And what do you think is the “gender neutral” term that Spanish speakers use when they refer to group of people of Latin American origin? It surely is not “latinxs”.
“What would be point of that?”, yes, that’s exactly the issue. It would seem weird, forced and foreign, just like “latinxs” does to people it is purported to refer to.
It seems to be a bit strange to complain about how widespread the use is of a newly coined term.
I assume that much of this "outrage" is some kind of a "culture war" thing. Instead of focusing on important stuff people get all distracted with "old man angry at minor change" and bike shed things like this ad infinitum.
> yes, that’s exactly the issue
What? it's not needed with "Americans" so there's no need. In some languages gender neutral terms can be legitimately used as a shortcut for using both after each other or similar.
> What? it's not needed with "Americans" so there's no need
But that’s the point: it’s not needed in Spanish either. Spanish speakers are totally fine without new inventions like “latinx”. They see those strange American people, who usually don’t even speak Spanish, try to impose their own new norms on what the Latinos should be called, and they don’t like this kind of cultural imperialism.
The whole problem stems to a large degree from lack of understanding the English speakers have for gendered languages. English is, with few exceptions, not gendered. The exceptions are rare enough that people who care can try to lobby for using gender neutral terms, like they are used for almost everything else. This is often against established language patterns, but since English is, in general, not gendered, it doesn’t seem all that out of place.
That’s not how gendered languages works. In gendered languages, everything had a gender. In Spanish, chair is female, and desk is male. When you use an adjective, you need to use it in an appropriate gendered form to match the gender of the noun. Spanish speakers are completely used to it, and don’t see this as anything special or in need of rectification: that’s just how their language works. External efforts to make some specific words gender neutral are just strange and foreign to them.
You seem to be mixing gendered nouns with something that's actually referring to actual people. Two different things.
In German for example every job ad title need to be suffixed with (m/w). It would be handy if it was gender neutral. I don't understand how the grammatical gender of a random noun e.g. wine, that happens to be masculine in German, is comparable to something that's referring to actual persons.
In Swedish for example there are the pronouns "han" (he) and "hon" (she), and now there's a gender neutral "hen". The latter being very handy when you don't know the gender of the person that's being talked about. But of course this addition has made culture warring people (a.k.a right-wing folks) very upset in Sweden too.
> You seem to be mixing gendered nouns with something that's actually referring to actual people. Two different things.
No, because when you refer to actual people, you still need to use a gendered noun. The issue is which gendered nouns to use, and different language have different rules about it.
In German, for example, one just like in Spanish needs to match the gender of the adjective to the gender of the noun. However, unlike in Spanish, German doesn't really have gender distinction in plural, and you generally use the same form to refer to group of people regardless of whether it comprises of only males, only females, or whether it's mixed.
Spanish, however, has gendered plural, and it also has a rule that whenever one refers to a group of people, one uses female gender noun only if the group comprises of only females. Whenever the group is fully male or mixed, one uses masculine form of the noun. So, a group of Latino men is "latinos", a group of Latino women is "latinas", but the mixed group of Latino men and women is actually "latinos" again. To add to that, the masculine plural version of the word "latinoamericano" is "latinoamericani", but the feminine version is "latinoamericanas", and not "latinaamericanas" (this is a compound word, and not an adjective-noun pair, hence the "latino" doesn't get declensed to "latina")
In short, any time you refer to group of Latin Americans in Spanish that doesn't happen to be all female, you'll always be saying "latino", and never "latina". Hence, the word "latinx" is solving a nonexistent problem, same as the word "Americanxs" would in English.
Why did you skip the Swedish example? That's the most similar to this. It's just a shortcut.
This is English speaking folks that have adopted a Spanish word and are now making it gender neutral by skipping the last letter. They are under no obligation to continue to follow the the original language's grammar. We would have a major linguistical crises on our hands if that was so.
Because I don't know anything about Swedish language :)
> This is English speaking folks that have adopted a Spanish word and are now making it gender neutral by skipping the last letter.
Which is silly, because "Latinos" is already gender neutral in its actual use, both in Spanish and in English. It declenses in Spanish using masculine form, but as the above example of chair and desk, grammatical gender of a noun doesn't have to say anything about gender of whatever it refers to. It does in the case of the word "latinos", but it only says that the group is not all-female: this is the gender neutral form.
> They are under no obligation to keep following the the original language's grammar.
Sure, there is no obligation. They could also decide to just call all groups of people from Latin America "Latinas", or just do away with that stem altogether, and just use "Hispanic" instead. Of course, in the former case, the Spanish speakers would be very confused that Americans keep insisting on only referring to females, and in the latter, the Brazilians might get confused why they are now called Hispanic. But, they'd be wrong to have any concerns about this, because languages are completely arbitrary, and Americans are under no obligation to have their language make any sense or be consistent with anything else.
The above is, of course, absurd, just like the word "Latinxs". Just use the word Latinos, which is already gender neutral, if you happen to care about it.
> It does in the case of the word "latinos", but it only says that the group is not all-female:
It doesn't even say that; it only means that the groups is not known to be all-female, as the masculine grammatical gender is used for indeterminate as well as mixed human gender.
> The above is, of course, absurd, just like the word "Latinxs". Just use the word Latinos, which is already gender neutral, if you happen to care about it.
Or, since Latinx is an adjective (not a noun), use “Latin” which American English, at least, already did before adopting the Spanish Latino/Latina. If we're dropping it for a non-Spanish gender-neutral English adjective with the same meaning, why not revert to the one we were using before that was only dropped to respect the language of the described population?
> It does in the case of the word "latinos", but it only says that the group is not all-female: this is the gender neutral form.
And that requires information about a groups composition ahead of time doesn't it?
Anyway, I think it's important to remember that this is English speaking folks that are trying to be more inclusive and finding "Latinos" to refer primarily to a group of males. They may even disagree with the original preference of Spanish to go with Latinos over Latinas for a mixed composition.
> And that requires information about a groups composition ahead of time doesn't it?
No, because when you know nothing about composition of the group, you use the gender neutral form (masculine) instead of feminine one.
> English speaking folks that are trying to be more inclusive and finding "Latinos" to refer primarily to a group of males.
When American use the word “people”, it primarily refers to groups of Americans. Should they be more inclusive and invent a term, say, maybe peoplxs, that includes also non-Americans? That’s absurd, of course.
> When American use the word “people”, it primarily refers to groups of Americans. Should they be more inclusive and invent a term, say, maybe peoplxs, that includes also non-Americans? That’s absurd, of course.
> This is English speaking folks that have adopted a Spanish word and are now making it gender neutral by skipping the last letter. They are under no obligation to continue to follow the the original language's grammar.
Don’t you see how that makes it worse? The English word-Latin—is already gender neutral! Americans adopted “Latino” as gesture to the large number of Spanish speakers living in America. It’s not just a borrowed word Americans happen to use, it’s a word used to refer to a large Spanish-speaking minority group living in the country.
But "Latin" is ambiguous and normally not used to describe people of Latin-American decent, at least not in Europe, and the emphasis in America seem to be towards Spanish speaking countries rather than the Latin/Romance languages as a whole.
This isn’t about using a gender neutral pronoun with respect to a specific person. It’s about English-speaking people trying to change the label used for an entire group of mostly immigrant people by slicing and dicing a Spanish word and adding an English ending to it.
