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A comment on The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked. Parent comment

Re:The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked by littlestymaar on Monday April 01, 2019 @11:14AM (#19544145)
French (and German) is a gendered language: we say «une»/«un» and «la»/«le». And we don't even have a way to opt-out the gender (German does).

In the 18th and 19th centuries, L'Académie Française tried to get rid of the feminine version or many existing names, and promote the idea of the masculine as «gender-neutral». The most (in)famous example is the masculine auteur (the French for “author”) replacing autrice for both sex. But this unification around the male version always felt artificial and somewhat offensive for women, because of the gendered articles.

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Re:The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked by bunderbunder on Monday April 01, 2019 @11:26AM (#19544304)
I think that approach might be politically easier to accept if the plan had been to drop the masculine version for half the nouns, and the feminine one for the other half.

But it's also hard to imagine the members of an old men's club voluntarily deciding that they should henceforth be known as autrices instead of auters. Doubly so 200 years ago.

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