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Well yes, but actually no
(jlai.lu)
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this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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How would it be really translated?
It sounds stupid, but the chatbot is actually right. The person saying the phrase would pick one based on how they view or present themselves. It's not a disparagement to say that a non-binary individual has a gender with respect to Spanish grammatical structure, because quite literally everything does. Chairs are feminine, days are masculine, etc.
I don't know if this is the case for Spanish, but it is worth noting that grammatical gender and human gender don't always line up when they are both present either. Like German's Mädchen, meaning "girl" or "young woman", is not a feminine word. If that sort of thing is common it might help enby people feel a little more comfortable with it, or at least I imagine it might since I'm not one
Funniest example I know is how vagina is masculine in French.
In Spanish some words for vagina are femenine and some masculine. The same happens with penis.
La vagina, la concha, el coño. How many more are there?
El chocho, el chichi, la chirla, la almeja, el papo, el potorro, ...
And a lot more.
Haha, fair enough. Lots of them if you count every dialect.
And "beard" in Russian (борода, baraDA) is feminine.
Yup, in several slavic languages actually
Also in latin languages. I suspect it may be common to all indoeuropean languages
Well yes, but actually no.
The reason grammatic gender is called gender is because almost all nouns referring to men (boy, men, father, uncle...) are in one group and almost all nouns referring to women are in the other.
In German, Mädchen is not in the female group because -chen is a diminutive changing any noun's group to neuter. The word Jungchen, from "Junge" meaning "(young) boy" exists as well and is also neuter.
~~Similarily, all plural nouns are in the female group.~~ Just because grammar has some more quirks doesn't mean grammatical gender doesn't line up with actual gender.
The only exception in German I know of would be the word "Weib", cognate to wife, translating to women, which is in the neuter group. Except this word is archaic and an insult nowadays. All other words referring to gendered people should be in their corresponding grammatical group.
All plural nouns are not female im german.
They just happen to use "die" as their definite article when they are nominative, which doubles up as the feminine article for fem. nominative. But they by no means "change" their grammatical gender. Within the german declination system, articles are very often reused for different cases. That does never change the gender of the noun.
Just like saying "der Frau" in genitiv singular does not make Frau a masculine noun, saying "die Männer" in nominative plural does not make Männer a feminine noun.
Whoops, yeah that part was bollocks.
I appreciate the clarification! My German is awfully rusty
Im sorry, but what this person told you is untrue though. A noun retains its gender in whatever declination it is, however, articles often double up within the german declination system. And it just happens to be that the plural definite article for nouns of all genders is "die", which is also the nominative singular definite article for feminine nouns. But the article never determines the gender of the noun, the gender of the noun determines which article to use. It's just sometimes, the article looks like looks like another article already used for something else. That's why every school book and german learning course tells you to put the noun in nominative singular before trying to tell the gender.
Linguistically, the term "grammatical gender" is really a historical mistake based on linguistics the discipline being born in Indo-European languages, (twice -- first with the first Sanskrit grammar, then for serious with people noticing suspiciously many similarities between Sanskrit and Latin)
The new and more inclusive term is "noun classes", e.g. Swahili has nine, e.g. "mtu" is person, class "animate/human singular", then you have "utu", "humanity", from the same root but in the class for abstractions. All Indo-European languages have three, and in that context "female gender" is really "the noun class that the word 'woman' is part of", same for "man" and "thing". Girl is neuter in German because it's a diminutive and all diminutives are neuter, "person" is female and "human" male because that's how the language assigned them semi-randomly to classes (mostly through phonetics). Nouns constructed with infinitive+er (like baker, very similar formation rules as in English) are all male, feminists really don't like that because that covers basically all professions... but it also makes all murderers male. Which doesn't make all murderers male, same as me being a person doesn't make me female. Grammatical /= personal gender.
This is all that you can point to a chair (male) and table (female) and have a good chance to be able to refer to them very efficiently, like "his leg is broken" and it being clear that you don't mean the table: That wouldn't make any sense as it's female and you'd say "her leg is broken".
But that’s because all diminutives are neuter in German. Like das Mädchen is the diminutive of die Mäd (the girl) same with das Fraulein (the young woman) is the diminutive of die Frau (the woman). Mäd and Frau are feminine words
It’s also the same in Dutch. De meid (the girl) is gendered (Dutch doesn’t have a distinct article for masculine and feminine words anymore) and the diminutive het meisje (the little girl) is neuter.
When referring to people usually the male form is used as the neutral form, so probably it's the best form to use in this case. Some people are trying to reintroduce the latin neutral in romance languages but at least in Spanish and Portuguese it ends up sounding a lot with the male form.
Isn't that up to the person, they might not like either term ?
Well, they're welcome to use whatever word they want. If they want people to understand the when they do so, their options are to either use the existing word or run the risk of having to explain it each and every time they don't.
I think there's a "No binarie" term that's not particularly popular that floats around, from what other comments have said, and it tends to be not well understood by people. It's like the pronouns xe/xer. It probably makes sense if you know the context, but if I just said the word in a sentence people would think I was saying nonsense.
At which point you're free to use the feminine gender, because the word for "person" is a feminine noun.
I’m not sure how common it is, but some nonbinary Spanish speakers use -e (latine, no binarie, etc) as a way to make Spanish gender neutral.
Yeah and elle for gender neutral pronouns, however almost nobody accepts these "because it sounds weird"
Which is a perfectly valid reason to reject it.
Nope. That only means that it isn't really in common use yet. Every neologism "sounds weird" at the start, until it becomes a regular thing in language.
Akchuli, speling und spich moost folow intrinsik rulés. As made self evident by the former sentence, simply changing things arbitrarily won't take you far. Much like mathematics, language follows a set of very much objective rules, despite being a human construct. Forcing change for the sake of change will leave you with garbage like the English language – a complete mess with exceptions to exceptions of exceptions.
I don't quite see you point. Yes, language has intrinsic rules. But language is also dynamic. Those rules can be changed. Forcing change for the sake of change is sometimes needed and welcome. Otherwise, there would be no "laptop", "laser" would still be an acronym and everyone would write "gaol" instead of "jail". There's a reason the proposed shortening from "though" to "tho" still hasn't dropped out of usage yet.
Language adapts to fulfill the needs of the users. After all, it is the best communication tool we have. Prescriptivism doesn't help improve the "complete mess" of a language, it just forces it to become outdated. We need neologisms, grammar changes, spelling reforms and so on.
Notice none of your proposed examples deal with the grammatical structure (syntax, semantics, morphological relationship), only with lexical variety. An apt comparison is as follows: now, plural words in English end in "r".
Okay, bad examples from my side. Changes that affect grammatical structure might be "bro" becoming popular as a pronoun, new tense structure found in Modern Mandarin or plural adjustments like German Kakteen > Kaktusse. Grammatical structure changes just as much as other aspects of a language.
Yeah, but RAE is not happy with this solution. 😅 I think at some point they'll come with their own proposal. For now I think that they emphasize non-gendered language instead of converting gendered words to non-gendered.
The common thing would be to say: "soy una persona no binària" which means "I'm a non-binary person".
But you can also say: "soy no binario" and that would also be correct.
The times I've done a form and it asks for the gender, the option is "No binario". Probably because gender is masculine in Spanish. You can say a person is "No binaria" because person itself is feminine.
For me it (chatgpt) says 'no binaria' ist the more common term, but no idea if that's actually how it is
No binario is masculine, because it ends in -o. To make it feminine, it is changed to no binaria, ending in -a. Therefore, no binaria is feminine.
There are neutral adjectives that end in something else, such as verde (green) or feliz (happy), but most adjectives do not have a neutral form.
I know, I can actually speak a bit of spanish myself haha.
But what do you do when you speak to a person who doesn't identify as neither? How do you justify the use of either no binario or no binaria? You need a gender for that. And if you can't figure out a gender there probably is a common or more agreed upon version or? I thought in this case more people might just use 'no binaria' for everyone.
Someone else mentioned 'no binarie' so I guess there's another way out of this.
You can use "no binaria", which kind of implies the usage of "persona".
Oh, I misunderstood, I didn't realize in this scenario you were asking them if they were nonbinary. The linguistic answer is everything in Spanish defaults to masculine.
I, personally, would treat it the same as I treat the pronoun game here in the US, because it's essentially the same thing: I start with whichever one jumps out at me and accept correction if necessary, because they are the ones who made the decision to make their grammatical identifiers differ from convention. It's not my responsibility to know it ahead of time.
If they want to be a dick about it, I now know they're not someone I want to spend time around anyway.
Yeah I guess most people are cool with that approach anyhow
An "-e" suffix would indicate a holdover neutral gender word from Latin, which only still exists as a historical artifact – it's not really a valid way to construct new words, if using formal language. It's also important to understand that grammatical gender has no need to align with your social gender, unlike what an anglophone may expect.
I'm not an anglophone, I'm german ;) we use gendered articles/endings for everything. There still is a debate on aligning to gender neutral language however. Not for things, but for everything regarding people, like job positions e.g., because the male version is just socially assumed to be the standard.
Who dictates the 'valid way to construct words'? People made up language, they might as well change the way it's constructed. If people adopt the change, it will prevail, if not it will vanish. That's the only way it works imo. No rules are set in stone regarding language and culture.
Also I took the -e suffix solution from another person on here, wasn't really my point to begin with. But I see your position. It's not exactly an uncommon opinion.
Society does. If I wished to spell words differently and did so in a formal setting, I'd most likely be seen as illiterate, not vanguardist. Also, some countries have prescritivist bodies controlling standard formal language, such as France and Spain (and a Portugal-Brazil joint group, to an extent).
Change always has to start somewhere and culture constantly changes. Sure people might first be opposed to these changes, but wasn't that always the case when something new was popping up? Tale as old as times.
Some changes prevail, some vanish. No matter whether there are prescriptive governing bodies or not.