So, I work right at the side of some translators at work and I can’t get enough of those feminization discussions. What do you do if you have both genders being addressed by a pronoun in French, usually you use “ils”. So:
- Ils étaient allés voir leur grand-mère.
“Ils” here could mean two things: only men or both men and women.
The big fight with equality is trying to go against this concept, where “Elle” would only be women and not both, by making some weird things like this:
- Ils et elles étaient allé(e)s voir leur grand-mère.
While not technically wrong in any way, I’ve seen worse, and it’s far from pretty. So, I say, while we’re on the French gender mania, which makes it a very difficult language, why not push it further and include a neutral gender, which includes both.
For example:
- Ols étaient alléx voir leur grand-mère.
“Ol” or “Ols” in the plural form would be the neutral way of “they” in French. And, instead of putting an S or an E or an ES as a feminin/masuclin singular or plural form, a simple X would define both. The X is, like the feminin E or the S or the ES are mute, and Ol is pronounced with the O sound in French.
