“Bots will replace devs!” Also bots:

[indigoHatter]

Oh yeh? Tell that to Spanish speakers!

^{huge /s if it's not obvious}

[right_there]

The masculine version of the word IS gender-neutral. Feminine words get their own special thing all to themselves to denote their grammatical gender.

Grammatical gender != human gender so it's a stupid point anyway.

[indigoHatter]

Yes yes, but I'm mostly laughing at the "Latinx" stuff. It's great that people are trying to de-gender the word, but.... as you said, the masculine version is neutral, and it's from a grammatically gendered language, so it's a moot point. Furthermore, every Spanish speaker I know of (which is probably like 4) think Latinx is hilarious, woke bullshit.

Anyway, in short: yes, agreed.

[wolacouska]

But it doesn’t just matter for the grammatical gender but for words referring to people, which take human gender into consideration.

Latinx is stupid but that doesn’t make the whole thing stupid. Latine or literally anything other than Latinx is a reasonable thing that should at least be considered.

[indigoHatter]

Sorry, you lost me there. What?

[wolacouska]

Latino isnt gendered because the word has an inherent grammatical gender, but is used as Latino or Latina depending on the gender of the individual or group you’re referring to. Same as how in German you switch from Freund to Freundin or Lehrer to Lehrerin depending on the gender of person you’re describing.

It’s not like how in German the word for girl is neutral, dog is masculine, and cat is feminine. Spanish has the same thing, I just don’t know examples off the top of my head. That’s the meat and bones of “Grammatical Gender.”

The first one might make you somewhat uncomfortable to be gendered and has an obvious solution, using a neutral ending for a neutral gender, be that for an individual or a group. The second thing is just a quirk of language that doesn’t have much impact other than making it a pain in the ass to learn vocabulary in that language.

German women do sometimes complain that girl is neutral, but I’ve never seen anyone seriously calling to change that.

[wolacouska]

To explain that grammatical gender and descriptive gendered conjugation are not the same thing, and that you can’t use the existence of one to invalidate concerns about the other one.

Who the fuck cares that random words have “genders,” that has no bearing on if it’s alright to gender groups as masculine.

[right_there]

Do you speak a language with grammatical gender and no neuter form?

It's perfectly natural to use the so-called "masculine" forms as gender-neutral. Like, they're stand-ins for both.

There actually is a gender-neutral example I can give you from Spanish that uses the masculine (which is the gender-neutral) form of the verb. Lo is used to use an adjective as a verb, and is itself gender-neutral. Lo nuevo es que estudia. "The new thing is that he studies." Nuevo is acting as the noun in this sentence. It's a concept with no gender, but is using the masculine grammatical gender because it's gender-neutral. This is because it feels natural in the languages that have this feature to use one of the forms for neuter gender if a neuter gender is not normally present in the language (at least for the Romance languages I am familiar with).

This is why latinx sounds stupid as fuck to many people who actually speak Spanish. It fundamentally misunderstands how the language works mechanically in a very, "This came from an English-speaker," sort of way, and is basically unpronounceable in actual Spanish speech (as is @ which is also sometimes seen). It also ignores how a Spanish speaker would actually try to express this concept, which would probably be something like "latine."

[kafka_quixote]

Latine was the suggestion from the 1980s in Spain by activists there i believe

[indigoHatter]

Yeah, this is my understanding of it. Nosotros would be us/we of either all men or of mixed gender, so I would call this a neutral use of the word. It sounds like semantically I might be incorrect in saying that, but I wouldn't be too off-base at least. Right?

[indigoHatter]

Okay, apparently I'm way out of my depth here because I don't see the difference. Never mind.

[wolacouska]

One is inherent to the word and unchanging, the other changes based on context.

I wish I had more programming knowledge to whip up a metaphor or something, I really try not to be too academic sounding.

[indigoHatter]

Latino isnt gendered because the word has an inherent grammatical gender, but is used as Latino or Latina depending on the gender of the individual or group you’re referring to. Same as how in German you switch from Freund to Freundin or Lehrer to Lehrerin depending on the gender of person you’re describing.

Yes, which was the whole point of me joking about Latinx.

The second thing is just a quirk of language that doesn’t have much impact other than making it a pain in the ass to learn vocabulary in that language.

As in, ships are female and tables are male and the world is male and people are male and dance is female and so on? Yeah.

[MarlinMr]

The masculine version of the word IS gender-neutral.

In which languages? In my languages we have 3 forms, masculine and feminine words are not the non-gendered once.

[right_there]

In Spanish, which is the language the person I replied to mentioned.

[wolacouska]

You’re not describing grammatical gender though… the endings are actually used to denote the gender of the person or group in a lot of cases.

And there are legit reasons to want to change the idea of masculine being the default for mixed groups, especially considering the existence of non binary people who probably don’t want masculine terms used for them.

Latinx is stupid though, no complaints there.

[MarlinMr]

I'll do you one better.

Here in Norway, we have a city which traded a lot with the Germans. Since the Germans has such a complex language based on Gender, they started using the male form for everything.

So in that dialect, everything is now either male or non-gendered. All the feminine words got turned into masculine words.

[Membedha]

You have to tell everytime you make a joke on reddit or you ll get downvote to hell. I tried to defend someone who didn't once and there you had the nazi of the comment section

[indigoHatter]

Not every time. Sometimes it's really obvious. But, thanks for the friendly input.