I know enough German to participate in a conversation and read a book or a news article. Like any language, it has odd features. Its pronunciation is more regular than English, though it’s not as consistent as, say, Italian. A feature which catches everyone’s attention is the gender system. I’d like to discuss it a bit, because its oddness helps to make it clear what gender is and isn’t, and because it creates distinctive problems for the language.

The word “gender” is related to “genre.” Originally it meant simply a kind of word, one that has distinctive grammatical features. It’s common for languages to have male and female genders, with or without a neuter gender, but some have genders that have nothing to do with sex. For instance, some languages have animate and inanimate genders. Languages in the Bantu family tend to have a lot of genders. At some point, people started using “gender” as a euphemism for “sex,” engendering confusion. Today we have the weird situation where some people think they can make themselves male, female, or even plural by declaring what pronouns apply to them.

But that’s English, and I was going to discuss German. I haven’t heard of anyone doing that in German. If nothing else, it would run into the problem that both “she” and “they” translate as “sie.” German has a different gender problem.

The German language has masculine, feminine, and neuter genders. Masculine and feminine as grammatical terms correspond roughly with male and female, but there are many exceptions. The same person can be “der Mensch” (masculine), “die Person” (feminine), and “das Kind” (neuter). If you heard all three of those words, you wouldn’t know whether the person in question was a boy or a girl. In strict grammar, you’re supposed to use pronouns that agree with the noun you just used, which means that a man can be “she” or a woman “he.” Things can be masculine, feminine, or neuter, and you have to memorize each word’s gender without expecting consistency.

But the biggest problem is more than a grammatical curiosity. Words for professions, nationalities, and so on have male and female forms. The female one adds the suffix “-in,” which works like the English “-ess.” So you have “der Professor” and “die Professorin,” “der Amerikaner” and “die Amerikanerin,” etc. Adding to the confusion, the “-in” suffix can have other meanings. Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier has a character called “die Feldmarschallin.” When I first encountered the opera, I thought she was a female field marshal, which would be unusual even today. It turned out to mean the field marshal’s wife.

The distinction needlessly splits categories in two and makes it hard to talk about all their members. The traditional practice is to revert to the male form when referring to a group as a whole or a mixed subset. Understandably, some people don’t like that. A fix which has become common is to combine the two forms into one word. (German is good at combining words.) For example, professors in general are called “Professor*innen.” The asterisk sometimes becomes a glottal stop, but the usage I’ve heard isn’t consistent.

This doesn’t feel like a long-term fix. It’s easy to hear “Professor*innen” as “Professorinnen,” and then it sounds like only female professors. If I had a vote, I’d get rid of the female forms and have the base form apply to everyone in the group. Germans are already used to genders that don’t match biology. English has been going in this direction for the few nouns that have different gender forms. The word “actress” still exists, but women who act are often called actors. “Seamstress” has become “sewer,” though not everyone thinks that’s an improvement.

The lesson is that grammar often doesn’t make sense, and we have to live with it.