From "Latine is the new Latinx" (Axios).
It's hard to imagine how this feels to someone whose native language envisions every noun as either masculine or feminine. I've spent time learning French and Spanish, and I have my feelings about the masculinity and femininity that permeates everything, but these are an outsider's feelings, weighed down by effort it takes to learn a lot of extra and seemingly arbitrary information. If it's your native language, you know what's masculine and what's feminine. Isn't it natural and fluent to you? Isn't it disturbing to be pressured to speak differently and to use made-up words in service to someone else's ideology? Do you feel a sense of loss when the world is not enlivened by the masculinity and femininity of inanimate objects and abstract concepts? I don't come from that world, but from a distance, it feels beautiful, and if I were you, I would want to believe it is beautiful.
***
In "Me Talk Pretty One Day" — commission earned link — David Sedaris writes about the difficulty of learning what's masculine and what's feminine in French:
Because it is a female and lays eggs, a chicken is masculine. Vagina is masculine as well, while the word masculinity is feminine. Forced by the grammar to take a stand one way or the other, hermaphrodite is male and indecisiveness female. I spent months searching for some secret code before I realized that common sense has nothing to do with it. Hysteria, psychosis, torture, depression: I was told that if something is unpleasant, it’s probably feminine. This encouraged me, but the theory was blown by such masculine nouns as murder, toothache, and Rollerblade.... What’s the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis?...
That passage continues, but I won't overquote.
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99 comments:
Everybody's doing it ! Look at my bright shiny new idea ! ! Did I mention, everybody's doing it ?
Shot: ""Latine," a gender-neutral way to describe or refer to people with Latino origins, is surging in popularity on university campuses, in museums, and among researchers and media. "
Chaser: "Zavala adds that while people in the U.S. are barely adopting Latine, its greater acceptance among younger generations could result in it eventually becoming commonplace...."
There is no such thing el espanol es binario (spanish is binary)
Althouse asks: Isn't it disturbing to be pressured to speak differently and to use made-up words in service to someone else's ideology?
We know instinctually that if they can force us to alter our everyday language with this folderol, THEY have way too much power and, of course, and won't stop. Because they never stop.
Wittgenstein on forces in gendered languages
538. There is a related case (though perhaps it will not seem so) when, for example, we (Germans) are surprised that in French the predicative adjective agrees with the substantive in gender, and when we explain it to ourselves by saying: they mean: “the man is 'a good one’.”
It's hard to imagine how this feels to someone whose native language envisions every noun as either masculine or feminine.
Perhaps it feels like... "colonization"?
There's a much easier way to address people's angst over some words' being "masculine" and others "feminine": Use a different binary that takes the gender associations out of it. For example, instead of calling them masculine/feminine, call the "o" words "convex" and the "a" words "concave."
German has masculine, feminine, and neuter.
As far as I could tell when studying foreign languages, rote repetition was the only way to tell which gender belonged to which noun.
"Isn't it natural and fluent to you? Isn't it disturbing to be pressured to speak differently and to use made-up [usage] in service to someone else's ideology? "
I feel exactly the same way toward the various abuses of English that the idiologists are trying to force us.
Is it OK for me to be offended if I’m addressed in a gender neutral way, or does it only work in the other direction?
It is a cliche and truism to say that language changes, it evolves. Wokesters like to point out that in olden times, "they" was used as a singular pronoun.
There is s big difference, though, between natural evolution and the language broccoli that is being forced down our throats by our self-anointed superiors. These superiors are trying (in vain, in my case) to change the way we as a society think, how we view other humans. Until 20 minutes ago, >99.9% of humanity was either a man or a woman, with the exceptions being rare scientifically demonstrable chromosomal abnormalities.
There is nothing natural or good in this concept that GLAAD and other groups, many of which want to watch the world burn, promote.
Society has changed, in many ways for the better, in defining acceptable roles for XX and XY people. What has not changed, is that the XX person is XX forever, same for XY. The people who insist otherwise may be mentally ill/delusional, ignorant, or evil. They are not correct.
While on a temporary service assignment in Spain, I took Spanish language lessons in Alcala de Henares. That happens to be where Cervantes was born, and would be like taking English lessons at Stratford-upon-Avon. It's difficult to imagine that Spain and Portugal will be interested in our language tampering.
The Latin Americans with which we are familiar, don't seem to embrace queer initiatives. Getting "Latine" to fly isn't going to work any better than "Latinx" did, but the Spanish speaking world will start to realize that they won't be left out of this cultural manipulation.
surely i have written of this here before, years ago, back when I refined my theory that our English language has a built-in bias for freedom that isn't in Romance languages.
I grew up on the Mexican border and love the emotional color built into Spanish and love Spanish-speakers, but I perceived a crushing heirarchy built into my friends' expectations. and have theorized that the language itself assumes/reinforces a segmented social order of pawns and Kings.
I use this to explain why countries founded in Spanish are less able to succeed as democracies, their language is too drenched in heirarchies.
For instance, They have two "you"s: the rules for formal You (usted) and the easy-going casual informal You (tu), are fine to show respect but also are great dividers of class. Our word "the" in Spanish is divided into two choices: every noun is prefaced by either a "La"/feminine or "El"/masculine, there is no neutral option.
In english it is simply The.
This is my long-winded way of saying "Sing it in English, muchachos!"
it is not as romantic and sexy, I know, but the most natural way to modernize "Latinos" and "Latinas" is to say it in English: "Latins"
99% of Portuguese speakers are A) not going to do this and B) will socially ostracize the 1% that do. Brazil has one of the largest transgendered populations in the world and not even they are down with this farcical merda do gringo.
The gender of nouns has absolutely nothing to do with sex.
You just learn them. After constant use and repetition, it gradually sinks in. When you ask, say, a French speaker if such and such a word is masculine or feminine, they will quite often pronounce it aloud with the article that sounds right (un garçon) and give you the answer.
This push to inclusify other languages is yet another example of English-speakers’ ignorance and presumed superiority.
This problem comes up for French people when a word has been adopted from English.
A man says, "Look. Une helicopter."
The other says, "No, it's un helicopter."
The first one says, "You have good eyes."
LatinD, obviously.
LatinC, perhaps.
Latrine.
Now you know how I, a native English speaker, feel when one person asks me to refer to them in the plural.
Shorter version: Poorer, dumber brown people around the world need to bend a knee to the urgent linguistic preferences of richer, smarter white people in American universities.
Gendered languages were always going to be a problem for the woke.
I just know that at first glance, every time I see Latine, my brain is going to read latrine. It will be an endless series of wait-a-minute rereadings while I adjust.
It took me a long time to not read CRT as cathode ray tube.
It is racist.
It is cultural genocide.
Every bit as much as latinx
They know what they are doing. Orwell wrote about what they are doing 75 years ago.
Fair warning: use Latin and I will call you out as a racist. As I do if you use the n word. As I do if you use latinx
John Henry
LatinB is human inclusive, except where LatinF are carved exclusions. Come to think of it, so are LatinBs.
Der, die, das, le, la, les, el, los, las... This is why it's easier to learn English: "The"
From my post in the open thread (with a little addition):
“Latine” looks too much like latrine. I assume it’s pronounced “lah-tee-nay.” I don’t think it will matter. Our “betters” will use it anyway.
Probably not so much by the people who grew up speaking Spanish/Portuguese every day.
gender neutral
Latine is a typo of LatinN. I blame AI for misprediction, then humans for progressing the grammatical fallacy in evolution.
Yes to one comment above. It is quite simple to use Latin in the singular and Latins in the plural. But hyper-Progressives want to change the way we think by changing the way we speak. What they are accomplishing is to convince ever more well-meaning
Americans that the “B” in LGBTQ stands for “bullies.”
Quite apart from the effect of inserting an “r” in Latine (which, incidentally, Blogger auto-corrected to Latino). Talk about leading with your chin.
English developed as a blue collar language. French was the language of the court and Latin the language of the clergy. English was used to direct peasants where to put that fardel or point that bodkin.. The grammar was simplified in order to be better able to communicate with the idiots that the nobility and clergy had to deal with while directing them in battle and collecting their tithes. The subjunctive is wasted on people like that. The English language was never meant for elegance....Spanish is a far more courtly and polite language. In an abundance of politesse The speaker even refers body parts away from his own body. The Spanish language does seem to go heavy on the negatives though. I can sympathize with that. Responding to certain questions, you just can't use enough negatives.....More often than not, Spanish words that end in e are masculine so I don't see how this settles the issue. Perhaps all Spanish nouns should end in an ampersand.
"Isn't it disturbing to be pressured to speak differently and to use made-up words in service to someone else's ideology?"
Isn't it disturbing to be pressured to do things differently and to use made-up customs in the service of someone else's ideology? Shorter version: Isn't it disturbing to live under oppressive prog rule?
LatinZ... from A to Zzzzzz
The purpose of changing the rules is to create new in-groups and out-groups.
That is it.
And any teenager will tell you.
They are called romantic languages for a reason. I'm no expert but I believe it goes back to romantic notions of beauty, aesthetics and how these identities? are not open to reinterpretation, or reimagining. So, they (the new powers that be) imagine what would happen if a language like French and Spanish could be 'penectomified'. The internet says 'penectomified' is not a word, and I'd imagine it is not a word because the popularity of cutting off a penis, voluntarily, is only recent, unlike romantic languages. As hard as removing a penis from a language could be, Imagin removing a vagina. How do you exorcise a portal?
I would usually say "good luck" to people attempting something very difficult undertakings. Not this time.
"This is why it's easier to learn English"
You have clearly never had the experience of assisting students from East Asia with their English papers.
Hottentot (n.)
1670s, from South African Dutch, said in old Dutch sources to be a word that means "stammerer," from hot en tot "hot and tot," nonsense words imitative of stammering. The word was applied to the people for the clicking, jerking quality of Khoisan speech.
There is inclusivity in ambiguity and nonsense.
"but these are an outsider's feelings, weighed down by effort it takes to learn a lot of extra and seemingly arbitrary information"
As Kate said above rote memorization:
Das Madchen, the girl, is neuter
German has der, das, and die but English gets by with the (and dhe).
German also has the Sie and Du familiarity distinction, long lost in English.
FWIW I don't think Latine will work, but it's their time to waste.
"Latrine" just jumps into the head.
"Head"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_(watercraft)
My experience is that Spanish speakers expect Americanos to get genders wrong. They sometimes find it amusing.
And to complain about "arbitrary" rules regarding Spainish language words is hilarious coming from English speakers. Where is the logic in English grammar or Spelling? Its just like the IRS tax code, its a hodge-podge of illogic and inconsistentcy.
Another great thing about Spaiish, is it usually is written the way it is (supposed to be) spoken. In Spainish, you dont have absurdities like "Thorough" vs. "Enough".
The same SJW/Leftists that hate the spainish language and want to gut it are doing the same to the English language. The use of BCE is the lastest example. No one asked for it - but you're going to get it. Top down oppression.
It make no sense linguistically either.
What articles are used.
If I have several Romanian women are they unos mujeres latine? Or unas mujeres latine?
(un/unos is masculine, una/unas feminine)
Is a French man Un hombre latine? Or una hombre latine?
And am I "un puertoriqueno" or una puertoriqueno?
And my daughter "un puertoriquena" or "una puertoriquena"?
I suspect that these people are not Spanish speakers, regardless of surname.
Fuck them and their genocide.
John Henry
Nobody is doing it
To be fair I've never understood the whole masculine/feminine thing either.
Why are my roof and floor masculine (el techo) and floor (el piso) masculine. And my walls (Las paredes) and carpet (la alfombra) feminine? Unless it is a rug (El rug)
I've had it explained to me by language teachers and the more I learn, the less sense it makes.
Best answer "it just is"
John Henry
This problem comes up for French people when a word has been adopted from English.
A man says, "Look. Une helicopter."
It's Greek, -pter < πτερόν wing, neuter.
Just another everyday example of the fascism of the Left.
Here's my Latin story. I took Spanish in high school. In college, I thought it would be a good idea to take Latin as a pre-law thing. I struggled and got a C plus. The teacher was Fr. Richard McGloin, S.J. He was an old-line Jesuit who wore a cassock on campus. He was a huge Creighton basketball fan, but supposedly was too nervous to go to the games.
In the 80s there was a huge scandal at Creighton involving Kevin Ross. He was a former basketball player (and not a very good one at that) who sued Creighton for educational malpractice. He supposedly was illiterate. The photo in the papers was of him sitting in a little kid's desk as he supposedly had to go back to grade school to learn how to read. An early example of what Ben Crump did with Travon Martin.
Creighton won the litigation, but the damage to reputation was done. After that, the basketball coaches had a strict order, "Not another Kevin Ross."
The punchline here is that Kevin Ross got a better grade in Latin than Begley.
instead of calling them masculine/feminine, call the "o" words "convex" and the "a" words "concave."
Not a bad idea but I'd go other way round. Convex, sticking out, like a penis, is clearly male. Concave, clearly female.
John Henry
In Canadian it's pronounced "lah-tee-nay-ay"
Latine? Like holding your pinky out while having tea in a China cup
Get the fuck over yourself.
German does give some clues as to what the gender of a word is, so one can make an intelligent guess and increase the odds of being correct. It still feels odd that the word for girl is das Maedchen. 'Das' indicates that the noun is neutral; neither masculine nor feminine. So, a girl is referred to as 'it' (es). The same is true for 'das Fraeulein', a post-adolescent unmarried female. And 'das Weib', a somewhat antiquated word one can translate as 'female' or 'wench'. It comes to me in writing this that the only feminine-case word for a women that comes to mind is 'die Frau', an older or married woman. Draw from that what you will.
"Latine' strikes me as the Left is looking for a new word to signal just how tolerant they are of brown-people.
And can we bring up substituting 'of' for 'have'. "She should have given..." or "She should've given..." NOT "She should of given..."
STOP THAT!!
Rusty, I am looking at you.
MfG
Goetz von Berlichingen
Latine? Like holding your pinky out while having tea in a China cup
Get the fuck over yourself.
An X, an e, a Z in waiting, a gender pride parade in linguistic dysfunction.
John henry said...
It is racist.
It is cultural genocide.
Every bit as much as latinx
They know what they are doing
But..
other than the fact that No latinos are using it..
and the fact that latinos* HATE it..
and the fact that it's STUPID and Racist..
latinos* boys and girls. John Henry? am i spelling that right? Spanish 101 was a LONG Time Ago.
Seems like there Already IS a gender neutral plural ending.. Aren't mixed groups 'o's?
Do NOT bend to their will.
"Because it is a female and lays eggs, a chicken is masculine."
Sedaris is being obtuse for comedic effect, as he should. But chicken (poulet) could refer to a male or female bird. Hen in French is "poule" which is feminine. While Rooster is "coq" which is masculine.
It sounds like a mispronunciation of Latina, which is funny.
These people are fucking lunatics.
And why is it that a cock/pussy is the entirety of LGBT identity...I fuck this kind of person so give me respect and celebrate me.
"More than half of those polled..."
Talk about sexist (and probably painful).
'German has masculine, feminine, and neuter.'
And when I took German in high school it was a pain in the ass.
We had an exchange student from Germany and I asked him how they kept it all straight.
He said they either guessed if they didn't know or just mumbled : )
Re laughing at people who get gender wrong
Back in the 70s when I was still employed, I went to a little "come y vete" (eat and run) for lunch.
Long skinny lunch counter type place. Crowded.
I'm at one end of the counter and the woman cooking at the other end 15-20 feet away. I get her eye and she yells "¿EH, QUE QUIERES? (What do you want)
What I wanted was a toasted cubano (like a sub/grinder /hoagie)
What I yelled back was UNA CUBANA CALIENTE (a hot Cuban woman)
by the time I got to cal.. I knew I had screwed up. Everyone in the place knew I had screwed up and erupted in laughter.
Even worse, there were some people from work there so by the time I got back from lunch everyone in the plant had heard the story.
I never did live it down.
As recently as about 2005 in San Antonio TX, a guy I had worked with in Puerto Rico retold the story at dinner.
The problem was not that I screwed up but that I did it so loudly and publicly.
John Henry
And don't get me started on the whole latino/hispanic ethnic thing either
John Henry
In Spanish, generally, if the word ends in a, it’s feminine; if it doesn’t it’s masculine. The tough part comes when learning to use adjectives—which agree with the noun they modify, so you have to decide on the gender of your noun before you get there.
Ella es una buena mujer
Pero
El es un buen hombre
I’ve read about how the gender of an inanimate object affects how it is perceived and discussed. For instance (apparently), bridge is masculine in German, but feminine in French. German bridges tend to be described in the media as solid firm structures, while French bridges tend to be soaring and light and graceful.
"Simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their true meaning. Hence, too, his taste for quibbling, hair-splitting, and scholastic tortuousness."
-- Eric Hoffer
Isn't it disturbing to be pressured to speak differently and to use made-up words in service to someone else's ideology?
Thank you. It's a form of colonization. Mostly white progressive Westerners will tell you how you need to restructure your entire language to accommodate a minute percentage of people who feel constrained by something (here, the idea of gender which somehow gets confused with biological sex).
I've spent some time thinking about this issue of how do languages with grammatical gender "deal with" people who declare themselves "non-binary"? Since 2017 I have "encountered" more than thirty languages by working through language courses by Pimsleur. And regularly post observations on social media under the rubric Languages are Weird(tm) Part (whatever number comes next in the language I am learning that week). And I studied several languages (mostly ancient) formally as an undergraduate and graduate student.
Once an old friend from high school overseas asked "so how does that language deal with people who are non-binary?" I was caught off guard and did not have much of an answer other than "no idea". His question has bothered me ever since. He's not an arrogant person but such questions strike me as arrogant and imperious.
I don't know. That Language is spoken by how many millions of people? How could you poll enough of them? Or is there some Language Authority who governs that language (as is the case for French, Modern Hebrew, others) who can issue a declaration and/or speak on behalf of those millions?
If you dig down to the root causes of this issue it is Marxism. Socialists want to abolish the gender binary which is one of the causes of Capitalism. Smash grammatical gender!
Who knew a post about the trans pronoun police would be so triggering? You ladies do love to cluck you're pearls every time Mom posts about gender blender fluids.
I don't know why women weren't and aren't more successful in the comic drawing field. It looks like something that would be right up their alley. Women broke into the novel writing biz fairly early in the game. Maybe little girls aren't as interested in comic books as little boys?....The underground comix back in the sixties, iirc, were more pornographic than misogynistic in their messages, but I suppose there's some overlap between the two. Anyway, it was a niche market. Mary Worth or Brenda Star could have been drawn by women. Probably not Flash Gordon though. Flash Gordon, like James T. Kirk after him, hung out with hot women. It was one of the reasons why men were so interested in space exploration.
Japanese is filled with words having wildly different meanings, depending on whether a vowel is "short" or "long".
For example, Nagasaki and Kyoto contain short vowels. But Tokyo contains one long vowel.
So, as ChatGPT puts it: "The Japanese pronunciation of "Tokyo" is closer to "Toh-kyoh" with the emphasis on the first syllable. The "o" sound in the second syllable is pronounced like the "o" in "go," and the "kyo" is pronounced with a slight glide, sounding somewhat like "kyoh" with a soft "y" sound." In contrast Kyoto has two short vowels.
Now that I've set up the situation, I once tried to explain to a Japanese woman that I worked in advertising in Ohsaka (long first O!) , that I had a "komon keiyaku" , essentally a retainer agreement, with a few companies. But I mispronuned "komon" as KOH-mon, which means "Anus Agreement."
Confusion abounded.
Oops, wrong post. But I'm too lazy to correct it.
Latine is too close to latrine. It’s a set up.
I dunno. If I'm a USA "wokester" and member of the LGBTQQQQQQ Brigade I should have every right to tell anybody in the world that they have to change their grammar and language to suit my preferences! Yeah baby, that's the ticket.
Have you heard about the Cass Report?
Trans nonsense is a quickly sinking ship.
Thanks for the laugh, John Henry!
No one is going to use this. Especially when they see it as pushed by a bunch of weirdos.
There are in fact patterns in Indo-European languages that make genders easy to know for many nouns. Diminutives are neuter in Ancient Greek as well as modern German. A child (pais) may be masculine or feminine, but a small child (paidion) is neuter. Makes sense: if a baby's small enough, it's hard to tell, so we sometimes say things like "What's its name? Is it a boy or a girl?".
Assuming he took language courses, Sedaris either had bad teachers or didn't pay attention in class: hysteria, psychosis, torture, depression are not feminine because they're depressing but because they're abstract ideas, which are almost all feminine in Latin and all the Romance languages, whether positive or negative. Knowledge and ignorance, wisdom and stupidity, cruelty and kindness: all feminine. In Latin and French, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity are all feminine - which is why Liberty leading the people in the famous painting is a topless woman. The only exceptions in Latin are those few that end with -or: amor (love), dolor (pain), error, labor (last two meanings obvious). These are masculine, probably because -or is the ending for masculine agent nouns. Just as English can add -er to any verb to make it an agent: worker, lover, laborer, and so on, Latin adds -or. Some of these even come into English: doctor, aviator, monitor, auditor, assessor, supervisor. Latin feminine agents end with -trix, but I can only think of two that have come into English: aviatrix and dominatrix: in Latin you have assestrix and doctrix. Should we call Jill Biden 'Doctrix Jill'?
Words that end with -ma and denote the result of an action come from Greek neuter nouns that had plurals ending in -mata: drama (cf. dramatic), pragma (pragmatic), schema, magma, problema, gramma, diagramma. These stayed neuter in Latin and turned masculine in Spanish, despite their -a endings: apparently the rule that Latin neuters turned masculine in Spanish overrode the rule that words ending in -a are feminine, so we have 'el problema', 'el magma'.
There are more such patterns in Latin that (I suspect) came over into Spanish: for instance, all trees and islands are feminine, even though many have the masculine -us ending, and all rivers are masculine.
There are of course hundreds of nouns where you just have to know, but there are hundreds more that follow easy rules.
Earnest Prole said...
Shorter version: Poorer, dumber brown people around the world need to bend a knee to the urgent linguistic preferences of richer, smarter white people in American universities.
+1
They also need to remain tribalistic, balkanized, and easily controlled.
Separating them through language from the common culture is Orwell 101.
cf said...
"For instance, They have two "you"s: the rules for formal You (usted) and the easy-going casual informal You (tu), are fine to show respect but also are great dividers of class."
In Argentina, there are three singular words for 'you,' though the one most commonly in use is 'vos.'
I saw a billboard for Renault cars there that said,"Eh vos - trátate de Usted."
John henry said...
"...What I wanted was a toasted cubano (like a sub/grinder /hoagie)
What I yelled back was UNA CUBANA CALIENTE (a hot Cuban woman)
by the time I got to cal.. I knew I had screwed up. Everyone in the place knew I had screwed up and erupted in laughter."
These days, even if you'd used the masculine gender, it could have been misconstrued, which might have been even harder to live down.
Isn’t it wonderful that some helpful white people are lecturing brown people on how to make their language better.
“Do you feel a sense of loss when the world is not enlivened by the masculinity and femininity of inanimate objects and abstract concepts? I don't come from that world, but from a distance, it feels beautiful, and if I were you, I would want to believe it is beautiful.”
Ugh. If you were me, no you wouldn’t. Such a binary perspective is retrograde and repressive. I want to believe that objects fall on a glorious multidimensional LGBTQ+XYZ rainbow. Which means, of course, that I don’t believe it.
I propose "Latinå". Pronounce it "luh -TEEN- ow". Or just schwa the ending.
For pronouns, "ellå" and "ellås".
For articles, "lå"/"lås", and "unå"/"unås". Similarly for adjectives.
All masculine or feminine nouns currently ending in "a" or "o" should be moved to the neuter "å".
When this creates confusion, such as caså can mean home or case, context will be necessary. Or just use an alternative.
Doesn't matter that it's not on any Spanish keyboards or that no one will know how to pronounce it, etc. Equity has its costs. Using other options will me seen as lås microagresiones and punishable by law.
/sarc
Language is too intimate to leave it up to people who have women cut off their boobs.
"Some"
It is one of those glorious imprecise words which can be used to lie while being technically grammatically correct. See "sources say."
This is the good kind of cultural imperialism.
It's Greek, -pter < πτερόν wing, neuter.
Greek words of neuter gender are always masculine in Spanish, which leads to seeming discordance between nouns ending in -a and their articles: el idioma, el tema, el programa, el planeta, el profeta, and so on. Not sure if the same is true of French.
It's Greek, -pter < πτερόν wing, neuter.
Greek words of neuter gender are always masculine in Spanish, which leads to seeming discordance between nouns ending in -a and their articles: el idioma, el tema, el programa, el planeta, el profeta, and so on. Not sure if the same is true of French.
When I studied Latin, the masculine, feminine, and neuter were part of the beauty of the language. Learning the genders wasn't difficult. For example, most nouns ending in -a are feminine; the few exceptions (agricola, nauta) are logical.
Mea Sententia means my opinion, by the way.
Having worked with Mexicans most of my life, I can tell you they could care less what white liberals require of them. as for making their culture more acceptable to white women, they really don't care. They understand too well when they are being treated like crap by people who presume to know the 'truth'.
Orwell had a few things to say about language, but that is being stuffed into a trash can by universities and other gathering spots for the superior liberal intellectuals.
Liberal women keep inventing things, and finding out later that the truth has been around since before their grandmas lived.
But it's fun to watch.
Que pasa con ustedes?
Other languages, especially non Indo-European ones, have different "genders" which are not masculine or feminine, but active vs passive, present vs distant vs hypothetical, etc. We get too bent out of shape because we call them by boy name/girl name, and we have powerful associations with those words, and we imagine that some deep sexist thing is taking place.
Over-compensating Non-combat "vet" Howitzer Howard: "
Who knew a post about the trans pronoun police would be so triggering?"
Readers of Althouse blog will recall how rapidly and completely Howitzer Howard did as he was told in regards to bending both knees to marxist BLM, sucking up to antifa to the point he claimed their battles in the streets were equivalent to D-Day heroes and was worthy of retired military pay, unquestioning support for the pro-grooming policies of the Womest of the Woke Patrol AND how it made perfect sense to him, a dumb white lefty from Southern CA for everyone to adopt "Latinx"!
Howard remains one of the most pliable and lacking in backbone lefties to post on this blog, rivaling LLR-democraticals Chuck/Rich/lonejustice!
Not to worry though. Even as leftists Chuck/Rich/lonejustice double and triple down on transparent leftist insanity, Howitzer Howard will cut his losses and pretend he never said all the things he said...followed by generic over-compensating middle-school level braggadocio.
Recent example: Howie claims to be training like a "professional athlete"....
LOL
I've not traveled that widely in the Spanish speaking world. Ecuador. RD Guatemala, costa rica, various parts of Mexico. And live Puerto Rico of course
Someone mentioned 2 forms of "you" in Spanish tu (informal) and usted (formal)
Plural vosotros and ustedes.
Other than in hs and college Spanish language courses, I've never heard vosotros used. I was taught it but told it is only used in Spain.
Spanishdict.com says the same thing.
It also say 5 forms of you
"vos" I only vaguely remember hearing of. Singular you, formal and informal. Used in some south American countries but apparently not in Spain.
John Henry
Hispanic cultures are family oriented. The no gender part goes against this idea and essentially is insisting that Hispanics ignore/destroy their heritage because affluent white people are ordering them to do this.
And that, not anti gay sentiment, is what is behind the rejection of this by ordinary (non assimilated college educated) Hispanics.
I wondered about Monica Trasandes and her grasp on the Spanish language so looked her up. NOT with Google.
Born in uraguay (detras de Las Andes?) and studied in Spain so seems to be a1st language Spanish speaker.
And a lesbian since 14,she is proud to tell us (nttatwwt)
I found this in a magazine called "hispanic executive"
What I found interesting was that other than in the name, the don't use the word "hispanic"
Even in the masthead "Hispanic Executive-amplifying the voices of Latin leadership in America"
Then in the article they use "Latino" exclusively.
No latine or latinx except in Trasandes job title at glaad.
It felt odd that a mag with hispanic in its title would prefer Latino.
Perhaps because a person from uraguay might not have any Spanish blood at all? (Indian, German, Italian predominately)
John Henry
I've spoken a gendered language (German) in daily life.
You really aren't thinking "masculine, feminine, neuter" over and over all day. It's just a way of keeping the parts of speech straight.
The whole thing is a case of English speakers who've never learned a foreign language one-upping each other.
Goetz wrote "German does give some clues as to what the gender of a word is, so one can make an intelligent guess and increase the odds of being correct. It still feels odd that the word for girl is das Maedchen. 'Das' indicates that the noun is neutral; neither masculine nor feminine. So, a girl is referred to as 'it' (es). The same is true for 'das Fraeulein', a post-adolescent unmarried female. And 'das Weib', a somewhat antiquated word one can translate as 'female' or 'wench'. It comes to me in writing this that the only feminine-case word for a women that comes to mind is 'die Frau', an older or married woman. Draw from that what you will."
German is actually very logical with nouns referring to human beings, with the words almost always following biological sex. The exceptions are generally easy to explain: Mädchen and Fräulein both have diminutive endings that make any noun to which they are attached neuter. The underlying words (Magd - maid, and Frau - lady) are feminine.
Weib (cognate to English wife) is the one that is actually a true exception and difficult to explain. One theory is that the word was originally a collective noun referring to all the relatives on the wife's side of the family. Collective nouns in German are typically neuter. According to this theory, the meaning changed, but the grammatical gender did not.
Frauenzimmer (in some ways similar to English chamber maid) is another word for woman that is neuter. But in this case, the word is a compound and the rule is that the gender is always based on the last word in the compound. Zimmer is neuter, so the compound noun is neuter. This word is now pretty much obsolete.
Without reading previous comments...
This strikes me as just so dumb. In languages with gendered nouns, there's no particular sense of sex associated with the nouns - they just are what they are. In Spanish, "cat" is "gato," masculine gender, regardless of any individual cat's sex. "Baby" is "bebe," masculine gender, regardless of any individual baby's sex.
But for those assuming that these are evidence of the patriarchy - one word for "company" is "empresa," feminine gender, which has nothing to do with sexual identity. Time is described several ways, as "el tiempo," masculine, as "la vez," feminine, as "la hora," feminine. Years, months, and days are all masculine, but seasons, generically, and hours are feminine. Winter, summer, and fall are masculine, and spring is feminine.
The use of gendered nouns like this in language has zero to do with human "gender." And it's fricking stupid to try to strong-arm a language into "evolving" because you don't understand linguistics.
This weekend I've been in New Orleans, with some friends who had never been there. At one point, we walked them down Bourbon Street, because you have to. As we were walking, I noticed a group of young people standing in the middle of the street, as so many do on Bourbon Street. And then there were two young women, black, who as they walked toward this group, were saying with increasing volume and urgency, "Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me." Finally they ended with, "You're in the middle of the effing street."
For God's sake. Everyone on Bourbon Street is in the middle of the effing street. These two young women had decided that the group they were walking straight toward was exhibiting some form of oppressive privilege that they had to stand up against, rather than just being a group of tipsy young people who were interrupting their laser-straight passage down the road. They decided to interpret their experience as grievance.
I will note that their attitude was in sharp contrast to the attitude of everyone else we encountered at French Quarter Fest. Everyone else was as accommodating and easygoing as we would all hope we would always be (and ad we've always found in New Orleans), giving everyone the benefit of the doubt and assuming that everyone was there for the same reason, to enjoy good music, food, and drink. I love NOLA.
But those two young women - girls, grow up and realize that NO ONE has an intrinsic right to walk in a straight line at all times. And it's not a sign that someone's repressin' you, a la Monty Python, if you have to alter your course a few degrees.
"Surging in popularity" -
Example: Last month there were two of us using Latine. This month there are 12!
So Colombians, Mexicans, people from Barcelona all the same-same...
"Not a bad idea but I'd go other way round. Convex, sticking out, like a penis, is clearly male. Concave, clearly female."
That inventive fellow Doc Green,
Developed a screwing machine.
Concave or convex,
It could serve either sex,
And diddle itself in-between.
Instead of "Latinx " or "Latine" why don't we say "Latinoid" as in "These aren't the latinoids you are looking for."
I can't wait to tell my 30 or 40 illegal immigrant neighbors.
Is "drywall" masculine or feminine?
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