• WoefKat@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Here in Spain you see X or @ a lot.

    Like senorxs or señor@s. Where the X or @ means ‘o’ or ‘e’ (male) or ‘a’ (female). I like the way they do this.

    This has some issues as it doesn’t include non-binary options. I think it’s also more of a protest against the patriarchal nature of the Spanish language which always defaults to the male version in the case where the gender is unknown or a mix.

    How is pronounced I don’t really know. People don’t really speak it in practice. It’s more used written.

      • SheeEttin@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        As someone with no skin in the game, I don’t understand why people don’t just say “Latin” when they’re speaking English. We already don’t use genders, and routinely ignore plenty of other foreign language rules like plurals (“a cannoli”, for example). I don’t think anyone is going to be confused and think you’re talking about the Italic people annexed by Rome in 338 BC.

          • Xhieron@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            My perspective has always been “if it’s good enough for John Leguizamo to use on HBO, it’s good enough for me.” And he very frequently referred to his ethnicity as Latin in his comedy.

            And then a few weeks ago he was on CNN saying Latinx.

            Point being, the thing that matters is that the intent is to be respectful. Using the wrong word to offend makes you an asshole, and it doesn’t matter if you’re misgendering someone or denigrating an entire ethnicity. Using the wrong word because it’s ambiguous, or it’s traditional, or you’re not sure is a different matter. Most words were wrong at some point, because language changes. The point is that you treat other humans as people, and not as political targets.

              • Xhieron@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Way to miss the point. None of this is news to me, and prescriptivism is a losing argument. I personally despise the term Latinx–just like I despiss Mx. I wouldn’t default to either. But I’ll call anyone whatever they prefer. If you want to doggedly refuse to accommodate someone just because their preference puts them in a minority, who are you actually helping?

        • SheeEttin@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Hot take: gendered language doesn’t serve any meaningful purpose and we should just get rid of it. There is no need for inanimate non-gendered objects to have a linguistic gender.

          • TheSanSabaSongbird@lemdro.id
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            1 year ago

            Or, you know, you could just get over it and realize that gender in language is not the same thing as gender in people. There’s one African language, for example, that has 16 different genders.

            Also, you are mistaken that linguistic gender doesn’t serve a purpose. It does and there’s a pretty extensive body of linguistic literature on the subject.

            Fun fact; as with most of the other Germanic languages, English originally had three genders; masculine, feminine and neuter. They got stripped out of the language for reasons having to do with English history that are too technical to go into right now.

            • LrdThndr@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Can you link a layman’s explanation of the value of grammatical gender regarding inanimate objects? After years of learning and being frustrated by French, I had come to the conclusion that grammatical gender was stupid and served no purpose, but I’d love to have a better understanding of its value.

              Again, this isn’t coming from a position of “prove me wrong, buttfart”. This is coming from “I’d like to learn more and have a better understanding of something I’m probably just not getting.”

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              And German still has those genders, and as you rightly said, they have nothing to do with gender identity.

              The only issue here is gendered pronouns and other forms of address that rely on the gender of the person being discussed. Nobody cares whether a table is masculine or feminine, but they do care whether your parent’s sibling is a male or female because in many languages, there’s no word to eliminate that information. That’s the issue here, and the solution isn’t to rewrite the entire concept of gender in languages, but instead to introduce and popularize genderless pronouns and titles. I know I hate saying “how many uncles and aunts do you have,” especially since I know that doesn’t necessarily cover all of the person’s parents’ siblings. Give me words like “cousin” so I don’t need to separate people by gender in casual conversation unless it’s actually relevant.

          • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Hot take: person who only speaks English thinks everyone should just speak English.

    • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      It’s still entirely non-standard, and not explicitly protected under law.

      By all means, push the bounds; and I would hope you establish legal precedent. However, there is little that offers prior circumstance; you are still arguing how things should be, rather than how things are right now. Because of that, courts are not a sufficient venue, it must be argued at the political level.