three grammatical genders - male, female, and neuter. This is a common trait of many Indo-European languages that has disappeared in the Romance languages but stuck in German, Russian, etc.
Linguists usually say masculine, feminine, and neuter. Latin had all three as well.
In Old English, he, heo, and hit (our he, she, and it) all stood for “it”, because all nouns had gender. Therefore if English had kept this gender distinction, there wouldn’t be a dehumanizing effect to “it”, because there would be just as many inanimate objects that are “he/she” as there are objects that are “it”. The queer community in Russia, as far as I know, uses “оно” as the preferred option. However, this option, I believe, falls to the wayside because of how the usage of “it” has changed. If I’m incorrect about this, please point that out.
I don't know anything about the Russian queer community, only speak Russian. The use of the neuter gender for people makes sense; it sounds a little strange, but, since genderqueerness is a revolutionary concept anyway, some adaptation would be necessary either way. There're a number of neuter words that refer to people (or, specific to Russian grammar, animated beings), e.g. лицо (literally "face", but used to mean "person", especially in legal contexts) or дитя ("child"). But because they're relatively rare, and most neuter words refer to inanimate objects, calling a person by the neuter pronoun would normally be considered an insult.
the academia-advocated usage of “latinx”
Speaking of "Latinx" as a gendered-language speaker - I hope that idea goes the way of miasma and phrenology. It's like an English-language AI trying to modify the living tapestry of a language by imposing an [<begin_string>insert-any-ending-here</end_string>] into a word. It's so dead and soulless. You can make gendered-languages less sexist, but not by treating them like (grammatical) gender doesn't exist. That said, Russian and German used to have different masculine and feminine plural endings, but they collapsed into one over time. So there's no reason why Latinos/Latinas can't become something like Latines in the future.
P.S. Thanks so much for the post! Language is a fascinating subject and looking at its history we learn how nothing is really set in stone, opening ourselves to more possibilities in the future.
Linguists usually say masculine, feminine, and neuter. Latin had all three as well.
I don't know anything about the Russian queer community, only speak Russian. The use of the neuter gender for people makes sense; it sounds a little strange, but, since genderqueerness is a revolutionary concept anyway, some adaptation would be necessary either way. There're a number of neuter words that refer to people (or, specific to Russian grammar, animated beings), e.g. лицо (literally "face", but used to mean "person", especially in legal contexts) or дитя ("child"). But because they're relatively rare, and most neuter words refer to inanimate objects, calling a person by the neuter pronoun would normally be considered an insult.
Speaking of "Latinx" as a gendered-language speaker - I hope that idea goes the way of miasma and phrenology. It's like an English-language AI trying to modify the living tapestry of a language by imposing an [<begin_string>insert-any-ending-here</end_string>] into a word. It's so dead and soulless. You can make gendered-languages less sexist, but not by treating them like (grammatical) gender doesn't exist. That said, Russian and German used to have different masculine and feminine plural endings, but they collapsed into one over time. So there's no reason why Latinos/Latinas can't become something like Latines in the future.
P.S. Thanks so much for the post! Language is a fascinating subject and looking at its history we learn how nothing is really set in stone, opening ourselves to more possibilities in the future.