abovtmaleprivilege:
I see Redd is trying to change the Spanish language by adding @ to the end of Latin-.
As a person who has been learning Spanish since elementary school, that is extremely incorrect.
Latino is the catch-all term instead of Latin@. Latino is masculine, but it is also used to describe a group. If a…
I would disagree that a language can’t be changed to suite a certain need. That’s what communication + language is all about..!
Quick language rant:
I honestly have no idea whether people who speak Spanish as a first language concern themselves with this, but in German there’s a relatively large trend to not use the ‘generical masculine’. To the point that it has a name: Gendering. (So e.g. instead of using ‘Studenten’ to refer to all students, terms like ‘Studenten/Studentinnen’ (+female plural), ‘Studierende’ (the ‘studiers’, which has no specific gender), ‘StudentInnen’ (a combo), ‘Student_Innen’ (a combo taking into account the non-gender binary), etc. are used instead.) Many of these are not only used by SJWers or whatever, but in official sources too (universities, the government, street signs, …).
There are, of course, other people who claim that Gendering is not a good solution: that it Others women, that it makes the difficult needlessly complex and it takes much longer to say even simple sentences, etc. However, in the (very limited) data I gathered, most people, both men and women, use at least some form of Gendering (the older people tend to say both forms/the gender neutral one, the younger tend to go for the combo one), at least in written texts. Even if it looks awkward at first, it soon becomes no less difficult to get used to that than to English speakers writing ‘they’ or ‘he/she’ for an unspecified/unknown gender. (Very gender binary, I know. I’m afraid I don’t know much more about how other genders are included other than the version with an ‘_’.)
Of course, the difference is that in German it was started and advocated by newspapers and other ‘official’ sources, not some random non-native-speaker online. But languages change naturally and constantly, so I don’t think it’s necessarily an awful idea in general.
/rant.
*cough* Sorry, I just have a lot of feelings about this. I wrote a 4000 word essay about the German ‘StudentInnen’ construction as one of the final projects in my last year of school. And stuff like this was one of the reasons I am currently studying linguistics at uni… ehehehe… (Even edited the post to include more info, I’m a geek. >.<)
