Does German use parenthetical pluralization?

Question

Question

In English, we sometimes enclose in parentheses the plural of a word to indicate that the possibility exists that a subject could also be plural. An example is below:

The location(s) must be announced by noon tomorrow.

Use of this is not advised for academic writing, but for certain situations or professions (e.g., legal), it is necessary. Does German use this same convention and, if so, how does it handle words that would feature an umlaut when such a parentheses is added? For example:

Haus(er)

or

Häus(er)

Background

This question arose while attempting to translate some documents from English into Spanish. I posted the question up at Spanish StackExchange and found out that Spanish has a different way of writing it. If that interests you at all, you can view that discussion by clicking on the link below:

Does Spanish use parenthetical pluralization?

Even if Spanish doesn't interest you, I recommend clicking on the link because my question, in English, may give you a better understanding of what it is I am attempting to describe.

Whether you visit the link or not, I've recently attempted to translate some English documents into German and, early on, I stumbled upon one that used a parenthetical plural. I have searched high and low for an example of this in German, but have not been able to find any. Knowing that Spanish has a different way of expressing this altogether, I now wonder if other languages, to include German, do as well. Anyone happen to know? If your answer could also address subject-verb agreement for such uses (if it exists), even better.

Answer 1

Yes, this phenomenon exists in German as well. Don't know whether rules exist for it (I suppose: no), but a short Google search brought up two examples:

Form des Verbs oder Pronomens, die an die sprechende[n], an die angesprochene[n] oder an die Person[en] (1a) oder Sache[n], über die gesprochen wird, geknüpft ist (Source: Duden)

and

Durch diese Kategorie wird festgelegt, ob eine sprachliche Äußerung

• auf diejenige(n) Person(en), welche sich äußert,
• auf diejenige(n) Person(en), an welche die Äußerung gerichtet ist, oder
• auf Person(en), welche nicht unmittelbar an der Äußerung beteiligt sind,

Bezug nimmt. Source: Wikipedia

In my experience (round) parentheses can be seen much more frequently than the brackets from the Duden sample. I'd also say that subject-verb agreement tends to follow the singular, like in the Wikipedia sample.

Answer 2

The official ruleset does not mention parentheses as a form of alternative pluralisation.

What it does mention, however, is using the slash (/) as a sign to introduce alternatives, but does not explicitely allow the usage of word fragments (like alternative plural)

Dies betrifft

1. die Angaben mehrerer (alternativer) Möglichkeiten im Sinne einer Verbindung mit und, oder, bzw., bis oder dergleichen:

die Schüler/Schülerinnen der Realschule, das Semikolon/der Strichpunkt als stilistisches Zeichen, Männer/Frauen/Kinder;

This could be used to express plural alternatives as well, such as

die Person/Personen

That means, the parenthesized plural is not officially sanctioned, but used nonetheless, as you see from the other answers.

Answer 3

Yes, this type of pluralisation is used in German in some settings, too. Mainly where brevity is the desired goal since it minimised the amount of letters required. However, the use of actual brackets is typically restricted to those cases where — as is the general rule in English — the stem does not change and merely an ending is added.

Die Reaktion(en) des/der Versuchsteilnehmer(s) wurde(n) beobachtet und notiert.

As you can see in my example, the plural of Reaktion and genitive ending of Versuchsteilnehmer is put in brackets to show that it is not always there. Note that also the verb form can be bracketed in that way. However, there is no such simple case for des versus der where one letter is always different from the other side. In that case, a slash is used to show that two different forms are there depending on the numerus.

While this type of inflection is possible it should be avoided if brevity is not a concern as it is typically considered bad style.

Answer 4

Just adding this as a curiosity because I don’t see it in the other answers. In this comment it’s mentioned that parentheses can’t really be used if the noun takes an umlaut in plural.

There is a different approach that is seemingly common in dictionaries (but I haven’t seen this anywhere else), which is to use a hyphen to introduce the plural suffix, and then to add an umlaut to the hyphen if the noun takes an umlaut in plural. For example, you might see:

Haus(-̈er)

(slightly related question about how to type this -̈ character)