![]() ![]() ![]() Spanish, based on Latin, is one of these. But sticking with the original meaning of “gender,” some languages have two genders for all or almost all words. In recent years, “gender,” originally only a linguistic word, has come to mean what we used to call “sex,” as in male and female in mammalian anatomy and physiology. Since the term Latinx gained popularity in 2016, it and its variations (for me, Latine offers more phonetic fluidity)-have become a source of fierce disagreements among Latine people of all races, ages, genders, and sexual identities. Patience was necessary, given that the debate over the use of Latinx (and more recently, Latine) to refer to people with origins in Latin America has gone in dizzying circles. I would have several conversations with family and friends about what this meant for me, what pronouns I would now use, and how we would have patience with each other in learning and moving forward. The Zocalo article, by Sebastian Ferrada, explains: Like the communist language changes in Russia after 1918 and China after 1949, this strictly is a top-down, dictatorial movement. But when I talk to working-class Latinos, such as those who work around my apartment complex, they’re not using Latinx. But Inclusivity Doesn’t Have to Be.”Īctually, it isn’t “complicated.” For one thing, I know a lot of Latinos, and none uses Latinx lingo. I bring this up because Zocalo Public Square ran an article on the Latinx controversy, “Why Is the Latinx Debate So Fierce? Gender, Language, and Identity Are Complicated. That article came out just before the Great Leap Forward (Second Five Year Plan) socialist industrialization scheme, 1958-62, failed-and starved to death as many as 55 million people. The present fundamental language reform … epitomizes the Communists’ … ability to alter the Chinese cultural heritage so that more efficient indoctrination of the people, tighter control of mass organizations, and a higher level of industrialization can be assured. In Far Eastern Survey in 1956, Tao-Tai Hsia, a Yale University professor, described what happened in “The Language Revolution in Communist China”:Ī veteran Far Eastern news analyst in the United States concluded that the main reason for Communist China’s doing away with the elegant and traditional ideographs was that the physical structure of Chinese characters suggests some very un-Marxian notions. What was shocking was how a dictatorship could quickly change the language at its own whim.Īlthough I don’t know Chinese, similar changes were pushed by the Chinese Communist Party after Mao’s 1949 takeover. Some reforms long had been proposed, and probably would have been adopted gradually, and organically. White émigrés who left the country after the Revolution refused to accept the new spelling, and accused the Bolsheviks of mutilating the Russian language. The pre-revolutionary spelling was virtually outlawed. In 1918, a decree on new spelling rules was issued and all printed publications were obliged to follow them. intention was to ditch everything ‘old’-the tsarist regime, religion, the economy, and the language. The Russia Beyond website features a good article explaining what happened: It went far beyond just insisting on tovarishch (comrade) instead of grazhdanin (citizen). One of the first things they taught us was the Marxist-Leninists, when they took over after the Russian Revolution in 1917, changed the Russian language. Our teachers in Monterey all were native Russian speakers, exiles from Soviet tyranny. And the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to prop up a puppet regime. In 1979, the communist Sandinista regime seized power in Nicaragua. In 1977, the communist Mengistu regime, backed by Moscow, took over Ethiopia, and soon perpetrated the worst famine since Mao’s Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s. That year, Castro’s troops installed a communist regime in Angola. South Vietnam fell to communist North Vietnam in 1975. It was a time of increasing Cold War tensions. Leonard Wood, Mo., in late April 1978 I arrived at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., to learn Russian. Forty-five years ago, after two months of U.S. ![]()
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