https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/06/hispanic-voters-latinx-term-523776
As left wing governments and corporations seek to reach out to Latin Americans in a more gender-neutral way, they’ve increasingly begun using the word Latinx, a term that first began to get serious use among United States academics and activists following the 2016 election of Donald Trump, but according to a new multinational poll of Latin American people, Latinx has unintentionally became one of the most homophobic slurs in Spanish and Portuguese. The incessant use of Latinx in advertising and government documents has only made the word more popular as a slur in only a few years. No Latin Americans polled referred to themselves as Latinx, the vast majority called themselves Hispanic or Latino even among the LGBT. What's most shocking is Latinx ranked first on the list of most offensive words according to Latin American people, most respondents said they wouldn't support a politician or organization that uses the term however there's monetary incentives for businesses and politicians to use Latinx, many Latin American governments are trying to phase out the use of gendered language and are offering tax deductions for the use of Latinx.
That's a fun fact, isn't that left over from middle or old English? I'm talking about relatively modern English, say 1700's onward.
Example "all men are created equal" was absolutely not inclusive of women.
It's closer to Old English, but it's why the genderless usage still exists.
Latin actually had the same. "Vir" for male which came from the same root as English "wer" (see also: "virile" which came from Latin through French rather than Germanic through Old English). The same thing happened where the genderless word ("homō") became the male word, "hombre" in Spanish or "homem" in Portuguese.
The thing is that those most affected by the usage of gendered language, do not view man as genderless. It's a completely valid viewpoint to have and language is meant to change.
I love how our good old Germanic tongue makes it so you can NEVER make a definitive statement about grammar. Even without the bs rules, so much of what we assume are root words are unrelated. Reading that made me wonder if it was the root of Norman, and yep comes from Northman or Northern Peoples. From what I can tell in Old English it was most commonly used like we use "you"
Also apparently Wif, the counterpart to Wer, was also gender neutral.
So if I am correct, wif and man both are neutral, and form a feminine word for a female person when put together Wifmann
I could be off base, and this is aside from the point, but I look up a language thing and my brain didn't melt for once so I am kinda proud
That's super interesting! Does "wife" trace its etymology back to that by any chance?
I seriously love how fluid and flexible language is. Prescriptivism shows a lack of curiosity and is also inherently classist. Communicating should be fun and language should adapt to the working class.
Yup, it comes from the half dozen alternate spellings of Wif
Love it, thanks for teaching me something new!
:rat-salute:
No, grammatical genders are not the same as gender. The word "wif" was grammatically neuter, but its definition was still female. Meanwhile "man" was definitionally neutral with "wer" being the counterpart to "wif".
That's another part of the problem with trying to add gender neutral language to a gendered language, they aren't really the same concept.