Hello everyone,
Are there settings in LO’s spell check or LanguageTool to enable some form of inclusive writing (in french notably) ?
Thanks in advance for your answers.
LO version : 25.2.6.2
Linux Mint 22.2
Could you, please, define “inclusive writing”?
Wikipedia suggests:
Inclusive language is a language style that seeks to avoid expressions that its proponents perceive as expressing or implying ideas that are sexist, racist, or otherwise biased, prejudiced, or insulting to particular group of people; and instead uses language intended by its proponents to avoid offense and fulfill the ideals of egalitarianism, social inclusion and equity.
I should have written: “define technically inclusive writing” or “from a parsing point of view”.
AFAIK, no language authoritative body has presently defined an “inclusive grammar”. when there are precise grammar rules, they can be implemented, with more or less difficulty, into a parser.
There are two levels in this domain:
- morphologic layer (dictionary): can handle “local” variants because the context is limited to a single word without consideration for adjacent words
- syntactic layer: unfortunately this is much more complex because grammar rules come into play with a variable-sized “horizon”; rules imply flexion changes which simple dictionary lookups can’t cope with
IMHO, as long as agreed rules are not available, checking will remain a manual process.
Indeed the french institutions are actually kinda against inclusive writing
In english it doesn’t exist, but for example, “the teacher” exists in french in a masculine (“le professeur”) and feminine (“la professeure”) form, and inclusive writing is about using both in a smooth way (“le/la professeur•e”)
Which you shall admit conflicts with the first goal of communication, i.e. unambiguously transmit a clear and immediately understandable message. And this is made worse by the lack of culture of most proponents of inclusive writing. I have a fair knowledge of French and don’t understand why some existing feminine words are replaced by new ones (take for example “le maire” and its traditional (old fashioned? voluntarily obsoleted for obscure reasons?) “la mairesse”, replaced by “la maire” which collides phonetically with “la mère” – and when you want to mention precisely the office with “de”, I let you guess what the result is phonetically). I am really fascinated by word “sage-femme” which stems from an old verb with meaning to take care, followed by a complement designating the object to care for. This etymology implies also there is no plural form because you don’t pluralise verbs and “femme” is a complement of the main word (must comply with grammar rule for verbs). Hence, this a name for a medical profession targeting women. How has it been considered as a job done exclusively by women? A man can be a “sage-femme”.
Please, AskLO visitors, excuse me for this pedantic off-topic comment.
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