7 ms·

Is there a real issue? El carro is a problem? La casa is a very real issue?

by nh23423fefe 4y ago

barelysapient 4y ago
It is for people who find binary gendered terms in language offensive.
- nh23423fefe 4y ago
  seems circular
- maximus-decimus 4y ago
  This is just hilarious to me because I imagine Spanish is like French where every word and pronoun, including the sky, a windshield and a machine gun is gendered. It's basically like saying "we're going to be inclusive of you by calling your native tongue offensively sexist." Gee, I wonder why it's not popular.
  - leephillips 4y ago
    You imagine right. And, like French, the genders often do not reflect expected associations with sex. “Clitoris” in Spanish is masculine. It’s more to do with etymology. The “-dad” words such as universidad are feminine; but there’s nothing particularly female about a university.
  - acdha 4y ago
    It’s a mistake to think of this as something inflicted by outsiders. Much of the early usage around the turn of the century was by native speakers, but those were activists pushing boundaries – basically challenging continuation of an arbitrary convention. That’s a reasonable thing to do but that doesn’t say what’ll become mainstream. It has seemed like in this case the problem was that some people outside of those communities heard that debate and thought they were being accommodating by going with the loudest voices on the topic rather the most representative. In a more HN analogy, it feels like setting a corporate standard on Arch Linux without realizing that you’re hearing from a small, self-selected group because most people don’t feel strongly enough to spend time evangelizing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
int_19h 4y ago
It can be a problem wrt occupations and other descriptions of people if there's no non-gender-neutral term to describe them - people then tend to fall back onto the whatever their cultural stereotypes are when gendering those, effectively reinforcing them. For example, when "engineer" is "el ingeniero" rather than "la ingeniera" by default. But there are certainly much better ways to solve it that don't involve bolting on things that are alien to the language phonotactics.

Is there a real issue? El carro is a problem? La casa is a very real issue?

barelysapient 4y ago

It is for people who find binary gendered terms in language offensive.

nh23423fefe 4y ago
seems circular
maximus-decimus 4y ago
This is just hilarious to me because I imagine Spanish is like French where every word and pronoun, including the sky, a windshield and a machine gun is gendered. It's basically like saying "we're going to be inclusive of you by calling your native tongue offensively sexist." Gee, I wonder why it's not popular.
- leephillips 4y ago
  You imagine right. And, like French, the genders often do not reflect expected associations with sex. “Clitoris” in Spanish is masculine. It’s more to do with etymology. The “-dad” words such as universidad are feminine; but there’s nothing particularly female about a university.
- acdha 4y ago
  It’s a mistake to think of this as something inflicted by outsiders. Much of the early usage around the turn of the century was by native speakers, but those were activists pushing boundaries – basically challenging continuation of an arbitrary convention. That’s a reasonable thing to do but that doesn’t say what’ll become mainstream. It has seemed like in this case the problem was that some people outside of those communities heard that debate and thought they were being accommodating by going with the loudest voices on the topic rather the most representative. In a more HN analogy, it feels like setting a corporate standard on Arch Linux without realizing that you’re hearing from a small, self-selected group because most people don’t feel strongly enough to spend time evangelizing.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

int_19h 4y ago

It can be a problem wrt occupations and other descriptions of people if there's no non-gender-neutral term to describe them - people then tend to fall back onto the whatever their cultural stereotypes are when gendering those, effectively reinforcing them. For example, when "engineer" is "el ingeniero" rather than "la ingeniera" by default. But there are certainly much better ways to solve it that don't involve bolting on things that are alien to the language phonotactics.