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Comment by remarkEon | Hacker News Reader

Though I'm an American, I speak a little German and have friends who speak Spanish/French/Italian (either natively as they were born in a country that speaks those languages or they learned it). The thing that has always perplexed me about "Latinx" is that the those pushing that formulation are grafting what is a Germanic language construction onto a Latin-based word. It makes no sense, and it's non-pronounceable (or at least difficult to pronounce) in Romance languages.

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As a native speaker of American English, I find Latinx to be either unpronounceable or lacking in an obviously correct pronunciation. Is it La-tinks? Or Latin-exks? The natural English construction of an adjective derived from “latin” that lacks gender would he just “latin”, not “latinx”, as English doesn’t have gendered adjectives in the first place.

(I don’t really understand how “Latina/Latino” came to be used for this purpose to begin with.)

I think it's just more political correctness gone wild. The vast majority of Spanish speakers in America are from Mexico but it somehow became derogatory to refer to them as "Mexican". How is that any different than calling somebody a Puerto Rican or a Brazilian? It simply denotes their place of origin.

>The thing that has always perplexed me about "Latinx" is that the those pushing that formulation are grafting what is a Germanic language construction onto a Latin-based word.

To be fair, English is extremely accustomed to etymological chimeras. A large portion of it is made of Old French, Latin and to a lesser degree Greek stems with English and Norse affixes/suffixes. Which is a perfectly valid way to import words while preserving the overarching grammar.

The problem with Latinx specifically is that it's closer to a regular expression than English.

Latinx came from LGBT Hispanic people. Probably it was influenced by spellings like folx and womxn.

Latine seems to be more popular outside North America. So Latinx is an English word mostly. And I think it became popular in writing before anyone much thought about pronunciation. A bit like Latin@.

>Latinx came from LGBT Hispanic people.

I have a very hard time believing that this was invented by people who speak a Romance language as their first language. Do you have a source?

>Probably it was influenced by spellings like folx and womxn.

Which is ... also a Germanic construction. Those words are not pronounceable in Spanish, Italian, or French. Is the idea that you just "imagine" that the word is spelled correctly when you pronounce it and this is just a thing you do when writing it?

> > Latinx came from LGBT Hispanic people.

> I have a very hard time believing that this was invented by people who speak a Romance language as their first language.

Children of Hispanic immigrants often feel more comfortable with English than Spanish yet many will still identify as “Hispanic”. So the word is more understandable if you see it as a product of a predominantly Anglophone Hispanic subculture

I thought about that, but the claim was that it came from that community, which is still hard to believe when it's a language construction that is really only common in elite white circles, evidenced by the polling data cited up-thread.

The polling data cited up-thread doesn't even include "elite white circles."

>3% of US Latino adults use the term "Latinx". 20% do not use it, and 76% have never heard of it.

Who is using this term if it is not people who it is ostensibly used to describe? I can venture a guess.

All of these meaningless labels were given to us by the so-called "elites" to keep us distracted... that same distraction is what allows of the continued manufacturing of consent.

I haven't seen it used much, so "a handful of people" is also an option.

But who are "US Latino adults" to begin with? This kind of statistic is based on an egregious confusion between ethnicity and citizenship, familiarity with languages, "communities" and subcultures. Labeling people (particularly other people) is problematic in itself.

"Latinx" is a sophisticated word from and for sophisticated people (such as the mentioned LGBT activists, who are often ready to adopt neutral replacements of masculine and feminine words); its usage should be considered an indicator of such sophistication (do you find it proper or silly?) and social contexts (who would you call "Latinx"? What would they think of you if you did?), all quite orthogonal to people's identity.

Are you using "sophisticated" as another word for "elites"?

Culturally sophisticated, enough to care about such things.

But I suspect there are many people who consider anyone smarter than them "elites" regardless of their actual social standing.

I said Latinx is an English word mostly.

Many Hispanic people are natively bilingual. Many speak English primarily.

Folx sounds like it looks. Womxn sounds like woman or women usually. Latin@ depends on the speaker. Latinx rhymes with Kleenex.

That's a pretty common misconception, but the correct pronunciation of Latinx is (lah-tinks).

It was supposed to rhyme with "thinks" from its inception.

I went to CU-Boulder and a part of the Latinx community, trust me, this is a quite hurtful anglo-ization of our tribe.

I honestly can't tell if you're trolling. "La-tinks" is just as much of an anglo-ization as pronouncing it like "Kleenex". There aren't a lot of cases in Spanish where three consonants are mashed together. Especially not ending with an "s" sound.

In fact, Spanish syllables only end in up to two consonant sounds (nearly always "ns" or "ks"), unlike English which can end in up to four consonant sounds (e.g. "texts").

Texts might end in four consonants in some underlying representation, but does anyone actually pronounce it that way? I think I reduce it to “Tex” unless I make a conscious effort to enunciate.

Yeah that's probably the case - I'm in the same boat (two consonants as in "tex" unless I consciously try to enunciate it in full).

Three consonant endings do get routinely pronounced in full in English though, e.g. "thinks".

I’m still skeptical it came from Hispanic people at all and not some handful of rich white sophomores at a private university, but it doesn’t actually matter because it is used far more frequently by wealthy whites than by any of the victim groups they purport to protect.

> Latinx rhymes with Kleenex.

...which is probably a big reason why it doesn't gain traction. It doesn't make sense as a word in any language. It feels like a foreign object pushed into the language by someone who is obviously out of touch. One could easily come up with something that at least reads and sounds like a word: Latinoa, Latinem, Latines...

Another big reason is that it doesn't solve a problem that most people have. If you look at Urban Dictionary, you see that many "up-and-coming" word creations are solving actual semantic problems, gaining traction organically, from the bottom-up. This is how language changes naturally.

On the other hand, the hypothesis that "generic masculine" forms are harmful is borne out of academia. It is entirely speculative and for practical purposes, unfalsifiable. Most people have to be told that the "moral" position is to comply with such language changes "from the top", for some perceived "greater good". Appropriately, have a word for this: newspeak.

I would claim "womxn" is not pronounceable in many other languages as well. My native language is German and whenever I see this I can't help but wonder how anyone would voluntarily agree with such an unelegant abuse of a word.

I'm not a language elitist or anything, but it's not a secret that language evolves towards easier and quicker pronunciation. And enforcing the opposite for ideological reasons is not just a bad idea, it's also doomed to fail.

>I'm not a language elitist or anything, but it's not a secret that language evolves towards easier and quicker pronunciation.

What I find pretty funny about this whole discussion is that German is a language that seems very tuned to allow for additions of language. Meaning, if you want to "invent" a new word, the German language has a lot of tools to allow you to do that. Which probably explains the root cause here for why "Latinx" exists at all.

Let’s not forget that womxn is actually allegedly transphobic, as Twitch learned the hard way recently.

I always pronounced it as Latinsk, which funny enough is the Danish word for Latin.

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