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Comment by kortex | Hacker News Reader

"Latine" (with a long e) or just "Latin" works fairly well in the language if one absolutely must avoid the collective-o ending, as in "Latine intelligente." Still a tad awkward, but leagues better than "Latinx", which is such a blatant violation of Spanish phonotactics and aesthetics that it bugs me, a white AF grigo.

"Latinx" was so obviously created by an English-primary speaker.

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Here's my suggestion: if you're an English speaker just say "Latin". Don't use any gendered suffix. It's literally the same word as "Latino" but in English. You don't call Italians "Italianx" or "Italiane" right? You just say "Italian". In context, nobody is going to mix up a conversation about modern Latin people and the ancient world.

I think that is kind of the point. The out-of-place x, by its very incongruousness, calls attention to and centers the LGBTQ constituent. You see it even with English words of Germanic origin, like spelling "folks" as "folx" or "women" as "womxn".

Nitpick: This may be true of “folx” and “Latinx”, but “womxn” (despite sometimes-similar connotations) seems to have originated as a way to highlight/signal feminism, and has only acquired queer connotations recently.

I'm aware of the form "womyn" from the 90s, but "womxn" appears to be more recent, and differentiated from "womyn" by its explicit inclusion of trans women and woman-like nonbinary people.

Edit: Wikipedia traces "womxn" back to the 1970s, but it seems unlike "womyn" it didn't get much currency in ordinary feminist usage, only finding purchase when the queer angle was added.

Hispanic is offensive because it focuses on the subjugation of the indigenous people by the Spanish Empire.

Latinx is much better. It (1) avoids acknowledging that Spain was once a world power, (2) intentionally introduces an unwanted misspelling of a common Spanish word that accentuates the Castilian lisp (3) intentionally misgenders the vast majority of people from those regions and (4) denies the existence of non-European South American languages and cultures.

Is this a reply by ChatGPT?

I laughed at your reply, but not so long ago (though before ChatGPT) I got downvoted to hell for asking a very similar question...

> Hispanic is offensive because it focuses on the subjugation of the indigenous people by the Spanish Empire.

Let’s rewind 900 more years to the 5th/6th century and play madlibs: “English (demonym) is offensive because it focuses on the subjugation of the Romano-British people by the Angles.” Does this example still fit, or is it too far back in history to be offensive?

Gemany^W Allemagne^W Tyskland^W Saksa^W Németország^W Deutschland would like a word.

Except for the part that the people being named speak a dialect of Spanish, not Latin.

So as soon as you have to discuss what they speak, you're bringing in Spain.

> avoids acknowledging that Spain was once a world power

As opposed to... checks notes the Holy Roman Empire?

> (2) intentionally introduces an unwanted misspelling of a common Spanish word that accentuates the Castilian lisp

That's just how the linguistics do. This is the same drivel that tries to argue chop chop and long time no see are somehow offensive, instead of just loanphrases from Chinese pidjin.

> (3) intentionally misgenders the vast majority of people from those regions

No, again this demonstrates a profound ignorance of how language actually works in practice. -o does not imply "default male" in Spanish. There's tomes on this stuff. Grammatical gender is not social gender. A mesa doesn't identify as female.

> (4) denies the existence of non-European South American languages and cultures.

Again, Latin/[aoex]?/ is better in this regard how exactly?

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