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Real talk, this is the pronoun fight all over again. If you don't like it, don't use it. If someone asks you to use it, anyway, be nice for the ten minutes it takes to finish a conversation and get back to tuning your perfectly rational grammatical hangups in peace. This ain't hard. Most US state governments haven't even gotten around to totally removing the N-word from their constitutions, so I dunno what slippery slope you think we're on here.
Its the chauvinism of people who aren't Spanish speakers shoe horning in something that doesnt fit the grammar of the language. Latine already exists and is more commonly used by non-binary speakers of spanish
I return to my first comment, "imagine caring about colonist grammar this much". The planet is literally on fire and this is a thread concern trolling about protecting the sanctity of a settler-colonist language, while simultaneously using "Spanish-speakers" as some monolith who both a) care about this extremely low-stakes issue and b) have already all come to the same conclusion on it.
It's possible to care about low stakes things and high stakes things simultaneously, and also to weigh in on things you don't care that much about, or in your case to care a lot about how much other people care about it I guess? Just don't comment if it's too low stakes to be a waste of time.
Im weighing in because your comparison of this to the "pls flair your pronouns" struggle session is bad because there are a lot of solid and non-transphobic reasons to think that "latinx" is a ridiculous term, not the least of which being that it's impossible to pronounce in Spanish and looks to solve a problem that has already been addressed.
And yeah of course Spanish speakers aren't a monolith but when you're talking about the language it makes sense to, uh, talk about the group of people who speak it? What other groups should we be talking about here?
To be honest, I think you've correctly identified that I have fallen for the poster's trap and gotten sucked into nonsense. At the end of the day, this is cringing about a thing that only English speakers do, anyway (so I guess the resolution to the grammatical issue is "it's an English word, not a Spanish one"), so I'm gonna check out.
Latinx is pronounced latine.
Languages only have rules only insofar as these rules are followed by a community of language speakers.
Go outside.
Unless you're a cat.
Languages only have rules only insofar as these rules are followed by a community of language speakers.
Only about 2-3% of Latin Americans in the US use latinx. That's the main issue, most people don't care and they don't really want to use it because it is weird so the whole thing is kinda pointless.
It's bleeding over to other heavily gendered langauges too because of American cultural dominance, and the very very few organizations who use it have made their texts very weird and hard to read. The worst thing about it when they insist on in to much is that usually it kind of signals some kind of admission of defeat. It's like, oh, we failed at making material change so now we're just gonna go around modifying words in ways that will never catch on because American Internet told us it's woke. Ironically it is a rehash of 2nd wave liberal feminists years ago who made a big deal out of gendering male words which were used in a gender neutral fashion, which also didn't catch on because the words they came up with were also ugly and awkward, and the advantage wasn't even clear.
What's wrong with Latin American? We come from Latin America. I'm fine with being called that, and it's gender neutral.
Honest question: Is it because of the "American" part? Do you think it's non-inclusive of people who aren't US citizens, or something like that?
I'm Brazilian, and, in my perception, thinking that the "American" in "Latin American" is related to the demonym is a bit exceptionalist, as if there were One True America, and that is the United States.
Furthermore, I always avoid using the term americano to talk about people from the US, and I think the only thing that's more ridiculous than saying America instead of US is a Latin American person, particularly a Brazilian, referring to Estados Unidos as América. It's one of the smoothest-brained things to do in Brazilian Portuguese.
It's also why I think that the gendered language discussion is way more complex in Portuguese. We not only have gendered pronouns, but also adjectives and nouns. Gender-neutral language in Portuguese goes one of two ways:
1 - You literally change every single gendered word in the whole sentence. Okay, now every instance of ele/ela is rendered elx or whatever you're using (there is no consensus about this as far as I know). But what if you're trying, for example, to talk about a person who is a teacher? The masculine form is professor and feminine is professora. What do you do? Do you add an X at the end? Professorx makes no sense and doesn't follow Portuguese phonotactics at all, and you most certainly would be met with a "huh?" if you said that out loud. It would also mess up TTS software and make things way harder for blind people.
2 - Circumlocution, in other words, finding other ways of saying the same thing. This is, in my opinion, the only appropriate way to make something gender-neutral in Portuguese. Instead of painting yourself into a corner, you simply avoid the problem altogether.
I'm ranting a bit now, but it's just that importing the simplified English gender neutrality norms into Portuguese is not only not grammatical (in the scientific, not prescriptivist sense), but it's also in my view softcore imperialism, creating a debate about a matter that's already settled from the get-go.
I don't know. I've already gone way off topic here, but I just wanted to share my view. All this to say that gender-neutral language in English is easy as shit, don't be a dick, just do it.
why do you still say "german" then? serious question not trying to troll
it seems like only POC cultures are subject to this sort of stuff. If you're going to have institutionalized gender neutral language, it should be applied to everyone IMO
I only respond to concern trolling with pedantry, so here goes: "German" comes from "germanicus", so it doesn't have anything to do with gender.
And which imperial power used the word "Germanicus"? It was the ancient Ropersons.
First, nice Dennis Miller bit. Second, pedantry again, "romanus" literally means "of Rome", so again, the existence of the string "man" is not indicative of gender.
I'm really tempted to make a bad "rom-anus" gag, because that's the level of discourse we're operating on right now. I can't think of a proper one though.
I don't really care about this, but recently I heard someone say "latinx men" and I thought surely that had to be an appropriate use case for "latino."
To me, it is still not as odd as writing folks as folx. Especially since folx is only noticeable in written English
(But I don't know a lot and could be missing something, since terms can build a contextual history)
isnt folks already gender neutral? it feels like shitlibs just slapped an x on that one not understanding why theres an x in gender neutral spanish words
Lol. I use folx ironically cuz of this. But maybe I should stop since the irony isn’t that obvious
I'm fairly certain folx is only used to save characters on Twitter. I never got the impression it was supposed to be a gender neutral substitute for folks.
Ok so this discussion tends to come up a lot and people think that because latinx isn't really pronouncable easily in Spanish that must mean it's put in by white libs, but there's a number of different origin theories behind this. I'll share one that I think was pretty interesting.
Basically this theory goes that sometime during the 60's/70's, there were feminist protests in parts of Puerto Rico where some of the graffiti was the word Latino but with an X over the O to cross it out and protest against the "male default" and then that somehow got adapted into the word Latinx later on.
This also matches up somewhat with another theory that shows one of its earliest usages was in Puerto Rican academic literature.
Regardless of which theories are correct, it does seem likely this arose from Spanish speaking Puerto Rican feminists in Academia and became what it is today as a form of US Spanglish due to Puerto Rico being part of the US.
But following Spanish pronunciation, wouldn't that end up sounding something like latinequis? I don't know if there's any precedent for words ending in -nx in Spanish, so it doesn't seem clear how you'd pronounce it otherwise...
I'd use it if someone told me to, but the majority of Latin Americans I've seen talking about this do seem to prefer latine for that reason and others.
Yeah if it was Spanish it'd be closer to latinequis.
It's not really used much outside the US from what I've seen. It's mostly used in the US by bilingual activists. They usually think of it as spanglish and I don't think it was really meant to be a global term (again, just from conversations I've had).
I think todes is what most people from Latin America use.
Using e seems to be a more natural non gendered replacement for native speakers. Like amigues instead of amigos/as.
I’ve never seen people drop the vowel entirely
latín in Spanish technically means Latin, as in the language. I have heard latine used before but it’s not at all common.
Using e as a gender neutral marker instead of o or a seems to be the most popular way of doing it, but I’m not an expert and would be happy to be corrected by someone who is more familiar with it.
