this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 127 points 4 months ago (16 children)

A bit ignorant take. Grammatical gender does not always imply the actual gender of the subject, and Spanish can easily form gender neutral-nouns or sentences. For example: "persona no binaria" is entirely made with "feminine" words, but it's meaning (non-binary person) is entirely gender-neutral.

This is also why most Spanish speakers make fun of anglophones who use "latix". It's embarrassing, condescending and completely unnecessary, it shows a lack of understanding of how Spanish is actually used by it's speakers

Here's another common way to make gender-neutral Spanish, while making it explicit:

Take the sentence "The workers are radicalizing." Workers is "Trabajadores" a masculine-plural word. The Royal Academy of Spanish Language, clarifies that the maculine form of any noun includes participants of any gender, so to say "Los Trabajadores se están radicalizando" would be grammatically correct, and no Spanish speaker would really asume you only have male workers. However, to make inclusion more explicit, it isn't uncommon for companies to use double articles: "Las y los trabajadores se están radicalizando." Notice that the noun has remained in masculine form, instead the articles have been used to make it explicit that the writer does see gender as a binary. You would see this in office-settings, but as you can hopefully see. Doing it like this actually reinforces the binary perspective, rather than the other way around.

TL&DR: Use "Latino/a" or "Hispanic", instead of "Latix" if you don't want your maid and gardener to laugh their asses off at your expense. Also, all words in Spanish have gender, that doesn't mean all people have to as well.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 4 months ago (11 children)

Hispanic here, absolutely hate Latinx, feels like a term made by English speakers on behalf of us for "inclusivity"

[–] [email protected] 39 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It's not though. That's a myth. It was created by latine nonbinary math nerds on old internet message boards. Since they were math nerds, they used x to represent a variable that could be anything. They only designed it for use on message boards, they never thought about how to pronounce it. You're allowed to think those latine geeks did a bad job, but calling them English speakers is factually incorrect.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Source? I wanna see the old message board post! Just out of curiosity, genuinely.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I've seen latine used by some Spanish speakers. It seems like opinions are certainly more positive about it than Latinx, but that's a low bar

[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 months ago

Latine is at least pronounceable, and doesn't sound like you're describing your former spouse from South America.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago

Even as a boy in latinamerica I found strange that my cousins where "las primitas" when I was not included and "los primitos" when I was. Like, what gave me so much power to change the gender of a group of 9 girls? Anyway, since 2005 or so, my small communist mailing group was discussing the way we use gendered words, being influenced by Spanish feminist groups. We were like 10 guys and a woman on the mailing list, and after a lot of discussion we decided to start using feminine gender for everything, given that "nobody" care.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

The irony is that in wanting to include their variable/neutral gender via x or @ instead of 'o' or 'a', people that use screen readers usually get excluded, as the programs don't recognize "latinx" or "latin@" - same applies to Portuguese

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (14 children)

Similar issue in Italian. Neutral gender in Latin consolidated in the male gender. It is what it is. There are some English-speakers who have really hard time to understand that different languages work in different ways, somehow.

That said, there are discussions about using both articles or more weird stuff like "*" or even the Ə character to replace the ending, which most people are not used to yet, though.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

So would you use Latina or Latino to refer to a non binary person?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 months ago (4 children)

In theory? I would use Latino, as in terms of pure grammar this is the correct answer, it's not about the gender of the person, it's about constructing the sentence following appropriate grammar.

In practice? I would just ask what they prefer. Lol

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (3 children)

You mean "Latinx"? That came out of the trend for slapping Xs onto words to make them inclusive. The problem is that it can't conjugate properly, which is why POC activists now prefer the term "Latine".

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Latines, can't be conjugated either, the problem is Spanish requires gender and number to match in each element of a sentence. Pretending to use "latine or latinx" ignores the fact of what comes after or before.

Take the sentence: "Los latinos son revolucionarios." (Latinos are revolutionaries.)

Let's try with "latines": "Los latines son revolucionarios."

This sentence is grammatically incorrect, gender and number between adjective, articles and nouns do not match. Do we make up new words? A new way of conjugating? Replace all terminations of all words with gender neutral ones?

How about just realizing that no one would assume you are talking only about males, unless you explicitly stated: "Los hombres latinos son revolucionarios." (Latino men are revolutionaries.) Notice how the same is true for English?

The point is Spanish does not need a neutral gender. Partly because it does have one, but it's only used for some objects and adjectives. "Este cuadro captura lo ominoso que vio en su pesadilla." (This painting captures the ominous thing they saw in their nightmare.)

"Ominous" in this sentence is being conjugated in neutral form, and using a tacit subject leaves the gender of the painter completely unmentioned.

I don't doubt there are people who use latinx and latine, my point is, most of the time that's a sign of ignorance and of not having done due dilligence. Token inclusion.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago

The term latinx was first recorded on brazillian protests on 1900, but popularized on academic papers since de 2000

https://www.theactuarymagazine.org/should-i-call-you-latinx/

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 4 months ago (2 children)

This is a screenshot of google translate on a screenshot of a twitter thread on a screenshot on a tumblr reblog. And the tumblr part doesn't add anything at all, but it appears on the tumblr community on lemmy. I love modern social media

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 months ago (1 children)

All it's missing is the iFunny watermark

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago

The tumblr part adds 2000 notes :)

[–] [email protected] 36 points 4 months ago (2 children)

There's an argument to be made that "no binario" is the more correct. Latin has a neutral grammatical gender ("bīnārium") that has been mostly assimilated into the masculine gender in Spanish.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

This is why some people insist on the generic he in English. A few hundred years ago, some British asshole who thought Latin was a perfect language decided to impose Latin rules on English, including such nonsense as "you can't end a sentence with a preposition" and "never split infinitives", as well as proscribing the then-common singular they in favor of "he". The damage he did to the English language is still not fully repaired.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

the singular they is pretty cool

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

thanks! i think you're pretty cool too

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (2 children)

But not ending a sentence with a preposition lead to a surprising grammar joke in "Beavis and Butthead Do America" which was one of the highlights of my early twenties.

It was really something magnificent to behold :)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If it was so good then what was it?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah -- it kind of loses something when you retell it out of context, but I'll give it a go :-

Agent Bork: Chief, you know that guy whose camper they were whacking off in?

Agent Fleming: Bork, you're a Federal Agent. You represent the United States government. Never end a sentence with a preposition.

See I am a huge grammar nerd, and I find grammar jokes, and dangling modifier jokes and so on, really funny.

But given the general level of humour in "Beavis and Butthead" I wasn't expecting this sort of joke, and it entirely caught me by surprise, and made me laugh for five minutes. I just thought it was far funnier and far better than most of the humour in the film.

Yeah, okay. Maybe it's just me.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

No binarie.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

I'm pretty done with English speakers trying to shame other languages.

Go verb some nouns, English. You are drunk.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Is there anything wrong with the statement? Is there a misconception of how Spanish works?

I literally don't know enough about Spanish to know either way or what the correct translation should be

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 months ago

My mind jumped straight to "it's-a me! Binario!"

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Non binariao. You‘re welcome.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

What do you think this is, Portuguese!?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

no binari@s

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago (6 children)

isn't the generally accepted solution to this just "-e"? like "no binarie", or "latine"

i feel like this is a bit of a trend, there's a pretty decent solution that mostly works with existing grammar and for some reason you don't really see anyone using it..

[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 months ago (6 children)

Spanish speaker here. It's kinda an ongoing issue. Non binary people in most of South America did already used that as solution problem is that Spanish is used with generes for a lot of things even objects that do not really have a gender.
So as a start it sounds weird and sometimes you have to do a double take to understand what was said. Another issue is that gramatically there are words that end in e and are gendered for man ex: "Presidente" is used for male president and "Presidenta" for female president. Admittedly those are few cases and some argue that they where originally non gendered or are loan words that are non gendered. But still it's not resolved Now this next point is mostly my observation you can take it as you'd like, the community handled this awkwardly and it kinda became a fad from 2014 now somehow out of taste for some. Some tried to impose it onto everyone as the.morally correct choice, and some seemed to use it as a form of rebel, I.think it was very badly received as a whole. My obvservations ending there reality is that there's very little open discussion about it like it was a fad (also right wing government winning in 2015 doesn't help) but non binary people is still very much there and still no better understood.
Right now seems that the genderless e use is still used as "an inside dialect" for some but when interacting with people outside of the queer comunity they go with old gender rules. Some others do use pronouns and gender alternatively. But definitely there is no consensus and little open talk.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Ah yes grammatical gender and lexical gender butting heads

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Grammatical gender isn't the same as regular gender, but neither are real.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

ironically i'm pretty sure grammatical gender is more real than regular gender

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

We default to "binario" since it's technically the gender-neutral form but some people deliberately change it to "binaria", "binarie" or even "binarix" to make a statement.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Morons who think they’re better than others: “No Binarix”

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago

Sounds like an Asterix and Obelix character. I’m in.

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