yup, struggle session time
edit: no one is right, everyone is wrong :^)
edit 2: this post is actually dedicated to Amy Goodman, please stop trying to sound cool grandma
I assume when you don’t know the gender of anyone in the group, you would also use ‘latinos’, making it mostly gender neutral.
Not exactly, this rule basically says, instead of thinking about the gender of the group im referring to, I will assume they are male, at least by majority.
This continues to spark a similar debate about: If a group of only latina women is referred by feminine pronouns, does a single man in a group of a hundred women necessarily indicate they will all be treated as men? If not, where is the line drawn?
I will assume they are male, at least by majority.
This is again a sort of semantic debate about the rules of the language. “Assuming male” is the language’s form of gender neutral, by the rules of the language (“rules” being a tricky word in language, but still). It’s like a homonym, -os means both male and gender neutral, depending on context. I absolutely understand the desire to change that rule, but that’s how the language is currently defined.
If a group of only latina women is referred by feminine pronouns, does a single man in a group of a hundred women necessarily indicate they will all be treated as men?
Again, by the rules of the language, a group with even a single male in it gets the gender neutral usage of -os.
Well ngl those rules are shit and we should change them. Attacking patriarchy means attacking it in our own culture as well.
Of course. Changing a language is perfectly fine and is always happening. ‘Latinos’ shouldn’t be gender neutral, but right now, it is to a vast majority of speakers. To change that you would need a majority of speakers to stop using it that way, then their children will have never used it that way. Like how ‘gay’ doesn’t mean ‘happy’ anymore.
But asking Spanish speakers to change a word to something unpronounceable in Spanish isn’t the way to go about it.
