this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (11 children)

The prefix Allo just means other, so when you have a pair of things the other one will normally become Allo-thing. Because we don't make words the culturally accepted default position until there is something to contrast it with, most instances of Allo will describe the culturally accepted default.

Aromantic - Alloromantic

Asexual - Allosexual

Autistic - Allistic

[–] pbbananaman 4 points 3 months ago (7 children)

The prefix seems unnecessary and doesn’t even make sense with your last example. Why is it needed when the a- prefix works perfectly fine to contrast with the existing word as-is?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Aautistic doesn't follow English's rules for making words, we don't do double vowl startings unless they are from very specific loan words that were popular enough to break the rules.

Same was alloistic doesn't work without a hyphen because when you have an o from a prefix and I from a suffix you need to drop one of them to make the word work.

Basically English has illegal parrings of letters you can't make and when they would come up you need to hyphen them together or drop letters.

See eject, which is ex-ject but we can't have xj so we drop the x.

Or attend, which is ad-tend but we can't do dt so make it tt instead.

Wading should be wade-ing but ei, so we drop the e.

Etc

[–] pbbananaman 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

I don’t think there needs to be a word that describes the negative of a condition. You just don’t need a descriptor at all. There’s no value add.

Inject vs eject? Am I being trolled here?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You're not being trolled this is literally how the English language works: https://www.google.com/search?q=eject%20etymology%20&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1-m

So would you propose we just say autistic people and normal people? Doesn't that seem kind of cruel and bothering?

Should we also say asexual people and normal people, or aromantic people and normal people, trans people and normal people?

Where do you draw the line?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

autistic/non-autistic, asexual/sexual, aromantic/romantic, trans/cis

asexual and aromantic are already based on being the negative, adding another term to reverse that just makes a double negative

[–] GojuRyu 5 points 3 months ago

I mean being romantic or sexual carries some other connotations and meanings making them ambiguous in many situations if used as the antonym to the asexual and aromantic label.
I don’t really care what words are used for it but I find the allo ones useful as they are the most commonly understood ones and are unambiguous.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I'm not going to argue with you on words that have already become accepted by the people whom they affect, or that most of the things you are saying are othering to the people affected and work to say that there is something wrong with them for being different / have been used to actively dehumanize marginalized groups.

I will say you are on the wrong Lemmy if this is the fight you want to make.

[–] Drivebyhaiku 2 points 3 months ago

Oh but there is an implied value - superiority. When you give a group of people a descriptive property with no inverse you are basically creating a construct of "assumed default". This comes with other issues of those falling outside the default having no way to effectively talk about people of the assumed default group without using words that have value judgements baked in. Like if I am calling you "a normal person" the implicit value judgement is that I am an abnormal person. I am "othered".

This sort of denial of language assumes that a group that you are given tools to talk about never and should never talk about your group back utilizing those same tools.

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