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People who speak heavily gendered languages, hows your language reforming with like general cultural trends to be more gender neutral? (hexbear.net)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I speak English because of Colonialism so when I say this I say this as a person who does not know any other language. How is a language like Spanish or Portuguese even able to reform itself to be gender neutral when all the words are masculine or feminine and people look at you like a weirdo if you use the gender neutral versions. I’m not saying all gendered language is bad, but its wrong for an entire profession to gendered one way or another or to have gender be seen as a binary thing in the first place.

What I’m trying to say is, how do you do it?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

I'm in university studying Spanish and Romance Languages and in written Spanish if you want to denote gender ambiguity you can use the 'x' letter, @ symbol or any other generic enough symbol. The gender in Romance languages is just a syntactical thing (you can call it even or odd, or high and low, the gendering is arbitrary). It's like saying the kanji for man in Japanese is 男 which is a combination of the 'rice' edit: 'Field' and 'power' radicals which gives you an insight into Japanese cultural development but doesn't go any further than that.

People don't care if you use gender neutral pronouns in writing or in speech though most spanish speakers just default to the generic masculine out of habit when speaking or specifically use the feminine, though in written Spanish I always try to make an effort to be inclusive as much as possible. The only people who care are settlers and conservatives who unfortunately infest América Latina who use gender neutrality as "erasing linguistic cultural heritage" or whatever nonsense they say to cover up their transphobia.

English has different gendered words for actor and actress, afaik romance languages do too (in spanish it is el actor and la actriz) so it's not like some languages are free from cisnormative gender fuckery. shrug-outta-hecks vivian-shrug

Hearing someone say latin-"x" in English can be jarring to hear though, that's as much as I'll say.

Here's this nice site I found that sums it up.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

in written Spanish if you want to denote gender ambiguity you can use the ‘x’ letter, @ symbol or any other generic enough symbol.

Hearing someone say latin-“x” in English can be jarring to hear though, that’s as much as I’ll say.

i prefer -e for this reason; it's pronounceable.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Write it latinx and pronounce it latine?

(Question addressed at the whole audience, I dunno what the consensus is where, and I expect it's hyper-local.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

You're right.

You can pronounce it with whatever ending you prefer. The point is that it's used only in writing. In German I know they specifically use a * symbol in writing and it's the same concept.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

The answer to that struggle session from ... what... last year-ish?... was here the entire time. smdh

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

I prefer -i which is also pronounceable using a symbol like 'x' allows the reader to insert their comfortable neutral gendered ending, which I think is a good middle ground in the face of no standardization by the so called "CEOs of Spanish" who hermit away in Spain.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Again I don’t know Spanish but doesnt Latine make more sense than Latinx? English uses the letter X more as a symbol than as an actual letter (see Elon Musk’ obsession with it for example), while Spanish uses it much more in daily conversation. So using X to replace the gendered part of Latino/Latina seems pretty neo-colonialist to me. It just doesn’t seem right for American English to be dictating how Spanish is spoken even if it’s for the purpose of inclusivity of all things. Look what happened with the word Indian, it’s offensive but not using it can also be offensive. The biggest problem is that the native speakers didn’t get a choice in what they wanted to be called. And while Spanish is not a native language (especially in Al Andalus), Spanish speakers do face discrimination for their language. I don’t know shrug-outta-hecks your racist if you use Latinx, you’re homophobic if you use Latino. I just try to default to Hispanic as much as possible. Which offends Portuguese speakers, so then I just use Latin, which doesn’t make sense because then we are just talking about Italian and I don’t give a shit about Italians. Overall I find it very confusing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

I don't think it's such a big deal, I think anglos/English natives just don't know they're not supposed to pronounce the -x part so they get confused. Latin American works fine in English but most Latin Americans don't see themselves as Latin* but their national identity as Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Costa Ricans, Cubans etc. And there are white latinos like that German guy who lives in Argentina with a lot of WW2 memorabilia.

It's weird in Spain since the national identity is Spanish but the national language is castelllano or the Spanish dialect of Spain.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

It's like saying the kanji for man in Japanese is 男 which is a combination of the 'rice' and 'power' radicals

Just a small correction, the top part of that character is 田, which means "field" as in a field of crops. The lower half does mean power as you said.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I know German is having a bit of trouble adapting to it, there are several systems people have been trying. I don’t speak it but I read a bit about one system where you include all the suffixes for both masculine and feminine and concatenate them with an asterisk to make it neutral

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Slightly relevant. Chinese is a gender neutral language. There weren't even male or female pronouns, you'd have to explicitly gender the person

But one of the changes that resulted from European cultural hegemony was they introduced female and male versions for pronouns in the written characters in the early 20th century, even though the spoken word is still the same for any gender

The issue with this is now non-binary people lost their all-inclusive pronoun, and there's efforts to introduce a third gendered pronoun now...

Oftentimes when learning other languages with gendered pronouns, Chinese people will fuck up she and he because they're used to using the same sound for all genders