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A bit ignorant take. Grammatical gender does not always imply the actual gender of the subject, and Spanish can easily form gender neutral-nouns or sentences. For example: “persona no binaria” is entirely made with “feminine” words, but it’s meaning (non-binary person) is entirely gender-neutral.
This is also why most Spanish speakers make fun of anglophones who use “latix”. It’s embarrassing, condescending and completely unnecessary, it shows a lack of understanding of how Spanish is actually used by it’s speakers
Here’s another common way to make gender-neutral Spanish, while making it explicit:
Take the sentence “The workers are radicalizing.” Workers is “Trabajadores” a masculine-plural word. The Royal Academy of Spanish Language, clarifies that the maculine form of any noun includes participants of any gender, so to say “Los Trabajadores se están radicalizando” would be grammatically correct, and no Spanish speaker would really asume you only have male workers. However, to make inclusion more explicit, it isn’t uncommon for companies to use double articles: “Las y los trabajadores se están radicalizando.” Notice that the noun has remained in masculine form, instead the articles have been used to make it explicit that the writer does see gender as a binary. You would see this in office-settings, but as you can hopefully see. Doing it like this actually reinforces the binary perspective, rather than the other way around.
TL&DR: Use “Latino/a” or “Hispanic”, instead of “Latix” if you don’t want your maid and gardener to laugh their asses off at your expense. Also, all words in Spanish have gender, that doesn’t mean all people have to as well.
Hispanic here, absolutely hate Latinx, feels like a term made by English speakers on behalf of us for “inclusivity”
It’s not though. That’s a myth. It was created by latine nonbinary math nerds on old internet message boards. Since they were math nerds, they used x to represent a variable that could be anything. They only designed it for use on message boards, they never thought about how to pronounce it. You’re allowed to think those latine geeks did a bad job, but calling them English speakers is factually incorrect.
Source? I wanna see the old message board post! Just out of curiosity, genuinely.
It was created by latine nonbinary math nerds on old internet message boards.
you know, sometimes I do think the world is cool
feels like
That’s exactly what it is, so that’s an accurate feeling.
I’ve seen latine used by some Spanish speakers. It seems like opinions are certainly more positive about it than Latinx, but that’s a low bar
Latine is at least pronounceable, and doesn’t sound like you’re describing your former spouse from South America.
Even as a boy in latinamerica I found strange that my cousins where “las primitas” when I was not included and “los primitos” when I was. Like, what gave me so much power to change the gender of a group of 9 girls? Anyway, since 2005 or so, my small communist mailing group was discussing the way we use gendered words, being influenced by Spanish feminist groups. We were like 10 guys and a woman on the mailing list, and after a lot of discussion we decided to start using feminine gender for everything, given that “nobody” care.
You mean “Latinx”? That came out of the trend for slapping Xs onto words to make them inclusive. The problem is that it can’t conjugate properly, which is why POC activists now prefer the term “Latine”.
Latines, can’t be conjugated either, the problem is Spanish requires gender and number to match in each element of a sentence. Pretending to use “latine or latinx” ignores the fact of what comes after or before.
Take the sentence: “Los latinos son revolucionarios.” (Latinos are revolutionaries.)
Let’s try with “latines”: “Los latines son revolucionarios.”
This sentence is grammatically incorrect, gender and number between adjective, articles and nouns do not match. Do we make up new words? A new way of conjugating? Replace all terminations of all words with gender neutral ones?
How about just realizing that no one would assume you are talking only about males, unless you explicitly stated: “Los hombres latinos son revolucionarios.” (Latino men are revolutionaries.) Notice how the same is true for English?
The point is Spanish does not need a neutral gender. Partly because it does have one, but it’s only used for some objects and adjectives. “Este cuadro captura lo ominoso que vio en su pesadilla.” (This painting captures the ominous thing they saw in their nightmare.)
“Ominous” in this sentence is being conjugated in neutral form, and using a tacit subject leaves the gender of the painter completely unmentioned.
I don’t doubt there are people who use latinx and latine, my point is, most of the time that’s a sign of ignorance and of not having done due dilligence. Token inclusion.
Thank you for your BASED take bro
The term latinx was first recorded on brazillian protests on 1900, but popularized on academic papers since de 2000
https://www.theactuarymagazine.org/should-i-call-you-latinx/
Similar issue in Italian. Neutral gender in Latin consolidated in the male gender. It is what it is. There are some English-speakers who have really hard time to understand that different languages work in different ways, somehow.
That said, there are discussions about using both articles or more weird stuff like “*” or even the Ə character to replace the ending, which most people are not used to yet, though.
It is what it is
Yet that does not logically imply that it is as it should be. And if it should be as it isn’t, then the fact that it is what it is tells us that it should be improved.
Doesn’t mean the current attempt is actually doing a good job at improving the situation, tho
The current attempt is Latine. What’s wrong with E? I thought everyone generally liked it.
You still have to deal with the “el/los” and “la/las”, because that depends on the word’s gender. Should it be “el latine” or “la latine”? Invent le/les to comply? And when it comes to quantity, un latino, una latina, uns latinos, unas latinas, un(?) latine?
Proposal: either smoosh them together (eg: ella / loas) which preserves the historical gendering of the language while creating a non gendered article Or Create a separate non gendered article that can be used
Language is made up by and for the speakers of the language. Rules of grammar are not actually rules but just what the collective speakers generally agree upon.
Proposal: either smoosh them together (eg: ella / loas)
As neat as that’d be, ella ([ɛlə] not [ɛjə]) was already a word and got shortened to la.
As in ella agua, ella manzana, ella persona.
Not to say we can’t repurpose things, but it was already a preexisting feminine word.
I dunno but those all sound like solvable problems and I think latine enbies will do great at solving them as long as latine binaries listen to them instead of calling the enbies anglos.
Any linguistic problem is technically solvable, just invent new words, add more rules and call it a day, you can do that for any language. Getting people that grew up and have used it for decades to accept is one hell of an uphill battle, especially as many will say the changes “are making up words to please half a dozen people”
Sure, but my point is:
- there is no point to overcharge with moral meaning what is a linguistic process (well understood I would add) that happened over centuries. This particular phenomenon has to do with the optimization of the language (neutral in Latin had relatively few nouns for objects) and the loss of consonants at the end of the world (like -m) that were often not pronounced anyway in the spoken language already - so again simplification. It has to do with a moral stance not more than other linguistic phenomena that caused mutations in consonants etc.
- changing the language is responsibility of the speakers, not of English-speakers that in addition to have language hegemony, pretend to change other languages they don’t speak, mirroring English’s quirks and working mechanisms.
In fact, what I mentioned above (about * and the schwa) are processes that exist among speakers to address what some perceive as a problem in the language. However this is something that for obvious reasons only applies to written language as both of them are not pronounceable.
Different languages also have a different prescriptive vs descriptive balance, hence changes happen differently.
You simply can’t transport English “solutions” to problems (I.e. neutral words) to Spanish (or Italian), because neutral for this language is the same as masculine. However, for speakers, gender is not perceived in the same way it is perceived in English. It is completely obvious (I can speak for Italian, but given the similarity I am sure the same applies to Spanish) that both “umani” (humans) and “persone” (people) include everyone, even if the first is a masculine word and the second is a feminine word, grammatically speaking. Nobody thinks of the gender of the word as the gender of the concept, because that’s not how the language works. When you want to do that, you add context that make it semantically obvious. This is apparently how English works instead, because gender has basically no other function, so you get things like the one in the screenshot, that doesn’t make any sense.
every time i see a /u/mindtraveller post I’m like “that’s correct but i hate it”
Thank you, that means a lot. Remember that consensus reality is a social construct produced within the conditions of patriarchy and white supremacy.
The irony is that in wanting to include their variable/neutral gender via x or @ instead of ‘o’ or ‘a’, people that use screen readers usually get excluded, as the programs don’t recognize “latinx” or “latin@” - same applies to Portuguese
So would you use Latina or Latino to refer to a non binary person?
In theory? I would use Latino, as in terms of pure grammar this is the correct answer, it’s not about the gender of the person, it’s about constructing the sentence following appropriate grammar.
In practice? I would just ask what they prefer. Lol
But if you were to say that you were Latino or Latina, the sentence would be grammatically correct either way. The only difference is in your gender identity. You have to assign a grammatical gender to yourself to construct the sentence, and that is where your gender identity comes into play.
And that’s ultimately the crux of the joke in this post. Somebody says that they are neither masculine nor feminine (i.e. nonbinary). They are then given two choices of words to describe that aspect of themselves and instructed to choose one based on whether they are masculine or feminine.
Again, this is only true if you know nothing about Spanish. Saying “Soy una persona latina” says nothing about the gender of the speaker. Males, females and enbys are “personas latinas”. So no, you don’t need to assign yourself a gender to speak.
My point was: It’s an ignorant joke.
That’s ignoring my point. You introduce the word “persona” in order to describe yourself in a nongendered way. In Spanish, this is necessary because many adjectives need to correspond in gender with the object they are describing. If I’m describing a person directly, I need to assign them to some gender in order to properly form the adjectives.
That is, if I wanted to say precisely that “I am American”, not that “I am an American person,” I could say either “Soy Americano” or “Soy Americana.” The former means that I identify with the masculine grammatical gender, and the latter that I identify with the feminine grammatical gender.
Well, as somebody that identifies as a man, I’d go with the former, but it ends up saying more about myself than the English version of the sentence does. How do I specifically say, “I’m American” without relaying my gender identity or assigning myself to a category such as “person” (well, perhaps I could speak authoritatively to somebody about their native language, and that would be enough to convey the idea). In practice, this doesn’t matter, but I’m speaking very narrowly about semantics. Semantically, it’s hard to express that concept in Spanish with as little information as I’m able to provide in English. I either have to express my gender (or at the very least, one gender that I do not identify with), or indicate that I’m a person.
I mean yeah… You have to use different words if you are communicating different information. Lol.
“Las y los trabajadores se están radicalizando.”
What about the nonbinary workers? Les trabajadores?
“Les” doesn’t exist. Just use “Los trabajadores”. It means everyone, doesn’t matter their gender.
Good news: language is made up. Les exists now. It can be used.
Les is already a word in Spanish used for other things, though.
Not really that much of a difference honestly. My point still stands. Language is made up. We can use whatever words we want to use to convey the meaning we want as long as the people talking agree with the meaning
You are correct but missing a key point: Language is indeed made up, but it works because we agree on how those made up bits are meant to be used. That’s why there have dictionaries and we are taught languages in school. So yeah, you can use any sound and word you like to communicate, but that doesn’t change the fact that the noises you are making are not “real” (as in with a communally agreed meaning).
Read the last part of my comment again. I didn’t miss it. If two speakers agree on a new word and its meaning to the point it becomes adopted by a wider population of speakers, guess what, it becomes a standard word. By how you’re describing it, dictionaries are the progenitors of language. You have that backwards. Dictionaries are records of the language and what words are being used.
The only languages that do not behave this way are dead languages.
Okay, let’s try this again, but for an entirely different reason this time…
Sadly this does not work for other neolatins languages like Italian, we have to stuck with tutt@ and other similar solutions
This is a screenshot of google translate on a screenshot of a twitter thread on a screenshot on a tumblr reblog. And the tumblr part doesn’t add anything at all, but it appears on the tumblr community on lemmy. I love modern social media
The tumblr part adds 2000 notes :)
All it’s missing is the iFunny watermark
My mind jumped straight to “it’s-a me! Binario!”
We default to “binario” since it’s technically the gender-neutral form but some people deliberately change it to “binaria”, “binarie” or even “binarix” to make a statement.
I’m pretty done with English speakers trying to shame other languages.
Go verb some nouns, English. You are drunk.
How about non-native English speakers trying to shame English instead? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ69ny57pR0
There’s an argument to be made that “no binario” is the more correct. Latin has a neutral grammatical gender (“bīnārium”) that has been mostly assimilated into the masculine gender in Spanish.
This is why some people insist on the generic he in English. A few hundred years ago, some British asshole who thought Latin was a perfect language decided to impose Latin rules on English, including such nonsense as “you can’t end a sentence with a preposition” and “never split infinitives”, as well as proscribing the then-common singular they in favor of “he”. The damage he did to the English language is still not fully repaired.
the singular they is pretty cool
thanks! i think you’re pretty cool too
But not ending a sentence with a preposition lead to a surprising grammar joke in “Beavis and Butthead Do America” which was one of the highlights of my early twenties.
It was really something magnificent to behold :)
If it was so good then what was it?
Yeah – it kind of loses something when you retell it out of context, but I’ll give it a go :-
Agent Bork: Chief, you know that guy whose camper they were whacking off in?
Agent Fleming: Bork, you’re a Federal Agent. You represent the United States government. Never end a sentence with a preposition.
See I am a huge grammar nerd, and I find grammar jokes, and dangling modifier jokes and so on, really funny.
But given the general level of humour in “Beavis and Butthead” I wasn’t expecting this sort of joke, and it entirely caught me by surprise, and made me laugh for five minutes. I just thought it was far funnier and far better than most of the humour in the film.
Yeah, okay. Maybe it’s just me.
No that’s pretty awesome
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Who is this Brit, I want to have a word
No binarie.
Non binariao. You‘re welcome.
What do you think this is, Portuguese!?
Paganel has entered the chat
Brazilian… like the wax
no binari@s
Binarião
Donde esta el binaño?
isn’t the generally accepted solution to this just “-e”? like “no binarie”, or “latine”
i feel like this is a bit of a trend, there’s a pretty decent solution that mostly works with existing grammar and for some reason you don’t really see anyone using it…
Spanish speaker here. It’s kinda an ongoing issue. Non binary people in most of South America did already used that as solution problem is that Spanish is used with generes for a lot of things even objects that do not really have a gender.
So as a start it sounds weird and sometimes you have to do a double take to understand what was said. Another issue is that gramatically there are words that end in e and are gendered for man ex: “Presidente” is used for male president and “Presidenta” for female president. Admittedly those are few cases and some argue that they where originally non gendered or are loan words that are non gendered. But still it’s not resolved Now this next point is mostly my observation you can take it as you’d like, the community handled this awkwardly and it kinda became a fad from 2014 now somehow out of taste for some. Some tried to impose it onto everyone as the.morally correct choice, and some seemed to use it as a form of rebel, I.think it was very badly received as a whole. My obvservations ending there reality is that there’s very little open discussion about it like it was a fad (also right wing government winning in 2015 doesn’t help) but non binary people is still very much there and still no better understood.
Right now seems that the genderless e use is still used as “an inside dialect” for some but when interacting with people outside of the queer comunity they go with old gender rules. Some others do use pronouns and gender alternatively. But definitely there is no consensus and little open talk.Ah yes grammatical gender and lexical gender butting heads
Generally this works with Spanish. But other Latin languages like Italian cannot have this option: so we have to use tricks like tuttə for anyone or others escamotages
Only in written language though, as the schwa can’t really be pronounced. I guess the way is to simply use both verbally (“tutti e tutte”), even though it’s not really necessary as “tutti” already includes - well - everyone (incl. non binary people).
Exactly :]
Grammatical gender isn’t the same as regular gender, but neither are real.
ironically i’m pretty sure grammatical gender is more real than regular gender
Eh, language is both fluid and made up. Patterns of sounds or squiggles that we generally agree have specific meaning
Morons who think they’re better than others: “No Binarix”
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Good lord not again man. You can’t dictate how we, the people from LATAM, speak our language.
Me, when I’m confronted with the prospect of introducing a grammatical neutral third gender
Relevant Tom Scott: https://youtu.be/46ehrFk-gLk?si=wFaP44sc5np2JICW
through thorough thought, yadda yadda.
What I don’t understand is that as soon as you start criticizing other languages for similar absurdities you’re gonna get a bunch of people coming out of the woodwork to defend it. People are fine to shit on english for being a horrible language, and I’m fine with that as well because that’s true, but as soon as you criticize spanish, i.e. another language that spread to everywhere because of colonialism, you’re gonna get dogpiled about how everything is getting forced from the outside by non-native spanish speakers and how it’s all so artificial and astroturfed. But then they also don’t acknowledge these calls whenever they have come from inside the house, which is something that’s always happening, and they also won’t do anything really to refute the core logic of the critique outside of what’s basically just prescriptivism.
I dunno, maybe it’s just because the british have sucked the fun out of everything and american imperialism has kind of given english generally a bad reputation among all of the south american countries which would generally speak spanish, and so that’s going to lead to a kind of resistance to anything seen as coming in from there, which is fair enough.
The bigger problem I have, though, which also applies to english, is how ineffective any of these more academic strategies for change are, even if they’re mostly well-intentioned. You see this outside of language, too. As long as we’re not making some institutional change, then no progress is gonna be made because people will see it all as artificial ivory tower bullshit, and won’t wanna use it. For english, it would have to be taught in school as part of a base level curriculum, and if you’re trying to grassroots it, then it’ll have to be explained every time you use it, with every new person, which impedes communication in literal terms and means it probably won’t get picked up.
What’s weird to me is that we can’t have that, and implicitly there can kind of be nothing that challenges the informal rules or structure of language, so no major shakeups are allowed, but still somehow we’ll see every kid on tiktok every two weeks start to accumulate some form of AAVE and then proceed to completely drive it into the ground. I guess that’s just because the internet is kind of a chaotic place and these things are primed to propagate pretty easily, but it’s kind of frustrating how totally undirected it all is, and how it all preys on our worst instincts. Means we get people that can only talk in buzzwords and call everything woke without having any formal definition for what that means really. I wonder how fast you could artificially change someone’s mind for the better if that’s what you actually wanted to do with social media. That maybe sounds villainous or manipulative, but I think we have to understand that this is something that exists and has always existed with these platforms, and by ignoring it, we just let the worst instincts and actors take over and fester instead.
To be honest, I didn’t post this because of the fact it criticises Spanish.
I posted it because of the last two lines – where someone refers to a non-binary girl and a non-binary boy and the guy below says “Yeah, we need to talk” cause that just made me burst out laughing when I read it :)
But apparently I was the only one?
No binarx haha
Yes let’s use a letter that could only be pronounced in English for Spanish speaking people.
Who the fuck ever came up with that is a next level idiot. Especially considering Spanish already HAS a gender neutral suffix, -e.
Which, funnily enough would mean that non binary in Spanish would be like, no binarie. Which sounds almost identical to English.
