“Hombre no binario” and “Mujer no binaria”. Or, if you prefer, “Persona no binaria”. So, it’s not the gender of the person, but the gender of the noun.
No binarie, “e” it’s used to imply gender neutral. Which is why latinx is an oxymoron, because in Spanish would be “latine”.
Latinx is something that English speakers that don’t understand the Spanish language came up with. It’s unpronounceable and annoying.
Sadly, it’s actually used here. Same thing with the “e” instead of “o” or “a”.
Same problem as portuguese. People insisting on “elx” or “todxs” instead of using a fucking vowel really should’ve spent half a second thinking about how to pronounce that shit. Hell, even with @ it doesn’t help at all, we spell the symbol as “arroba”, so it implies feminine gender in the end
Except this doesn’t happen – at all. Gender neutral words in Spanish and Portuguese are holdovers from an older form of the language. Don’t force an Anglocentric sensibility onto others.
I’ve seen people spell words in all sorts of ways, doesn’t mean it’s an accepted practice.
The problem is that Spanish is a gendered language. You’d have to see first if the LLM understands the somewhat recent move towards non-gendered/gender-neutral versions of certain words, and if so you’d then have to check if it fully understands what the term non-binary means in this context.
That’s the thing about LLMs though. They don’t understand anything at all. They just say stuff that sounds coherent. It turns out of you just say whatever seems like the most reasonable response at all times then you can get pretty close to simulating understanding in some scenarios. But even though these newer language models are quite good at some things, they are no closer to understanding or conceptualizing anything.
How would it be really translated?
It sounds stupid, but the chatbot is actually right. The person saying the phrase would pick one based on how they view or present themselves. It’s not a disparagement to say that a non-binary individual has a gender with respect to Spanish grammatical structure, because quite literally everything does. Chairs are feminine, days are masculine, etc.
I don’t know if this is the case for Spanish, but it is worth noting that grammatical gender and human gender don’t always line up when they are both present either. Like German’s Mädchen, meaning “girl” or “young woman”, is not a feminine word. If that sort of thing is common it might help enby people feel a little more comfortable with it, or at least I imagine it might since I’m not one
Well yes, but actually no.
The reason grammatic gender is called gender is because almost all nouns referring to men (boy, men, father, uncle…) are in one group and almost all nouns referring to women are in the other.
In German, Mädchen is not in the female group because -chen is a diminutive changing any noun’s group to neuter. The word Jungchen, from “Junge” meaning “(young) boy” exists as well and is also neuter.
Similarily, all plural nouns are in the female group. Just because grammar has some more quirks doesn’t mean grammatical gender doesn’t line up with actual gender.
The only exception in German I know of would be the word “Weib”, cognate to wife, translating to women, which is in the neuter group. Except this word is archaic and an insult nowadays. All other words referring to gendered people should be in their corresponding grammatical group.
Linguistically, the term “grammatical gender” is really a historical mistake based on linguistics the discipline being born in Indo-European languages, (twice – first with the first Sanskrit grammar, then for serious with people noticing suspiciously many similarities between Sanskrit and Latin)
The new and more inclusive term is “noun classes”, e.g. Swahili has nine, e.g. “mtu” is person, class “animate/human singular”, then you have “utu”, “humanity”, from the same root but in the class for abstractions. All Indo-European languages have three, and in that context “female gender” is really “the noun class that the word ‘woman’ is part of”, same for “man” and “thing”. Girl is neuter in German because it’s a diminutive and all diminutives are neuter, “person” is female and “human” male because that’s how the language assigned them semi-randomly to classes (mostly through phonetics). Nouns constructed with infinitive+er (like baker, very similar formation rules as in English) are all male, feminists really don’t like that because that covers basically all professions… but it also makes all murderers male. Which doesn’t make all murderers male, same as me being a person doesn’t make me female. Grammatical /= personal gender.
This is all that you can point to a chair (male) and table (female) and have a good chance to be able to refer to them very efficiently, like “his leg is broken” and it being clear that you don’t mean the table: That wouldn’t make any sense as it’s female and you’d say “her leg is broken”.
But that’s because all diminutives are neuter in German. Like das Mädchen is the diminutive of die Mäd (the girl) same with das Fraulein (the young woman) is the diminutive of die Frau (the woman). Mäd and Frau are feminine words
It’s also the same in Dutch. De meid (the girl) is gendered (Dutch doesn’t have a distinct article for masculine and feminine words anymore) and the diminutive het meisje (the little girl) is neuter.
When referring to people usually the male form is used as the neutral form, so probably it’s the best form to use in this case. Some people are trying to reintroduce the latin neutral in romance languages but at least in Spanish and Portuguese it ends up sounding a lot with the male form.
Well, they’re welcome to use whatever word they want. If they want people to understand the when they do so, their options are to either use the existing word or run the risk of having to explain it each and every time they don’t.
I think there’s a “No binarie” term that’s not particularly popular that floats around, from what other comments have said, and it tends to be not well understood by people. It’s like the pronouns xe/xer. It probably makes sense if you know the context, but if I just said the word in a sentence people would think I was saying nonsense.
I’m not sure how common it is, but some nonbinary Spanish speakers use -e (latine, no binarie, etc) as a way to make Spanish gender neutral.
For me it (chatgpt) says ‘no binaria’ ist the more common term, but no idea if that’s actually how it is
No binario is masculine, because it ends in -o. To make it feminine, it is changed to no binaria, ending in -a. Therefore, no binaria is feminine.
There are neutral adjectives that end in something else, such as verde (green) or feliz (happy), but most adjectives do not have a neutral form.
I know, I can actually speak a bit of spanish myself haha.
But what do you do when you speak to a person who doesn’t identify as neither? How do you justify the use of either no binario or no binaria? You need a gender for that. And if you can’t figure out a gender there probably is a common or more agreed upon version or? I thought in this case more people might just use ‘no binaria’ for everyone.
Someone else mentioned ‘no binarie’ so I guess there’s another way out of this.
no binari@
