Please can you explain more? I’m interested
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On the hispanic comment, Spanish is a naturally gendered language, you cannot form a sentence without giving gender to at least the subject, for example "la doctora toma el café por la mañana" would translate to "the (female) doctor drinks (male) coffee by the (female) morning" because English is a mostly gender neutral language you would loose all gender information by literally translating that sentence.
Now if we take the gender out of every word in that sentence it would look something like "lx doctorx toma (we loose el, here) café por lx mañana", el wasn't necessary in the sentence to beging with, so that's fine, but the rest of the sentence becomes pretty hard to read to anyone that speaks Spanish, there's no practical way of pronouncing that unless you use the English pronunciation of the letter x.
To add more depth to this, in spanish to give a gender neutral statement, you default to the male version of the noun, for example, for a group that has boys and girls, you would just refer to them as "los niños", people feel this could be dismissive of girls, if there is at least one boy in a group of girls you'd say "los niños" and depending of the context it is implied that the group has both girls and boys, so in some latin american governments they are required by etiquette to form sentences like "las niñas y los niños" instead of just "los niños" this is called around here "inclusive language" but even then most Spanish speaking people think that is impractical and unnecessary.
That said, the latinx movement is kind of relevant in Argentina IIRC, but in most other latin american countries the idea will be met with a lot of resistance and rejection.
> That said, the latinx movement is kind of relevant in Argentina IIRC, but in most other latin american countries the idea will be met with a lot of resistance and rejection.
I would go even further than that. The US-centric idea of Latino as a unified identity (let alone with the x), often based on North-American stereotypes of Mexican and Caribbean cultures, can be off-putting in Latin American countries. As an example, here's the comedy-rock song «No Somos Latinos» («We are not Latinos») from Uruguayan band El Cuarteto de Nos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onQU3sp8_Jk
I would argue about that, I'm salvadoran, never been to the states and I would gladly say I'm latino, we even have an expression when we go abroad, "I miss the latino heat" which means that we miss the warm weather and friendly disposition of people in latin american countries, it's a weird phenomenon that you can't experience if you're not from a Spanish speaking country and have not gone abroad.
Generally speaking when you're in your country you'll sometimes have strong opinions about your neighbouring countries, Hondurans are this, Guatemalans are that, but when you're outside your country and you run into other latin american people, in my experience it was something really special we would greet each other as if we were long time friends, I think there's something more to it than language, I think most latin american people can relate to a certain kind of burden that comes with living in a latin american country, those burdens and the problems our societies have are pretty similar all around and I think when we meet in foreign countries we immediately relate in the way we perceive our societies and the things we've lived through.
Just as an anecdote, I went to Paris for a vacation and I went into a Five guys restaurant, usually you have to pay for a soda refill, but there was a dominican guy who was a waiter and he heard me and my SO speaking Spanish and he immediately smiled and came over and we had a nice conversation about our countries, and he let me refill our sodas for free, it's really nice and I don't know if other regions have something like this
Yes, other countries have something like that. In national football (soccer) there is fierce competition between clubs, but if its international countries such rivalry counts instead. If I am in Germany, I feel Dutch, but if I am in USA I feel European.
As a Mexican-American I have had to explain the term ‘Latinx’ to native Mexicans as well as other Hispanics and they all just kind of shake their heads.
I heard that some people consider this to be an insult, that's the main reason not to use this word.
The term Latinx is a political construct and for the most part irrelevant to most people from Latin America or of Latin American ancestry.
It’s mostly used for political purposes in the US by non Latin American people as well as a few Latin Americans in the political sphere because it’s a useful political tool for the time being.
“Latinx” is basically an “embrace, extend, extinguish” attempt of Latin American ethnicity in my view. It offers what appears to be acceptance, but only within a progressive Anglo-American framework with a bunch of extra signifiers on top. At the end you have English language thinkpieces about taco authenticity, and assimilation into establishment politics and culture.
Even in English, he/his was considered gender-neutral in context. It's only in the last few years that a plural "they" has confusingly taken its place. I still get tripped up when I see singular "they." I have to stop and re-read the sentence because I think I missed something.
Lol singular they is literally older than singular you but go off.
Anyone know how the unusual consonant x was chosen to replace a and o rather than another vowel (like e)?
To my untrained ear, les neen-yes sounds more in line with los neen-yos and las neen-yes than lecks neen-yecks (if that's how you'd pronounce it).
It's just 'x' as in the mathematical variable 'x' for something unknown, e.g. suppose a train is traveling at 'x' km/h... They use "latinx" to abstract over "latino/latina". Of course this makes zero actual sense in Spanish.
Because Spanish speaking people did not come up with the concept and people that came up with the concept were maybe not that familiar with spanish pronunciation or weren't concerned about it at all, I've heard that this originated strangely enough in Portugal but was made popular by some people in the US, I might be wrong on that one though.
Bilingual LGBTQ people used it before it became mainstream English.
It likely came about in written form then was moved to speech.
I’m in agreement with you that é is the natural neutral replacement letter. But I don’t think this is a serious attempt to change the language so much as a serious attempt to signal group membership.
Latinx came from LGBTQ Hispanic people. It was influenced by spellings like folx and womxn probably.
It became popular in writing first too.
Some people do say Latine. Probably it will replace Latinx eventually.
This is all true but I don’t think it was the main point GP was making.
Most “Latino” people are of at least part Native American or African ancestry; whereas “Latin” refers originally to speakers of Romance languages. Thus most (of course not all) “Latinos” who call themselves that are identifying with the subset of their ancestors who enslaved and conquered the others.
The Native Americans were also well-known enslavers. Look up who the Cherokee took with them on their trail of tears.
Please don't deny their agency.
Yes there were many Native American enslavers and conquerers. Doing evil isn't exclusive to white people and it would be absurd to suggest that it is. But I don't see how that's related to my comment.
Generally speaking, Irish people would be of Celtic or Norman (Which I'll still probably get some pushback for saying.) ancestry. Anglo-Saxons settled the rest of the area and ever since there's been some type of issue between the groups. An Irish person describing themselves as Anglo-Saxon is entirely divorced from the roots of where many Irish people are descended, there has always been a lot of trying to erase and assimilate that history and culture.
This is a somewhat tenuous topic too because there's a whole lot of history and bad blood after the times I'm speaking of and there's a different but similar issue currently brewing over there as well.
Note that no one callled them Normans before the 1800s. They called themselves English when they conquered Ireland. The Irish (Gaels) called them Saxons (Sassenach) or foreigners (Gall). After the conversion of the English to Protestantism there was a yawning chasm between the Old English (Catholic) and the New, but no one ever used Norman contemporaneously.
That can't be right. The Normans as a people played a major part in European history from at least the year 911 through the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). I've never seen the faintest indication that they weren't still called Normans after leaving Normandy, by themselves and others, e.g when invading England and Italy.
I guess you meant more that the term fell out of use in England at some point, and Norman-descended people in England called themselves English. But even so, Norman is still a recognisable ethnicity - norse people who settled in France, spread by conquest into England, Malta etc. It could be a useful contemporary or historical label even if those people at a given time called themselves something else.
The people who invaded England and Italy were called Normans. The people who invaded Ireland called themselves English, and were called English by the Irish.
A different group of Norse invaded Ireland before they did England IIRC (hence why Norse-Gaels is a thing).
But the Normans who invaded Ireland came via Wales largely and were not called English until the 16th century
The article you link to is talking about the Vikings, not the Normans. If you can find a primary or secondary source saying they called themselves anything other than English of be delighted to see it.
The wiki on Normans in Ireland cites Brenden Bradshaw on what the Irish called them but that applied only to Donegal apparently.
> Note that no one callled them Normans before the 1800s ... no one ever used Norman contemporaneously
Are you claiming that the Duchy of Normandy is a post 1800 ret-conned invention? You think it never actually existed?
The people who invaded Ireland from England and Wales called themselves English.
But the Normans are a real people going back over a thousand years.
I neglected to add “in an Irish context”. No Normans ever invaded Ireland. A great many English did, the military leadership of whom were mostly descended from those who conquered England a bit over a century prior.
An Irishman of the hundred years centered on 1900 would have responded with amusement or indignation at being called "Anglo-Saxon", a term referring originally to the peoples of
Great Britain east of Wales and south of Scotland. The Irish regarded themselves rather as Celts, and ones that I had received bad treatment at Anglo-Saxon hands.
And as we all know, ethnic identity is fully static and never changes over time, you are morally obligated to identity in a way that would be accepted by your ancestors. lmao.
Murphy is the Anglicized form of an Irish name, Ó Murchú. One of the author’s paternal line ancestors came from Ireland, a land conquered and colonized by the English, i.e. the Anglo-Saxons. It would be one thing to say he had a honky ass white name, a cracker name, that would be in the American says American thing, who cares category. But to identify as Anglo-Saxon, an ethnic category!?! Not terribly surprising given the use of that most American of making customs, the numeral[1], but still. In much the same way as someone with Irish ancestry calling themselves Anglo fucking Saxon tells you something about their attachment to any Irish ancestry you learn something about anyone with ancestors who spoke Spanish if they self-identify as Latinx. You learn that they don’t care about the Spanish language, at all. And you learn that they use an ephitet invented by Anglos, for use by people who speak English
> only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves, according to a nationally representative, bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019 by Pew Research Center.
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
[1] If you are not a monarch giving yourself a numeral is pretentious.
I feel you shouldn't punish people for the name they were given by their parents. Changing your name is a big existential act, which I don't think it's reasonable to expect. If you've had it drummed into you from birth that you are III then it's hard to escape. That person's views about what their name represents are their own though and can be challenged.
Americans do their American thing. That’s cool. I do my Irish thing and point out that a Murphy calling himself an Anglo-Saxon is utterly assimilated. Also cool. Americans pointing out that Irish and British people drink way more than Americans, and imbibe other narcotics at rates not normally seen outside Cuban-American locales. That’s cool. We can all notice that other people are different and get along, or not.
> "Changing your name is a big existential act..."
that's mostly cultural. in some cultures (e.g., asian ones), it's normal to have multiple names for different levels of familiarity, and to adopt new names as circumstances dictate.
with that said, criticizing (someone else's) naming choices is a wholly aesthetic opinion and should be disregarded (perhaps politely).
Assuming they are relatively pure-blooded Irish, they'd more accurately describe themselves as Celtic. In theory, Anglo-Saxon has a somewhat specific meaning (descended from the Angle and Saxon tribes). In practice, the term is often generically used for descended from northern European white people (as in WASP).
The Anglo-Saxons inhabited England, not the rest of the British isles. The term more-or-less corresponds to racially English, or culturally English.
The people in Wales, Scotland and Ireland were the Celts, with some subdivisions (Picts etc).
But it looks like both terms are more loaded in the USA [1], so I don't want to speculate on the intent of the comment.
> The Anglo-Saxons inhabited England, not the rest of the British isles. The term more-or-less corresponds to racially English, or culturally English.
This isn’t true. The Lowland Scots are no less culturally Anglo-Saxon than the English. They were slightly less successful than the English at extirpating all traces of Celtic culture from their homeland but it wasn’t for want of trying.