3 ms·

>I don't really see the big issue with Latinx... it seems to me an easy and correct way to refer to latinos and latinas, without saying both, or one or the othe

>I don't really see the big issue with Latinx... it seems to me an easy and correct way to refer to latinos and latinas, without saying both, or one or the other, or bringing in gender. I see two issues in Spanish, one in English, and two in general. The only viable way to read this word in Spanish would be /latinks/, and it's against the language's phonotactics. So if you must replace the gender mark with something else, you'd need to use a vowel (cue to "Latines"). It is not necessary though, simply because grammatical gender is not social gender. There are a thousand ways to conceal the gender of someone in Spanish - refer to "la persona" (always feminine, no matter if you're referring to a man), plurify (the plural will take the masculine for mixed groups), so goes on. Or even, you know, use the default grammatical masculine, like the RAE recommends? Granted the RAE is a bunch of pedants but they're spot on in this case. In English it sounds even more spurious. There's "Latin" already, why the hell are you adding a gender mark that doesn't exist in the language and then replacing it with yet another? While this, one of the general issues I see is that we Latin Americans don't really identify ourselves by this sort of catch-all label. We have a bunch of local identities - using an equivalent for "the other side", calling us "Latins" (with -o, -a, -x or whatever) is like talking about the ethnic Germanic culture of Canada, Suriname, Jamaica, USA and Belize, as if they had a lot to do with each other. The other issue I see is related to the above: who are the people using that word to identify themselves? Dunno about you, but I think they're just a bunch of Americans conflating heritage with identity. Every time I see someone claiming to be "latino" on the internet, I'm almost tempted to say "you are not one of us, stop lying" because of that. It's the same deal as the "Italians" from New York, or the "Irish" from who cares.

jhgb 5y ago
> It is not necessary though, simply because grammatical gender is not social gender. There are a thousand ways to conceal the gender of someone in Spanish - refer to "la persona" (always feminine, no matter if you're referring to a man), plurify (the plural will take the masculine for mixed groups), so goes on. Or even, you know, use the default grammatical masculine, like the RAE recommends? Granted the RAE is a bunch of pedants but they're spot on in this case. I'm wondering, is it the case in Spanish as well that interrogative, negative, and indefinite personal pronouns are grammatically masculine? In those cases you have no other choice in Slavic languages, for example.
- lvxferre 5y ago
  Spanish blurs the line between non-personal pronouns and determiners, so two things might happen: either the word "defaults" to the masculine, or it's actually being used as a determiner, with the noun omitted - then it gets the gender of the omitted noun. A bunch of them are also genderless, such as "quién" [who], "cual" [which], etc.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    What I mostly meant was that if the verb distinguishes gender (in Slavic languages, this is a feature of the past tense), then these pronouns impart the masculine on the verb. But now that I look at Spanish verb tenses, it's apparently not the case that the past participle in the predicate expresses the gender of the clause subject. If there's a different situation where this could arise, nothing readily comes to my mind.
    - lvxferre 5y ago
      The past participle is gendered in Spanish. And it works the way I described, even with "genderless" interrogative pronouns - you'll default to the masculine, unless some omitted word "forces" the feminine. Like this: 1) Cual fue dicho? // which [one] was said.MASC 2) Cual fue dicha? // which [one] was said.FEM 3) Que fue dicho? // what was said.MASC "Dicho/a": past participle of "decir", "to say". On the first two examples, there are implicit masculine and feminine words respectively, like, dunno... "vocablo" and "palabra" (both are "word".) The third example however doesn't have anything like this, so it's defaulting to the masculine. In Slavic languages, would something like (2) be allowed for the past tense? That is: an implicit word, "forcing" the past tense to go to the feminine [or neuter]?
      - jhgb 5y ago
        Ah, apparently I missed (rather embarassingly) that some other auxiliary verbs don't use the participle in the same way that "haber" does. > In Slavic languages, would something like (2) be allowed for the past tense? That is: an implicit word, "forcing" the past tense to go to the feminine [or neuter]? No, (2) does not make sense there. The grammatical agreement is between the subject and the predicate (by definition it can't be an agreement with words that aren't even present in the sentence in the first place), and the "who" is masculine here. If I say in Czech, for example, to paraphrase it in English, "Who broke the window?", it's actually "Who broke.MASC the window?" regardless of the answer. I thought this was still preserved in Spanish because as far as I understand it, very much the same thing was possible in Latin as it is in Slavic languages but apparently Spanish ditched this at some point in the past. Interesting.

jhgb 5y ago

> It is not necessary though, simply because grammatical gender is not social gender. There are a thousand ways to conceal the gender of someone in Spanish - refer to "la persona" (always feminine, no matter if you're referring to a man), plurify (the plural will take the masculine for mixed groups), so goes on. Or even, you know, use the default grammatical masculine, like the RAE recommends? Granted the RAE is a bunch of pedants but they're spot on in this case. I'm wondering, is it the case in Spanish as well that interrogative, negative, and indefinite personal pronouns are grammatically masculine? In those cases you have no other choice in Slavic languages, for example.

lvxferre 5y ago
Spanish blurs the line between non-personal pronouns and determiners, so two things might happen: either the word "defaults" to the masculine, or it's actually being used as a determiner, with the noun omitted - then it gets the gender of the omitted noun. A bunch of them are also genderless, such as "quién" [who], "cual" [which], etc.
- jhgb 5y ago
  What I mostly meant was that if the verb distinguishes gender (in Slavic languages, this is a feature of the past tense), then these pronouns impart the masculine on the verb. But now that I look at Spanish verb tenses, it's apparently not the case that the past participle in the predicate expresses the gender of the clause subject. If there's a different situation where this could arise, nothing readily comes to my mind.
  - lvxferre 5y ago
    The past participle is gendered in Spanish. And it works the way I described, even with "genderless" interrogative pronouns - you'll default to the masculine, unless some omitted word "forces" the feminine. Like this: 1) Cual fue dicho? // which [one] was said.MASC 2) Cual fue dicha? // which [one] was said.FEM 3) Que fue dicho? // what was said.MASC "Dicho/a": past participle of "decir", "to say". On the first two examples, there are implicit masculine and feminine words respectively, like, dunno... "vocablo" and "palabra" (both are "word".) The third example however doesn't have anything like this, so it's defaulting to the masculine. In Slavic languages, would something like (2) be allowed for the past tense? That is: an implicit word, "forcing" the past tense to go to the feminine [or neuter]?
    - jhgb 5y ago
      Ah, apparently I missed (rather embarassingly) that some other auxiliary verbs don't use the participle in the same way that "haber" does. > In Slavic languages, would something like (2) be allowed for the past tense? That is: an implicit word, "forcing" the past tense to go to the feminine [or neuter]? No, (2) does not make sense there. The grammatical agreement is between the subject and the predicate (by definition it can't be an agreement with words that aren't even present in the sentence in the first place), and the "who" is masculine here. If I say in Czech, for example, to paraphrase it in English, "Who broke the window?", it's actually "Who broke.MASC the window?" regardless of the answer. I thought this was still preserved in Spanish because as far as I understand it, very much the same thing was possible in Latin as it is in Slavic languages but apparently Spanish ditched this at some point in the past. Interesting.