you will see an -e ending used to make words gender neutral, eg Latine. That is a thing you will see from Spanish speakers and writers, not activists, and it’s a case where the RAE is behind. And to be honest there are Latin Americans who don’t care about the RAE. I don’t think we’re yet at a point of teaching this as accepted Spanish in school but it’s not wrong to use.

"A Pearson spokesman said: “Gender-neutral pronouns are not required as part of Pearson Edexcel GCSE French, German, or Spanish. The specifications require students to learn and be assessed only on the standard masculine and feminine forms used in these languages."

So it's a so-called "international row" over nothing. Slow outrage-news day?

@newrubylane that being said, the overwhelming majority of French people indeed don't speak this language. It is overrepresented in writing in "well meaning" sectors such as (subsidized) arts, some HR, and universities, and that's basically it.

It's not the case that this is a version of the language that the French don't speak. The Academie Francaise is an authority on the use of official language; it's a bit like if we gave the Oxford Dictionary power to set a policy on various aspects of language usage. The AF suggests alternatives for Anglicisms as they enter the French language to try and keep English at bay, for instance, and sets/campaigns for rules about language usage in official contexts. In day to day usage it obviously can't make people use or not use certain words.

Lae chat noir.e est dans lae joli.e jardin*

Can one just do an asterisk every now and then or must everything be asterisked?

Lae chat est dans lae jardin

Phew! so much easier!

as well as “students’ use of gender-neutral nouns

So one could fudge the gender of 'table' as long as there is an asterisk?

I predict much asterisking and inventive use of neutral articles.

According to the TRAs DNA does change over time when you take hormones.

I enjoy trolling in Spanish by always using feminine plurals for mixed groups of people. But unfortunately my French isn’t good enough. It’s quite hard to do it consistently and as a foreigner relies on you getting gendered endings correct consistently in other situations so that people actually notice the difference.

Which is where this French thing will have zero impact whatsoever with British GCSE students… I imagine even the most gender woo teenagers are struggling enough to remember the basics, let alone add in a new gender, which is what “gender neutral” is in the end.

😂

yes, i find it a lot easier in German - and i so rarely use French except in a private capacity that it doesn't really crop up.

I remember working with a really lovely bunch of Germans and one old dinosaur of a bloke. And He rejected any attempt for us to use inclusive language. Eventually after he had addressed us in the male form as a group once too often, the women just ignored everything he said unless he directly spoke to us. And in the end the bosses introduced "gendered language so we are all making sure everyone loads/unloads the dishwasher and not just the men". Was pretty hilarious.

Whoa!
I am just getting used to words being shortened
restaurant to resto
refrigerateur to frigo
television to tele
promotion to promo

(sorry my keyboard can’t do the accents)

Interesting. I've not come across that before, and without context I wouldn't have been sure what was meant.

@AngryHerring in the situation you mention, my go-to option is to address the room as if it were a women only group (ie the equivalent of Kolleginnen, although the French collègues is gender neutral so bad example), and men can just suck it up if they feel excluded for once. There is even a name for that ("accord majoritaire ", majority fit). I started using "toutes et tous" now and then a few years back, although I'm wary of the fact that women now risk feeling excluded if people only use "tous", which wasn't the case before (I never did, at least!)

But toutes et tous are actual words, unlike tous.tes. A big difference is that most of the time in German the feminine form adds a suffix to the masculine word (Father+in = Fahrerin) whereas in French the feminine suffix replaces the masculine one (conducteur / conductrice) making it much more wordsalady.

Whereas access hole covers has.

Obviously I don't, and can't, know how I would have felt if I had been a woman. I do know women who don't like being called an inanimate object ... but my point on chair/chairman/chairwoman is that it's possible to get used to changes in language. Of course the problem with "chairwoman" was that it sounded too much like the rather derogatory "charwoman". Language is endlessly fascinating and changes can have subtle, or not so subtle, consequences. And sometimes logical changes just sound ridiculous. Personhole covers don't seem to have caught on yet.

No, I'm using alternative spellings to cover all eventualities!

I'm still not keen on being called a "chair" rather than a "chairman" but I don't always notice anymore.

with respect, that is because you are a man. If you had grown up with 2nd wave feminism as a woman, you would have had to be called chairman because that was how it was done. And it really bloody grates. Chair is fine.

That's why I'm "meh" about how it is done in Germany (and i am ok with Pearson letting the applicants "gendern" if they do it how it is done here in Germany). We have fought a long and hard struggle NOT to be addressed as "you blokes - yes you women should feel included in that" and i am not about to let that go.

not sure about French but German already has a way of using gendered language (not their regular grammar with Der, Die or Das) to make it more inclusive.

Frankly? I'm am ok with it because otherwise you get the ridiculous situations of a room full of women and one man and the group is always addressed as though they are all men. There has been a move to use gender inclusive language which does shorten things. So instead of someone giving a presentation saying male-colleagues and female-collegues, they say "KollegInnen" which covers both sexes. In speaking it is customary to give a tiny break where the comes.

Naturally there are naysayers, and then you get people like me who say "Kolleginnen" - my boss said "you should make a break to make it inclusive" but my reply of "i was using the female form, men should feel included" was fine by everyone.

There is a huge pushback against the gender-inclusive language though. And many companies have revised style guides to go back to the old ways. The most recent example of pushback against the pushback was a local voluntary fire brigade who revised their procedures manual using gender-inclusive language, and the local mayor told them they had to change it. So they used the feminine form throught and said "men should feel included".

But. This comes with the long long long baggage of feminists trying to get round the fact that German tends to use male gendered language "and women and other genders are included". So it is a little more complicated than just getting rid of new-fangled gender inclusive bollocks.

and yes, due to SelfID and other laws, you can be male, female or diverse here.

It would seem every institution has been touched by the trans ideology or queer theory.

Sadly the re engineering of society has happened. What always gets me with any of this trans/non binary/queer theory infiltrating life is did not one person sit around the table at Pearson in this case, and say ‘this is nonsense, we are here to teach French not indoctrination about trans/non binary/queer theory?’

It took me a long time to appreciate the French language, but it only works if you gain a feel for it. Trying to learn it by rules is about as futile as trying to learn English by rules. Native speakers know what sounds right and what sounds wrong, and don't have to decide whether it should be "the long green grass" or "the green long grass" by mentally running through an ordered list of type of adjective. Similarly a native French speaker knows that "la verte herbe" or "la herbe verte" sound wrong and "l'herbe verte" sounds right (I do hope my schoolboy French hasn't let me down there!).

Even in the most predictable languages, there are unwritten rules. I remember being taught "time, manner, place" in German, which was some use in written work, but utterly useless in conversation as you just don't have time to process the rule. In English, dialect forms often sound completely wrong until you become used to them, when they start to sound right, and you realise that "my lover" just means "mate" or "pet" or "me duck".

I tend to object most to language changes that are deliberate as opposed to natural language evolution. I'm still not keen on being called a "chair" rather than a "chairman" but I don't always notice anymore. But sometimes I have a stronger objection to culturally imposed language changes, when they have an effect on people's understanding. Any change to language can have an impact on meaning, for example the change in meaning of "wicked" in some cultures. Usually we manage to adapt and understand what is meant even when a word is used to mean the reverse of what we are used to. I'm not convinced that's true of pronoun use, and I strongly suspect that using gender identity pronouns instead of sex-based ones affects people's understanding on a subconscious level.

A further factor is the "uglification" of language, for example "obligated" for "obliged". I think l'Académie Française are particularly concerned with this aspect of language.

…shoujd you not make that fou/foule 🙄