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.

  • Vncredleader
    ·
    3 years ago

    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.

    Since wīf is a grammatically neuter noun, all accompanying articles, determiners, and adjectives take neuter forms: þæt ealde wīf ("the old woman"). However, pronouns referring back to wīf are almost always feminine: Ġesiehst þū þæt wīf sēo þǣr stent? Canst þū hīe? ("Do you see the woman who [feminine] is standing there? Do you know her?"). This is similar to the situation of the neuter word mæġden (“girl”) and the masculine word wīfmann (“woman”), whose grammatical genders also disagree with their natural genders. Declension

    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

    • Horsepaste [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.

      • Vncredleader
        ·
        3 years ago

        Yup, it comes from the half dozen alternate spellings of Wif

    • eduardog3000 [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      So if I am correct, wif and man both are neutral, and form a feminine word for a female person when put together Wifmann

      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.