Exam board insanity

[Rightsraptor]

Reading the DM in the library and found this:

'Now French exams set to allow gender neutral terms'. It turns out it's German and Spanish as well.

I wonder what the famously protective Academie Française thinks of this. I don't get why there are two words for the French replacements, that seems somewhat ... um ... binary. Are they saying to use 'lel' for 'elle' and 'ille' for 'il', which is gendered in itself?

I am puzzled by the idea that using gendered pronouns about objects may not be inclusive to pupils who ID as 'gender fluid'. It's not about the speaker, it's about the object. So, presumably, a 'gender fluid' person will be upset by my femaleness. To which I can only say 'tough bloody luck'.

Not sure if the bottom bit is there but it reads
'It is irresponsible for exam boards to pursue a redefinition of academic subjects in order to promote a woke ideology.'

Pearson stated the predicable inclusive garbage.

I can't see this makes any sense at all. Colour me shocked.

Blimey!

But it doesn’t make sense - if you were writing about yourself in an exam you wouldn’t use pronouns anyway. And if they’re writing about someone else, it would be a character prescribed by the exam board and they’re not going to put a gender-neutral one in as it would be super confusing! So it’s a moot point.

You would use pronouns, e.g. ma, mon, moi, je etc. surely, if writing about oneself? Third person narrative would never be gender neutral, though. Don't see the point of all this messing around for c.200,000 people few of whom would be taking the exam.

I heard that in the radio earlier and they reported that some Spanish and German (nationals) linguists were saying,

"FFS! Don't make it unnecessarily complicated and so that actual Germans will laugh at them."

Sadly, they don't seem to have added, "... you fucking morons."

Yes, first person pronouns, but they don’t change and aren’t mentioned in the article anyway. So it’s a useless rule.

What do the actual French/German/Spanish speaking people of the world think of this?!

It is a long time since I studied language but it wasn’t just pronouns eg il/elle that changed was it? Didn’t the words also change depending on the sex referred to?

Bloody ridiculous. It’s like ‘whack-a-mole’. You hear about common sense prevailing in one area and think everyone’s seen the light at last, then something like this crops up in another.

It did make me smile, op, that you felt you had to put Reading the DM in the library, lest we think you’d actually buy a copy!

I speak French and my DH asked how the non-binary crew would deal with French just last night. Funny that this story has come up.

What???

So the UK exam boards are making up new bits of foreign languages so that they can be inclusive in a way which isn’t used by native speakers? They’re planning to teach the kids a made up language?

I really hope I’ve misunderstood!

I have half tracked this and I thought it meant you didn't have to bother learning words properly. By which I mean, you don't need to know whether "table" is masculine or feminine. And I thought...looks like a fantastic way of skiving off the hard part of learning!!

Sunnyjac · Today 13:59

What do the actual French/German/Spanish speaking people of the world think of this?!

That it's a big, hairy bag of wank, by all accounts.

watcherintherye · Today 14:03

It did make me smile, op, that you felt you had to put Reading the DM in the library, lest we think you’d actually buy a copy!

Yeah, we believe her, though thousands wouldn't!

Oh perish the thought @watcherintherye that I'd ever buy it! I was in the library, honest.

What about definite and indefinite articles, too? And agreement of adjectives?

What do the actual French/German/Spanish speaking people of the world think of this?!

Post Brexit do we care? Forriners. Why would we want to educate kids to be able to actually be able to communicate with them. Stick to English and shout louder.

Is it true that WW2 pilots used to communicate in schools French on the basis that though they used to be able to understand each other no one else could...including the French.

Well, having seen the documentary with Rene, Yvette and Edith, it's a verifiable fact that Jean Crapaud can't understand their own language, when spoken by stout British yeomaen.

Yeomen, for goodness sake!

So is it la transfemme or le transfemme?

You would use pronouns, e.g. ma, mon, moi, je etc. surely, if writing about oneself

French doesn't quite work like that. You describe your nose as mon nez (masculine), your mouth as ma bouche (feminine) and your hair as mes cheveaux (plural) - its the 'thing' you're talking about that is m/f, not the person.

His mouth is sa bouche (still feminine, even though it belongs to a boy), her nose is son nez (still masculine even though it's on HER face).

Utterly ridiculous. Bastardizing another country's language to suit the woke bullshit in our own.

I have half tracked this and I thought it meant you didn't have to bother learning words properly. By which I mean, you don't need to know whether "table" is masculine or feminine. And I thought...looks like a fantastic way of skiving off the hard part of learning!!

Ha ha, yeah, me too

They're not impressed: www.lbc.co.uk/news/cambridge-university-german-gender/

But this doesn't make sense in French.

OK my French is a distant memory but the teacher is Le Le professeur even if the teacher is female.

I know the French examined is slight different, or at least it was eg putting accents over capital letters.

I did see someone on twitter, apparently Finnish is gender neutral, so to talk about trans / gender etc people speak English!

As a languages teacher, I can confirm that most of the kids I teach can't cope with the pronouns that are there already (what Miss? There are three ways to say 'you' in German?! ). They don't need any more adding to the confusion!

Good question! I got the same impression as you.

It's possible that the madey-uppy German may be intelligible to certain woke groups in some cities in Germany.

That'll be a minuscule proportion of the 82+ million inhabitants, mind.

As for Austria and German-speaking Switzerland, I couldn't even guess.