Quote Originally Posted by Gun-Cat View Post
Ohh, thanks for clearing that up! It has been some time since I looked into my German textbooks. Interesting to know! While we are at it, I fraintly remember reading some letters in german that had some fancy endings like "Student/-innen", mind explaining what that is all about? Is that an attempt to address both students male and female? Might be atleast tangentially related to this thread.
You are correct in your assumption!

-in is a suffix you can end to a lot of male nouns - often job-"descriptions" like Lehrer (techer), Artz (medical doctor) etc. - to make them female.
-innen is basically the plural form for that.

So "Student" is a male university student; "Studentin" is a female university student; "Studenten" are several male university students and "Studentinnen" are several female ones.
So in this context its used to adress everyone studying at the university.

M university recently cahnged a lot of letterheads to "Studierende" ("people who study", basically) though - which actually fits this discussion, because its supposed to include everyone, regardless of whatever gender they identify with.
...I heard quite a few profs and specially the people who have to take care of sending out letters to students and the like being rather unhappy about this, because it meant a massive extra workload for them to change everything for something that many dont see any real gain in. And we are only talking about one language here and only letterheads at one university - and it was already a massive extra effort. Doesnt even compare to the massive amount of text and the 4 languages this game supports.