gender

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Facebook sometimes has problems with gender – if it doesn’t know which a person is, it usually throws around “they,” as in “Bruce Fields took their turn in [game]!” because, yknow, English doesn’t really have a gender-neutral pronoun.

Look how much worse it is when you switch your Facebook language to German:

vorschlaege

This is Facebook suggesting a friend who I might know. It doesn’t seem to know if Laura is female or not, so not only does it have the kind-of-neutral “FreundIn” (which means Freund/Freundin), it also has to suggest alternative endings for the article (could be ein or eine) and the adjective (could be gemeinsamer or gemeinsame). It obviously doesn’t know what to do with Carleton, either.

Whew! German is rough. Well, it’s rough in writing, when you can’t just mumble the adjective endings.

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About Helen Fields

I'm a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C. I like to knit,sing, dance, and write about science. Only one of these pays the bills. A few years ago I spent six weeks on an icebreaker in the Bering Sea and two months in Berlin on a journalism fellowship, and who knows - I could find some more adventures sometime.