"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.
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
Except this doesn’t happen – at all. Gender neutral words in Spanish and Portuguese are holdovers from an older form of the language. Don’t force an Anglocentric sensibility onto others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know, I can actually speak a bit of spanish myself haha.
But what do you do when you speak to a person who doesn’t identify as neither? How do you justify the use of either no binario or no binaria? You need a gender for that. And if you can’t figure out a gender there probably is a common or more agreed upon version or? I thought in this case more people might just use ‘no binaria’ for everyone.
Someone else mentioned ‘no binarie’ so I guess there’s another way out of this.
Oh, I misunderstood, I didn’t realize in this scenario you were asking them if they were nonbinary. The linguistic answer is everything in Spanish defaults to masculine.
I, personally, would treat it the same as I treat the pronoun game here in the US, because it’s essentially the same thing: I start with whichever one jumps out at me and accept correction if necessary, because they are the ones who made the decision to make their grammatical identifiers differ from convention. It’s not my responsibility to know it ahead of time.
If they want to be a dick about it, I now know they’re not someone I want to spend time around anyway.
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.
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