Except the desire to degender everything is a specifically English endeavor, and only because it doesn’t have gender based nouns. Spanish is VERY MUCH A GENDERED LANGUAGE. Also, Spanish already HAS a neutral article, “Lo” so not even using that while inventing our own bullshit is the most pearl clutching nonsense I’ve ever seen
Comment on You can't argue with his logic
Murse@slrpnk.net 22 hours agoWhile I do get wanting to steer the language away from pointlessly gendering everything (why tf do I need to know if my blender is a boy or girl??) …yeah “Latinx” ain’t it.
To me it always reads phonetically like “lah-teenks”. I hate it.
Derpenheim@lemmy.zip 22 hours ago
Murse@slrpnk.net 18 hours ago
Oh, thinking you can change a major language structure to make it more PC is dumb as hell. I’m not advocating for it, but I do understand a shred of of where that push is coming from. Spanish is VERY MUCH A GENDERED LANGUAGE… but… why? Why is my chair a girl, and shoe a boy? The status quo in this case is about as dumb as thinking we can change it.
iocase@lemmy.zip 20 hours ago
Its literally a fools errand. Especially since most people speak languages that are strongly gendered. It’s just a self-absorbed virtue signal. The people who made Latinx obviously never stopped to ask most Latin people what they thought of the whole endeavour… And no, I don’t mean Francis your half Mexican schoolmate from private school…
nickiwest@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
In the little corner of Latin America where I live, if people are making a concerted effort to be inclusive in writing, they end a word with @s to include both -os and -as endings: amig@s, chic@s, etc. But that is very uncommon, and I have not encountered a spoken equivalent.
As a non-native speaker, I find Spanish to be quite a bit more flexible than English. It’s very context-dependent, so I think a lot of Spanish speakers just have the mindset that you figure out the meaning of a word through its context. Words ending in -o can be for everyone or for masculine people, and you figure out the speaker’s intention by the context.
But also when your blender has a gender (it’s feminine, for people who don’t know), maybe it takes some of the gravitas out of the conversation about gendered language.
Murse@slrpnk.net 4 hours ago
That’s clever honestly. I could see that working well for things like banners addressing a broad audience - marketing type stuff.
My bitching is more geared to why it was structured that way in the first place… and obviously it didn’t just appear overnight, but developed over ages like most other languages. Some trends stick and others don’t… gendering random inanimate objects is one that stuck. …for some weird-ass reason.