• Lvxferre
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    fedilink
    27 months ago

    That German “capital I” is close to what I’m asking about, but not quite - I’m focusing on agreement, when the form of a word (typically an adjective) is dictated by either grammatical gender of another word or social gender. Specially when dealing with a single individual.

    This might be easier to show with an example. From the PT dialogue files:

    • [Abigail, if the player is male] “Você não se sente sozinho na fazenda?”
    • [Abigail, if the player is female] “Você não se sente sozinha na fazenda?”
    • [Translation, for both] “Don’t you feel lonely in the farm?”

    Note how the form of the word changes from “sozinho” to “sozinha”. Other Romance languages and Russian are the same deal in this; German too, with some caveats (if it’s a predicative you use the base form).

    In this situation, and casual conversation, what do non-binary people feel comfortable using? The two whom I know simply use -a, but that’s a sample size of two and heavily biased (both speak the same dialect of the same language in the same city).

    I’m asking this in this context because:

    • The game addresses the MC directly, as an individual. As such, groups aren’t a concern here.
    • For nouns (like Doktor/Doktorin/DoktorIn), it’s somewhat easy to plop a new string with the gender-neutral version. Agreement however is dynamic.
    • At least from what I have seen (remember: small and biased sample), those written conventions like -x* or -@ are mostly only used when the person is trying to bring this topic up, nor on everyday language. And only when writing (while SV’s dialogues are supposed to represent speech).

    *the other user there did mention -x, but if I had to take a guess it’s just some Anglo trying to pull out a “chrust me”. I’m saying this based on their example - “Latinx” with a capital L (an English spelling convention) and using an adjective that is 90% of the time used by Anglos to lump “all those Latin Americans” together regardless of their local identities. (It sounds as silly as some Brit or Surinamese identifying oneself “as a Germanic”, you know?)

    [Sorry for the long reply. Also, thank you for your input! :D]