Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take

Re:Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take by UnpossibleJim on Friday October 29, 2021 @03:02PM (#29042322)

This comes into the forced language changes like "LatinX". On paper, changes like this are fine, but in use they only wok on paper. In use they still have to be identified as "Soy un LatinX" or "Soy una LatinX" (sorry if my Spanish is a little rusty), but the definitive article is still male or female. While in your example above, Americans (as I am) seem eager to change individual words in a language and culture to bend it to our will and white wash it (and no, I'm not on board with this. Deleting a cultural language won't fix a problem of oppression, which are not limited to cultures with gendered languages), it still does not remove the "gendered" aspects of the language in many cases.

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Re:Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take by dragonwriter on Friday October 29, 2021 @03:09PM (#29042397)

> This comes into the forced language changes like "LatinX". On paper, changes like this are fine, but in use they only wok on paper. In use they still have to be identified as "Soy un LatinX" or "Soy una LatinX" (sorry if my Spanish is a little rusty)

Not really. “Latinx/Latin(x)/LatinX”, in both English and Spanish (though it seems to be used less in Spanish, even by people who use it in English [0]) is usually, perhaps exclusively, used as an adjective, not a noun.

[0] e.g., I’ve see groups use things like “Soy Yo Latino / I Am LatinX”.

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Re:Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take by tsimionescu on Friday October 29, 2021 @03:42PM (#29042707)

> “Latinx/Latin(x)/LatinX”, in both English and Spanish (though it seems to be used less in Spanish, even by people who use it in English [0]) is usually, perhaps exclusively, used as an adjective, not a noun.

If it is indeed used only as an adjective, it would make sense to see it very rarely in Spanish, as Spanish already dictates which gender to use for an adjective - if you want to say 'a latinx movie' in English to avoid using Latino/Latina, that makes some sense; but in Spanish, 'una pelicula latino' would never make sense, so why use 'latinx' instead of the normal agreement 'latina'?

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Re:Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take by dragonwriter on Friday October 29, 2021 @03:54PM (#29042844)

Even in English, the use of it as an adjective for anything except personal identity (specifically, a way to identify personal ethnic identity in a way which was inclusive of non-binary gender identity) seems to be a step detached from its original origin taken by media adopters who just do a global find and replace to swap it for Latino and/or Latina without considering context.

Not quite on the level of an American college newspaper I saw in the 1990s that identified Winnie Mandela as an African-American speaker when she was making an appearance, but the same kind of process.

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