Parental leave and family at work

One noun keeps turning up on the forms in this list, and it exists because of a gap English does not have. German die Eltern is plural only: there is no everyday singular, and Elter survives only as a technical term in biology. Where English says a parent, official German has to build a compound, der Elternteil, literally a part of the parents. A compound takes its gender from its last element, and the last element here is der Teil, so the word is masculine whoever it describes: Jeder Elternteil hat einen eigenen Anspruch, and where the statute looks at things from the father’s side, the mother is der andere Elternteil. Everything that agrees with it follows the grammar, not the person: ein Elternteil, des Elternteils, beide Elternteile. In conversation nobody needs the word; people say die Mutter or der Vater. On paper from the Elterngeldstelle it is the only way to name one of the two without saying which.