Was the argument over "Latinx"? In my head, I'd filed it away as being over "Latin@". But now I think I'm wrong.
Of course, one annoying thing about "Latin@" is how to read it outloud. What does audio software do when it gets to this word?
The argument here was over Latinx. I saw Latin@ before I ever saw Latinx, but Latinx is much commoner now, I think because it's pronounceable. (Weird sounding, but you can say it.)
It looks like when somebody writes "f@ck" so you can't accuse them of spelling profanity.
But Latinx hasn't spanned all these other situations, like Moby points out, hijx. It would particularly awkward in the generic first person, the way these sentences are written. "Estoy comidx con me hijx..."
Moby's alternate name is Moby Hi@.
I think it would be easier to pronounce if they just switched the o/a with a u.
It could even be singular or plural. "Mu hiju" can be any number of children of any gender.
I can also fix French. They just need to stop using so many letters that aren't pronounced and spell "oui" as "wi".
I think there is some talk among Spanish speakers of an ungendered 'e' ending rather than 'u', but I'm not sure how big a thing it is.
I guess that's what they did for things like "boss" (jefe instead of jefo or jefa).
The solution in 15 seems like the most likely to actually be picked up broadly. And it's so easy and consistent. No aviatrix becoming aviator.
I saw a mural the other day in the Fruitvale district with the words "LXS VIDXS NEGRXS IMPORTXN". Yes, I know, none of those endings are supposed to overtly denote gender, and the 3P-plural ending -an isn't even grammatically gendered, but I see what they're working on.
If Spanish changed all the -a and -o suffixes to schwas, x or @ could just become the letter for that sound!
Ada Palmer implied the revived Latin in her world was degendered, but I didn't glean through the snippets how that worked.
8: That would be an ecumenical matter!
Ada Palmer implied the revived Latin in her world was degendered
I mean, Latin is degendered, isn't it? IIRC we don't talk about masculine and feminine nouns in Latin in the way that we do in Spanish and Russian, they're first, second, third, fourth, fifth declension. Puella, -ae and femina, -ae refer to female people and are first declension, and puer is male and second declension, but mulier, -eris is third declension, as is homo, -inis.
They still have gender, because the adjectives have to agree with them. The gender largely aligns with the declension for 1 and 2 (save some neuter nouns and typically male professions), but only partly otherwise.
No, Latin is as gendered as German. We certainly do talk about masculine, feminine and neuter nouns, because adjectives have to agree with them in gender as well as case and number. It is true that most 1st declension nouns are feminine, as most 2nd declension nouns are masculine or neuter, but when you hit an exception, such as nauta- "sailor" (1st decl. masc.), the adjective needs to take the masculine form: bonus nauta- "a good sailor". 3rd declension nouns can be masculine, feminine or neuter and you just have to learn which, although there are some guidelines. 4th declension nouns are masculine and 5th are feminine, except for the ones that aren't (domus-4th, fem.).
Modern Romance languages have all assimilated neuter gender to masculine.
Isn't German the same as well, with grammatical gender not tracking perfectly with biological sex? There's a Mark Twain essay complaining about it among other things -- the word I remember is that madchen is grammatically neuter but means girl.
Also, and this is a pet peeve, "homo" means human person, not male human person, so neuter makes sense in that case. The counterpart of mulier is vir.
I'm so glad you've homoed in on that.
28. Yes, homo is technically a common noun, which means it can take masculine or feminine adjectives, as appropriate. It defaults to the masculine form, though, if you don't know whether you're talking about a man or a woman.
Latin is less superficially irrational than German, because grammatical gender does track biological sex in people, gods and animals. So nothing like das madchen. But inanimate objects are all over the place. A city is feminine, but a town is neuter. Well, why not?
27: Yes, Twain's complaint was about Weib, which is indeed a head-scratcher - Mädchen can at least be explained by German suffixes controlling gender such that anything that gets a -chen becomes neuter.
In the German it is true that by some oversight of the inventor of the language, a Woman is a female; but a Wife (Weib) is not--which is unfortunate. A Wife, here, has no sex; she is neuter; so, according to the grammar, a fish is HE, his scales are SHE, but a fishwife is neither.
I will say that German gender is sometimes a great help in parsing complex sentences of the philosophical sort; if your first couple of clauses have introduced three different abstractions with three different genders, and then the third clause drops in a pronoun, that pronoun being er or sie or es is often the only way you can work out which abstraction it refers back to.
The Germans have a female sun and a male moon. Toss in the difference in the adjectives between 'ein blaues Auto' and 'das blaue Auto' and you've got a language even English speakers can call irrational.
34. And the French have a male sun and a female moon. Whence all the problems in 1870, 1914 and 1939. Or not. This is probably why English became the international language.
English came to dominate because people enjoy trolling and English spelling can hardly be beat on those grounds.
Has anybody ever done a study to determine if countries that are called "Fatherland" are more inclined to war than countries known as "Motherland"?
Latin is less superficially irrational than German, because grammatical gender does track biological sex in people, gods and animals
Not genitalia, though, notoriously.
Free-walking genitalia are always a bit of a surprise.
if countries that are called "Fatherland" are more inclined to war than countries known as "Motherland"?
"Homeland" is for countries that want to go to war in a gender-neutral way.
Home is where the hearth is and a hearth is just a big, flame-encasing vagina.
27: One of my co-workers saw her grandfather's references to her daughter as "It" as a sign of senility. I asked if his family of origin had been German, and she said yes, and I said that madchen was a neuter noun in German, so that might be why.
Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother, you're a madchen at age five.
I checked with my local expert. Our kids' school in Spain sent all their communications to parents using this grammar and it's pronounced as an -es prefix.
Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother, you're called 'hij@" at PS 5.
||
Any of you reprobates have opinions about the Araucana?
>
I had to remind myself which one it was (couldn't remember if it was a pre-Columbian epic or not). Off the cuff I'd say: it might be a good war story, BUT the verse might also be bad enough to make your eyes bleed, particularly in translation. That Early Modern Virgilian stuff generally gives me hives; I still haven't made it through the Lusiads because hacking through the Portuguese is work and hacking through the translations is torture. Have you read that? Also, what do you think of Lucan?
Haven't read Lucan. The Lusiads (in translation) was interesting, but not for the verse.
About -chen in German: The same thing applies in Irish. The Irish for "girl", cailín, pronounced like and the source of the name "Colleen," is grammatically masculine because -ín is a masculine diminutivizing suffix. I think it might have been neutral in the past, but Modern Irish has lost its neutral gender.
Modern English can still stop the world.
53: I did not know that!
There are a bunch of other regularities like the "all diminutives go neuter" rule that reduce the burden of memorizing grammatical gender in German. Anything that ends -schaft, -heit, or -keit (roughly, qualities, or instances of those qualities) is feminine. Loanwords are usually neuter. Anything ending -ier or -ent (individuals of a given profession, often loanwords) is masculine. Making something a plural trumps gender. This has the slightly ironic consequence that lefty/academic Germans stick aserisks in written German to indicate where this has happened, so as to gender the language *still more*.
That reminds me of the Snicker's bar I have. Maybe I'll melt it on toast?
56: German Wikipedia doesn't disappoint.