Okay, let's try this again

112 comments

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.
  
  feels like
  That's exactly what it is, so that's an accurate feeling.
  
  I literally dislike leftists just for the fact that they tried to fk with my Latino culture with their degeneracy.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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/
  
  latrine
- 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
- Sadly this does not work for other neolatins languages like Italian, we have to stuck with tutt@ and other similar solutions
- "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.
- Okay, let's try this again, but for an entirely different reason this time...........

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
  
  Obligatory XKCD

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.
- Is there anything wrong with the statement? Is there a misconception of how Spanish works?
  I literally don't know enough about Spanish to know either way or what the correct translation should be
  
  If someone identifies as non-binary they would be neither male or female in how you address them, at least in english. In Spanish "non-binary" doesn't translate to a neuter equivalent because the gender of a word matters in the context of who you are addressing.
  I am not a native or proficient speaker of Spanish, so I could be off.
- 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
  
  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 :)
  
  Who is this Brit, I want to have a word
- No binarie.

Non binariao. You‘re welcome.

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

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
  
  IT. DOESN'T. WORK.
  The English language is a chit tier language. That's a fact.
  It doesn't work for ANY LATIN language. Not Spanish, not Italian, not French, not Romanian, nor Portuguese.
- 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
  
  LatinX doesn't work in Spanish. And Latinos fkin hate anyone entertaining this idiocy.
  It doesn’t work for ANY LATIN language. Not Spanish, not Italian, not French, not Romanian, nor Portuguese.
  Now have fun with that as you travel more East and South.
  
  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).

My instinct would be to just drop the suffix and go with binari
- Isn't that what happens when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie?

Morons who think they’re better than others: “No Binarix”
- Sounds like an Asterix and Obelix character. I’m in.

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

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.

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?

Premium mansplaining
- Cissplaining really

112 comments