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Comment by 908B64B197 | Hacker News Reader

I still don't get the term latinx.

Have they considered... Latin. As in, Latin America, for instance?

It's incredibly offensive. They're projecting how English works on gendered nouns onto other language (Spanish) and then getting worked up over it. It's astounding that the people pushing the term don't see the irony.

I have seen some concern about this issue in El Salvador. But "latinx"? Not once. It's unpronounceable in Spanish. You only see the letter X in indigenous place-names like Mexico or Oaxaca, and there it's pronounced kind of like a fricative version of our H, which can't work at the end of the word. I've heard native English speakers say it's pronounced "lah-TINKS", which is so obviously foreign it's painful.

Two solutions I've seen native speakers employ: Sometimes in written language, the @ symbol will be used because it's like an A and an O overlayed ("latin@s"). When speaking, the only thing that could work would be E, "latines", which at least would be pronounceable and would rhyme. Did the idiot who thought of "latinx" think about rhyming? Spanish speakers write poetry and music too.

> But "latinx"? Not once. It's unpronounceable in Spanish. You only see the letter X in indigenous place-names like Mexico or Oaxaca, and there it's pronounced kind of like a fricative version of our H, which can't work at the end of the word. I've heard native English speakers say it's pronounced "lah-TINKS", which is so obviously foreign it's painful.

That's pretty ironic. I never made that connection, though I only have a basic familiarity with Spanish phonetics.

My understanding is that "latinx" is pretty much exclusively a performative English-speaking white liberal thing. It's not very pronounceable in English, either. I've never actually heard it spoken, but mentally I read it as "latin-ex." Personally, I don't think I'd ever even try to use "lah-TINKS," since I'd be afraid it'd be interpreted as an ethnic slur.

This video gives some background to the term, and pronounces it latin-ex: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bs339gW_xqU (I tried to pick a short video without any adverts.)

> I've never actually heard it spoken

Tune into NPR for an hour and you're sure to hear it.

I’ve heard it spoken (never, of course, by someone actually from Latin America), and it’s indeed pronounced latin-ex.

> You only see the letter X in indigenous place-names like Mexico or Oaxaca, and there it's pronounced kind of like a fricative version of our H

Interestingly, in both of those cases it was originally pronounced like our “sh”, which is a sound that doesn’t exist in Spanish.

Also nicely ironic that the language Latin is gendered. So "Latin America" in English is "America latina" in standard Spanish, and Google wants to translate it to "Americae" in Latin ("Americas", plural, feminine gender, nominative case.)

Hispanics don't get it either.

One of my favorite responses to this came from a Mexican on Twitter and was something to the effect of "Fuck off, pendejx."

I laughed _so hard_ at this and am going to steal it.

Indeed. The only ones I've ever seen push it in the workplace are the ones that never learned how to speak Spanish. Telling.

With them shoving their privilege into others. The exact thing they preach not to do.

Or latine which was invented by people who actually speak the language.

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