Cayetano Santos <[email protected]> writes: > I guess the same is common in Portuguese, Italian, Russian, German ... > and Castillian.
Hi all. In German, it is not true, partly because it breaks grammatic cases, *except* the website uses both male and female form sometimes and the manual uses female forms often in examples or when it is not specified. The German authority for orthography mentions this reason [1], in machine translation to English with DeepL and a few fixes by me: > Increasingly, orthographic symbols such as colons (:) – without a > following space (Bürger:innen) – or special characters such as asterisks > (*), underscores (_) or other symbols are being used within words to > refer to people. These symbols within words are not part of the core > German orthography. They are intended to convey a metalinguistic > meaning that goes beyond the formal linguistic function to identify all > gender identities – male, female, diverse: die Schüler:innen, die > Kolleg*innen. They thus go beyond abbreviated forms such as > Bürger/-innen, which are already covered by the official rules. > > The special feature of intra-word symbols for indicating a meaning > that spreads across genders is that they directly affect the > orthographically correct spelling of words. They share this property > with some punctuation marks (intra-word parentheses, apostrophes, > hyphens, quotation marks), whose use within words is described in the > official rules. In the case of special characters with gender > references, however, a metalinguistic meaning is to be conveyed. > Their use can lead to various grammatical problems that have not yet > been clarified, e.g., in syntactic contexts involving the multiple use > of articles or pronouns (der*die Präsident*in). > > The development of this entire area is not yet complete and > is being monitored by the Council for German Orthography. Regards, Florian [1] https://www.rechtschreibrat.com/regeln-und-woerterverzeichnis/
