this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 70 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

"Hombre no binario" and "Mujer no binaria". Or, if you prefer, "Persona no binaria". So, it's not the gender of the person, but the gender of the noun.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

Damn you for bringing logic and context in here

[–] SoulsParadox 10 points 1 year ago

This is the only right answer

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

What about nonbinary nouns?

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (7 children)

No binarie, “e” it’s used to imply gender neutral. Which is why latinx is an oxymoron, because in Spanish would be “latine”.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Latinx is something that English speakers that don't understand the Spanish language came up with. It's unpronounceable and annoying.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Sadly, it's actually used here. Same thing with the "e" instead of "o" or "a".

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Latine doesn't bother me, at least you can pronounce it.

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[–] dylanTheDeveloper 1 points 1 year ago

So a girl manitee would be called a maniteehee

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I always thought it ended the same way as Kleenex brand tissues. The one you want when the snot gets hot.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same problem as portuguese. People insisting on "elx" or "todxs" instead of using a fucking vowel really should've spent half a second thinking about how to pronounce that shit. Hell, even with @ it doesn't help at all, we spell the symbol as "arroba", so it implies feminine gender in the end

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For portuguese, its "o" or "a" instead of el/la, so it's "a arroba"

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The problem is that Spanish is a gendered language. You’d have to see first if the LLM understands the somewhat recent move towards non-gendered/gender-neutral versions of certain words, and if so you’d then have to check if it fully understands what the term non-binary means in this context.

[–] AlphaAcid 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's the thing about LLMs though. They don't understand anything at all. They just say stuff that sounds coherent. It turns out of you just say whatever seems like the most reasonable response at all times then you can get pretty close to simulating understanding in some scenarios. But even though these newer language models are quite good at some things, they are no closer to understanding or conceptualizing anything.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I was using the term “understand” as shorthand for “trained after and on content containing” and “given enough context on what is being asked.”

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (14 children)

How would it be really translated?

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Funniest example I know is how vagina is masculine in French.

[–] d4f0 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

In Spanish some words for vagina are femenine and some masculine. The same happens with penis.

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[–] rtxn 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

And "beard" in Russian (борода, baraDA) is feminine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yup, in several slavic languages actually

[–] Gabu 1 points 1 year ago

Also in latin languages. I suspect it may be common to all indoeuropean languages

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] kraftpudding 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Whoops, yeah that part was bollocks.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I appreciate the clarification! My German is awfully rusty

[–] kraftpudding 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

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

Isn't that up to the person, they might not like either term ?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Yeah and elle for gender neutral pronouns, however almost nobody accepts these "because it sounds weird"

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] k2helix 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago
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