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.
I literally dislike leftists just for the fact that they tried to fk with my Latino culture with their degeneracy.
They aren’t trying to mess with the culture for “degeneracy”. They were well meaning when making the Latinx term, it just happens that everyone seems to hate it.
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
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.
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.
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.
Doesn’t mean the current attempt is actually doing a good job at improving the situation, tho
every time i see a /u/mindtraveller post I’m like “that’s correct but i hate it”
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.
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/
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.
“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.
