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Comment by lotu | Hacker News Reader

Language is defined by the people who speak it, not by some authority. If people are using “les” than it is part of Spanish.

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If it was natural an used by all, it could be, but it in this case it was not natural, not used or liked by all, and forced.

For example, thief's use their own words and it is not considered part of Spanish for example.

They started with gender ideology and then started to escalate. And it is not more inclusive if you force me to leave my believes. If you want to be called "les", and you ask nice, I will probably have no problem. Now, if you want me to embrace that "les" is more inclusive because you just say so and you force me to do it, is not part of Spanish.

A similar thing happened with abortion. First they started saying it has to be legal, then that it had to be free, and then that if you are a doctor and you don't agree with abortion you have to do it anyway (they force you to do it by law).

Do you have any more information on the abortion policy you're using as a comparison?

Tried to guess which country you were referring to but couldn't find concrete info after a bit of googling.

I don't think the comparison between using more inclusive language to refer to people, and you being forced to abandon your beliefs, makes much sense. Putting aside potential issues with beliefs and their effect on a person's treatment of those around them, no one is forcing you to stop believing whatever it is you believe.

Potentially limited may be how you treat or talk to people, but that is a separate limit than what you are allowed to believe, since once it becomes words or actions, now it's not just in your head but out in reality and potentially affecting others.

This is in Argentina.

MY MISTAKE: apparently the law does allow a doctor to say no for his believes. I cannot edit the previous post.

Again, so this people today say that you have to say "les", what prevents me from saying I am not filling included, I want everybody to start saying "lus" or "chimichangas" for that matter? The problem for me is that they force you to behave however they want you to behave.

Honestly though, in my day job I've been trying to eschew gendered pronouns across the board - my coworker's gender is not relevant to them being my coworker. For a long time we've promoted gender as the single most defining trait as a person in a way we don't promote with height, weight or even skincolor. It's Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith that are used as common forms of address - but not Tall Smith or British Smith. I'm pretty much done with such an emphasis being placed on gender in common social interactions, the only thing it's relevant to is who's going to sleep with who which isn't really something I want to discuss at work anyways.

Mr. and Mrs. are not adjectives, though.

Mr. and Mrs. are both honorifics that are technically nouns - but they definitely modify the noun that comes after them which is one of the uses of an adjective. I can talk about the white house and the red house - just like I can talk about Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith.

There are plenty of other words (including adjectives) that you can use as honorifics - you've got Little John (and Lil Jon), Short Bob and Tall Bob.

I think it's fair to move away from Mr. and Mrs. being as prominent as they are.

> but they definitely modify the noun that comes after them

One of the two nouns is an appositive, but it's never been too clear to me which is which in English grammar. In my native tongue it definitely doesn't seem to be the case that Mr. modifies Smith, as our equivalent to Mr. is a common noun that is used to refer to any male human.

In English the word serves double duty (and does other stuff) - "Hey Mr., can you tell me which way it is to the subway station" is a perfectly natural sentence. They can even be anonymized nouns (similar to la blanca - referring to a white house depending on context) - "Oh, I was going to wait to open the bottle until the Mrs. gets back". Lastly you've got the example I had in my prior comment "Oh sorry, I actually wanted to speak with Mrs. Smith - can you put her on the line?" where it is functionally, I think, an adjective though the dictionary considers it a noun in that usage.

Academically speaking, my understanding of the linguistics at play are that there are biases embedded deep within the gendering of specific words, even.

There is a real gap in the archaic forms of Romance languages when it comes to the level of gender sophistication that was in the even more archaic Latin.

Modern languages are evolving rapidly and it is entirely within the realm of reasonableness to expect that humanity will tend towards meta-evolving it’s own languages.

But I am not well read in linguistics and suspect that Noam Chomsky has already written a book on this topic.

>Do you have any more information on the abortion policy you're using as a comparison?

No, s/he doesn't because is talking nonsense: conscientious objectors rights/persons are protected in Argentina by its Constitution and plenty of case law.

Re: Abortion: Doctors can (and have) very much deny to perform or "facilitate" abortions on moral or religious grounds but by law ("Ley del Aborto") they also have the legal obligation to refer the woman/patient WITHOUT delay of any kind to another doctor or another hospital (mostly public ones) to have the procedure.

My bad, apparently you are right. Doctors can say they don't want to do an abortion.

Just no need to be smartass about "nonsense". I read it somewhere and I don't follow all the news all the time.

Those "thief words" are part of a dialect, yes. A word being "forced" or "natural", whatever that means, has no bearing on this discussion, and neither your personal choice of using them or not.

Some languages actually do have a central authority. IDK about Spanish, but my native language (Czech) definitely has an official standard.

Anyone can, of course, use any weird construction they want, it is just not correct Czech.

Spanisch also hast it. Real academia española

But he post of the other member was about that languages naturally evolve, which is true, but this is forced and unatural.

What makes it forced or unnatural? It's intentional, to be sure, but hope does that make it less natural? Or put differently, how do you distinguish between a natural and unnatural change to language?

Unnatural because they thought of inventing it, they started saying "tod@s" (todos is everyone), didn't catch, they then moved to "todxs", didn't catch, then they said "todes", and because people don't naturally use it. They even use it wrongly all the time. But more importantly, unnatural because if you have to impose it and call me names for not using it, you are doing it wrong.

> they thought of inventing it,

How is this different than any other term that was coined?

> didn't catch, they then moved to "todxs", didn't catch, then they said "todes", and because people don't naturally use it. They even use it wrongly all the time

This sounds like natural evolution to me. People try different terms until one sticks.

> But more importantly, unnatural because if you have to impose it and call me names for not using it, you are doing it wrong.

Why? You're calling their use of language "wrong". Can't they do the same?

The parent is pretty clearly saying that "les" wasn't previously a Spanish word, because HN is an English language forum and some of us don't know that. Let's not nitpick the English of folks for whom it's a second language.

> Language is defined by the people who speak it, not by some authority.

This may be true in case of English, but not necessarily in case of many national languages.

> > Language is defined by the people who speak it, not by some authority.

> This may be true in case of English, but not necessarily in case of many national languages.

Counterexample: The German Rechtschreibreform of 1996 was mainly retracted after a decade of popular resistance. Seems even languages that are ostensibly “regulated by a central authority” in the end follow the will of those who use the language.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1...

English is already a counterexample. As for orthography reforms, well, they don't affect language as such, as languages are primarily spoken. An orthography reform won't ever change how people speak, so whether the German one was successful or not is irrelevant. And the fact that orthography reforms in particular may not be often successful is not surprising either since written words tend to more conservative as they have facilitated communication through time. Just look at the discrepancy between English speech and writing.

> English is already a counterexample.

I meant counterexample in the sense of "language that does at least ostensibly have a central authority (the Duden) still in the end having to bow to the will of the language-using public". English isn't a counterexample of that, since it doesn't even remotely claim to be governed by any central authority.

> ...languages are primarily spoken. An orthography reform won't ever change how people speak, so whether the German one was successful or not is irrelevant

"Primarily" is not the same as "only". You haven't heard a word I've said, have you? And yet here we are, talking to each other...

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