Bulk gender change

A phenomenon you may have seen in a PBS Nature special about some non-mammal lifeforms occurred last week in the city of Leipzig, Germany.

All teachers at Leipzig University underwent gender adjustment and are now female, kind of.

If you are a male reader, please do not cringe.  Nothing bad happened to the apparatus of maleness.

It was a linguistic operation that turned Herr (Mr.) Professor into Herr Professorin (female gender form).

Language wise, German has three "genders", male (der), female (die), and neutral (das).  For English native speakers, this represents one of the many challenges of the language. If you come from the U.S., you have an advantage in that there is one word whose gender you won't mess up, thanks to TV car commercials. You will always get "das Auto" right.

Everything else is up for confusion, and they even spend lots of collective brain power on assigning the "correct" German gender to English words that dot the language.

For instance, a link on a web page remains "Link" (they do capitalize all nouns), but what is the German gender?

Male.

We would have made it neutral (das), it's a thing, and "das" flows nicely, but no, it is "der Link", which sounds outright threatening and authoritarian to the ears of TheEditor.

The Germans have grappled with language gender issues for decades and tried to overcome the default male form of address in a couple of ways. One was "doubling up", for example, they would write and says things like "Studenten und Studentinnen" (male students and female students), thus making long and complicated sentences even longer and more complicated.

TheEditor calls this the "high carbon footprint version" of German because of the extra paper, bits, bytes, and time needed in discourse.

In some manuals and in the new vehicle code, they switched the default from male to female, and that works despite some detractors.

They tried "StudentInnen" (note the capital i), kind of cute but causing a revolt among old people and confusing foreigners.

Leipzig University decided to ditch the male forms and use the female gender forms throughout the campus, which makes the form of address Herr Professorin.

We have not seen any huge public outcry, which is nice.

Yet, TheEditor thinks it is time to ditch  two perfectly useless grammatical forms of gender. Make everything the neutral "das", and be done with it. Immigrants will love it, and even TheEditor may speak more German.

Other than being a historical convention nobody signed off on, having three grammatical genders is inefficient and nothing but the language version of "we've always done it like that".

And it is an ecological nightmare!