Hacker News Reader

Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Or cooler heads prevail like at the Académie Française who recognize that sexual genders are completely unrelated to grammatical genders despite what activists try to say.

So we may just get some people who push back and tell people that chess isn’t racist and it’s people who are injecting race where it doesn’t exist (such as here in chess) who are the problem.

View on HN

Have cooler heads prevailed in this regard? “Progressive” Americans degendering Spanish by referring to Latino people as “Latinx” seems to be going as strong as ever, despite the protests of actual native Spanish speakers. In their haste to appear progressive, people who say “Latinx” are ironically engaging in linguistic colonialism, as it were.

But that’s the problem with progressives. They trip over themselves trying to be at the front. And yes, I’ve asked people of Latin descent if they use latinx in their speech to which they respond no and that it’s a North American invention and that in Spanish it’s Latino for sing male, Latinos for plural males or combo males and females, and Latina for singular female and latinas for all female but never latinx for any combination of the above.

> Americans degendering Spanish by referring to Latino people as “Latinx”

Depends, do you speak Spanish? If so, there's a governing body - the Real Academia Española (RAE) - and they have referred to the "x" ending as an abomination. It is rejected from the style guide and not acceptable Spanish.

If you want to speak Woke Proto-Spanish, by all means do. Just realize it's not Spanish and it's spoken by a tiny fraction of a percent of - generally American woke-sters desperate to cling to Latin or Spanish culture as they realize they are actually American and as such - not oppressed minorities (the worst of fates!). This is why Oxford recognizes "Latinx" but the RAE does not.

That’s a perfect example of something that literally every single time I’ve seen it mentioned was in the context of people expressing outrage at other people’s activism, and never in the context of an activist actually advocating for it.

Do you mean that it's an imagined problem or that it's an example of a truly terrible idea?

Because I see people using it all the time on TV. It's not an imagined problem.

Read the literature from your nearest HR department and there is a good chance you'll see this term being used in earnest.

I've heard people actually, earnestly, use it. It was high school students, though, so I cut them some slack on the rope of pretentious foolishness. We were all there to some degree when we were teenagers.

I've heard several PhDs use it. They were white English speakers and liberal in their political leanings. It comes across as even more pretentious than high schoolers aping the latest wokeness.

Related: Referring to American Indians as 'Native Americans', which is often seen as over-inclusive by American Indians themselves since it implies you're talking about Natives to the entire North and South America. While not the worst thing, when you are specifically talking about the native tribes the United States pushed out and forcibly moved to reservations, the term 'Indian' is codified in law[0] and is what the group themselves embraced as their identity so that, as a whole, they could bargain with the United States government to obtain compensation for the tragedies endured.

https://youtu.be/kh88fVP2FWQ

0: https://www.bia.gov/

I knew you linked to that CGP grey video before I clicked since it’s literally the only place I’ve ever seen that claim made.

I find it dubious, since there are many Indians, and some tribes have taken the stance that they don’t like that term.

The problem seems to stem from 'American' being synonymous with the United States, when in a literal sense it means the entire North and South America continents. People will probably know what you mean with context but it can be confusing, so adding on 'Native American' just requires more explaining whenever you bring it up when not among peers.

This is a good point, but I'd also be interested in seeing the opinion of Americans with heritage from India, since using 'Indian' to refer to Native Americans might inconvenience them.

Indian-American: An American citizen whose family came from India.

American Indian: same as Native American.

It's none of my business but personally I prefer latine[1]. IMO there's no need for white English speakers to tell Spanish speakers their language. We're all on the journey to a world with more than two genders together. Spanish speakers will figure out their own path to inclusivity.

1: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/10/15/20914347/latin-...

Latino is already inclusive. There's nothing to be done, as Latinos aren't preoccupied with creating fake problems.

> referring to Latino people as “Latinx”

Isn't this connecting a Latin conjugation? Which in turn would be westernization? I understood westernizing people to not be the right thing to do. (Which to be fair, Spanish does originate from Europe but Latin people are not). I never understood this. If someone has a good explanation I'd love to hear.

Isn't Latinx supposed to be Latino+Latina? Surely those two words areactually gendered (in the biological sex way), unlike most words which are gendered in a purely linguistic way.

Latinos is how you gender Latino+Latina in a "purely linguistic way", but some people don't like it, so they made a new word. The masculine word is either gender neutral or "truly" masculine depending on the context, but the feminine counter part always refer to girls/women.

> despite the protests of actual native Spanish speakers.

The only people I've ever seen mad about "Latinx" were American internet free speech advocates.

> Or cooler heads prevail like at the Académie Française who recognize that sexual genders are completely unrelated to grammatical genders despite what activists try to say.

But that's not really true. I always learned that, for example, ils (grammar-masculine they) should be used when referring to a group of people where any of the people are sexual-gender-masculine, but elles (grammar-feminine they) should be used when referring to a group of sexual-gender-feminine people. Ils and elles have the same rules when referring to a group of inanimate objects depending on the grammar-gender of the objects.

You're both right. In grammatically gendered languages, various situations and context are present. Sometimes, people get worked up on a non-issue (like the latinx example other commented). Other rules have a more debatable impact, like the famous "in groups, the masculine prevail".

Interestingly, other approaches existed in the past like the rule of proximity where the gender of the closest element will dictate how the verb and adjectives will be written.

Languages are an ever-changing thing. I think it's healthy to propose and discuss grammatical changes if it makes sense, but everyone should be aware of what they are actually talking about.

In Germany we had the same. That didn't stop most newspapers to use some form of weird gendering of language. I think it will fade out since people don't use it.

It also underscores why some people think the media is a partisan mess. It is to some degree at least. They even asked people and most didn't like it. Didn't stop them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com