Inclusivity
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From Jeff DeMarco:
This is the de Young Museum in San Francisco, doubling down the -x construction for Spanish: Bienvenidxs.
Are most Spanish speakers ok with this?
I also note that none of the Chinese language materials use simplified characters (viz., huānyíng 歡迎 but not 欢迎). Is this a snub against the mainland? They do feature a dress made up of images of Mao….
When I first started posting on Language Log nearly two decades ago, some readers upbraided me for using traditional characters instead of simplified ones. I used the traditional characters out of respect for the tradition, but it seems that some people were offended by my not using simplified characters. As time passed, to avoid being chastened by the simplified supporters, who tend to be more combative, as befitting Maoists, I mostly switched over to simplified, except for historical purposes / accuracy.
As for the Mao image dress, it all depends on how they depict him. Do they make him look diabolical? Admirable?
Within a few days, I will make a post on a dress with Chinese writing on it. I have done so several times in the past, and will cite those posts in the forthcoming one, which is on a sensitive subject.
Selected readings
- "Hyper-inclusive Speaker-exclusive we" (10/24/23)
- "Spread of 'inclusive x'" (12/11/23)
- "Gender-inclusive French" (7/7/21)
- "Écriture inclusive" (10/9/17)
- "More on 'écriture inclusive'" (3/31/20)
jhh said,
January 24, 2024 @ 10:25 pm
歡迎 –in Japanese– is read "kangei," and means "welcome."
hallo said,
January 24, 2024 @ 10:50 pm
As someone who is gay and essentially the target audience of this kind of language, I think it's meaningless and would probably annoy Spanish speakers. If I spoke Spanish I would hate it. Some LGBT people do like this kind of language but I get the impression the overwhelming amount of its supporters are supposedly well-meaning people who want to feel good. Language like this, for me, especially when it's forced on us, is only salt in a wound, as people will say it's making a difference when from my perspective, supposedly inclusive language really has nothing to do with inclusion, or any of the problems that I as a minority face. Is this one example a big deal? Maybe not, but I do feel there are places that take forced language change too far. Gay people exist everywhere, even Iran and countries where it is illegal. To me, getting upset about supposedly gendered languages is only unproductive, and one of the reasons why nowadays we LGBT people get ridiculed as snowflakes.
Jenny Chu said,
January 24, 2024 @ 11:40 pm
@jhh is the Japanese version indistinguishable from the trad. Chi. characters?
Christian Horn said,
January 24, 2024 @ 11:43 pm
Traditional/simplified Chinese Kanji:
I wonder if always providing 2 sentences then, one in traditional and one in simplified Kanji, would be "inclusive activity" then to satisfy both?
I wonder how much the request here is comparable to the request in German now, where some people ask to have words like "Fahrer" (driver) called out as explicitly to also include females (and also nonbinary humans), for example in using "Fahrer*innen".
Jim Breen said,
January 25, 2024 @ 12:14 am
The usual Japanese term is 歓迎. 歡 is regarded as a pre-WWII 旧字体 and 歡迎 is usually only found in discussions on Chinese texts.
AntC said,
January 25, 2024 @ 12:15 am
I used the traditional characters out of respect for the tradition, …
I (for one) appreciate that you generally give both. Traditional form is still current in many places outside PRC, after all. And if you're discussing historical texts, it would be daft not to.
népéta said,
January 25, 2024 @ 2:50 am
i'm not a spanish speaker at all, but from what i've heard, some people seem to prefer using '-e-' over '-x-', because 'latine' or 'bienvenides' are more reasonable to pronounce and use.
AG said,
January 25, 2024 @ 4:30 am
@hallo –
Your reaction to the "x" puzzles me slightly – isn't it a way to avoid alienating the roughly 50% of readers who wouldn't be included by either -a or -o? I don't see that as necessarily having anything to do with being gay at all, but rather an effort in the more general arena of gender equality?
(I suppose maybe your reaction is more tied into the history of who has used "latinx" in the past, and who hasn't, rather than the actual "x" being somehow a literal reference to gay people.)
Seth said,
January 25, 2024 @ 4:48 am
The "Mao dress" seems to have some very complicated cultural implications (it's beyond my pay-grade to make sense of it all, but it seems like it can't easily be classified overall).
https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/1995-tam-mao-collection-dress/
Abbas said,
January 25, 2024 @ 5:08 am
@ Hallo
Spaniard here. I could not agree more.
And yes, it is as annoying as unnecessary. In early childhood everybody learns that there are (most generally) two genders, even for inanimate things showing no sexual features, for instance a table, and that because of some arcane rule plurals referring to both genders (as were formerly understood) will (frequently) be in the male form, save when you specifically want to clarify the opposition of sex if relevant.
It is also the opinion of the old dotards from the Royal Academy of Language:
The explicit mention of the feminine is only justified when the opposition of sexes is relevant in the context (…) The current tendency to indiscriminate splitting of the noun into its masculine and feminine form goes against the principle of economy of language and is based on extralinguistic reasons. Therefore, these repetitions should be avoided, which generate syntactic and agreement difficulties, and unnecessarily complicate the writing and reading of the texts.
DJL said,
January 25, 2024 @ 6:32 am
Spanish (and Italian) speaker here. I wouldn't say I am all that annoyed by it, but it is meaningless and unnecessary, not to mention unpronounceable, which seems to defeat the purpose in a way.
Moreover, the claim that using the -o or -a ending would exclude 50% of the population is a bit tendentious; Spanish has always allowed for a generic or unmarked reading for nouns, whether these end in masculine -o or feminine -a (masculine and feminine as grammatical markers, not as a reference to anyone's sex/gender). There are plenty of sexist and non-inclusive uses of language in everyday life, but this is not really one of them.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 25, 2024 @ 6:52 am
This is not meant as a rhetorical question – I genuinely don't know the answer. Would a typical Spanish-speaker who is being natural and idiomatic but not particularly self-consciously "precise" greet a medium-sized group of people (say 10 or 12 or 20) that happened to be all female by saying "bienvenidas" rather than "bienvenidos"? Or is the "generic" sense of "bienvenidos" as used when addressing a group strong enough that it doesn't get overridden in ordinary non-self-conscious usage if the group is neither all-male nor mixed?
DJL said,
January 25, 2024 @ 6:56 am
@ JW Brewer, I would probably use 'bienvenidas' if I noticed the group was all female, otherwise the generic use of 'bienvenidos'.
Chris Button said,
January 25, 2024 @ 7:51 am
Again, asking purely from a lingustic perspective here …
How would something like "duas pessoas" in Portuguese be handled? "Pessoas" means people and happens to be a feminine word, and "duas" means two ("dois" is the masculine form)
Chris Button said,
January 25, 2024 @ 8:02 am
Separately, the internet tells me that the there is an alternative "bienvenid@s". That seems preferable to "bienvenidxs" since the @ symbol cleverly evokes both "a" and "o" and at least looks like it could be a vowel.
Victor Mair said,
January 25, 2024 @ 8:11 am
I remember when Vivienne Tam's “Mao Collection” hit the fashion circuits in 1995, and was much amused by it.
In the article by Faith Cooper linked by Seth, she refers to the Mao images as "comical", and I think that's just the right tone.
Noam said,
January 25, 2024 @ 8:58 am
As a native speaker of a different, and even more gender marked language (verbs also), I have rather strong and different feelings about this type of issue. The default use of masculine doesn’t feel neutral to me, at all. My suspicion is that it’s more of a cultural question than a purely linguistic one.
Mike Anderson said,
January 25, 2024 @ 9:46 am
Shiow me on this doll where the gendered noun touched you.
languagehat said,
January 25, 2024 @ 9:49 am
The default use of masculine doesn’t feel neutral to me, at all.
Of course it's not; that's been generally acknowledged for decades now, except by the equivalents of "the old dotards from the Royal Academy of Language." The question is how to avoid it, and I agree with those who find the "x" forms idiotic, useful only to those who enjoy parading their exquisite sensitivity. People who actually care about usage in the real world find better workarounds, "@" and "e" being two such.
Terry K. said,
January 25, 2024 @ 10:05 am
For me, as a speaker of Spanish as a second language, plural nouns referring to person feel similar to the persona. Persona is always grammatically feminine, regardless of the gender of the person referred to. Grammatical gender, for that word, doesn't match personal gender. Same with the plural masculine for a mixed group. Bienvenidos is grammatically masculine, but (usually) refers to persons of all genders.
Terry K. said,
January 25, 2024 @ 10:08 am
Language history note. In romance languages, the neuter disappeared by combining with the masculine. So masculine as the default, as the neutral option, has some basis separate from sexism. (Though I won't claim the sexism of seeing masculine as the default way of being human doesn't play a part.)
Jarek Weckwerth said,
January 25, 2024 @ 10:51 am
I can't speak to the original question, but:
@Noam: So am I (gendered verbs), and I find them far more insiduous than nouns and adjectives, mainly because even people who really should know better don't bother noticing. Too often when "inclusive" language is mentioned, the discussion descends into what is known as "feminatives" over here. And then there's girls and women firefighters in my daughter's schoolbooks. Neat. But they still address the pupil with masculine verbs 100% of the time. I have to say it's a pet peeve of mine. Worse still, there are all kinds of IT services (banking, shopping etc.) that will talk masculine verbs at you even when they actually know (because you've told them) that you're a woman. (BTW one reason for that is the total lack of awareness of the problem where the software usually originates, like e.g. America ;)
@DJL: The original picture also has Italian. I don't really know, but is there no feminine form of bienvenuti? The interwebs are telling me that bienvenute does exist?
Noam said,
January 25, 2024 @ 11:03 am
@languagehat I didn’t know any of the commenters here were so distinguished as to be from the Royal Academy of Language.
I wouldn’t have picked x either, but my understanding is that it was coined by native Spanish speakers in Puerto Rico (although the source for that wasn’t reliable). In any case, I was arguing for the relevance of the basic issue, rather than any particular solution.
Jonathan Smith said,
January 25, 2024 @ 11:04 am
Re: traditional/simplified, it would be better not to treat them as pairs of allographs of single graphemes at all. The message X when written for a PRC audience will use "simplified" characters, but hardly need match morpheme-for-morpheme the equivalent message written for a Tw. audience in "traditional" characters. This is often (incidentally/accidentally) done right in technical manuals and such. When citing text, one can just cite faithfully instead of doing switcheroos — enlightened e.g. academic journals get this.
DJL said,
January 25, 2024 @ 11:28 am
Yes, Jarek, ‘benvenute’ certainly exists, but the movement towards (what’s perceived as) more inclusive language is not as prominent in Italy as it is in some Spanish-speaking countries (and I think many of these arguments seem to come from Spanish-speaking people who live in the US).
Can only second Terry K’s comments on the origins of -o endings in Romance languages and the loss of the neuter case, but I would add that both Spanish and Italian have loads of words that superficially end in -a, and thus exhibit a grammatical feminine ending, and they are as generic as many of the other genetic words ending in -o.
Cervantes said,
January 25, 2024 @ 11:38 am
While it is true that you would say bienvenida to a woman and bienvenidas to a group of women, I think this is really a back formation. Venido is actually a past participle, so if you were speaking for a group of women you might say Nosotras hemos venido, we have come, the verb form being genderless. Bien venido literally means "came well" and is ungendered and unnumbered. (Not that anyone is likely to say that per se.) I would venture that the compound word acquired a gendered connotation secondarily. That's my surmise, anyway.
Victor Mair said,
January 25, 2024 @ 11:45 am
"Re: traditional/simplified, it would be better not to treat them as pairs of allographs of single graphemes at all."
In the real world, that's not the way it works at all.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 25, 2024 @ 12:03 pm
@Cervantes: I take it the progression is that if the participle as used outside of auxiliary-verb-plus-participle constructions is treated as an adjective, then the usual Spanish rules for inflecting adjectives for gender arrive on the scene? I don't know why there isn't a way to spin it so that the stock-phrase-for-welcoming is either an imperative verb ("Be welcome[d]!")* or a nominalized plural ("greetings!") that everyone accepts has no "natural" gender (because a greeting is an utterance rather than a mammal) even if it has grammatical gender.
*In German, adjectives are conveniently not inflected for gender (or case) when used predicatively rather than attributively, so "Willkommen!" as a greeting is not marked for gender even if understood as a clipping of "Du bist willkommen" or "Sie sind willkommen" etc., regardless of the sex(es) of the addressee(s). But I guess I don't know whether a Spanish calque of "you are welcome[d]" or "be welcome[d]" would be thought to require inflection for gender.
hallo said,
January 25, 2024 @ 1:25 pm
@AG
I took it to mean that they were trying to make a point about gender. A majority of gay people are unusual for their gender.
@Abbas
I am so happy to know that you agree. I speak German and agree that splitting plural nouns up like that only makes a passage harder to read.
JMGN said,
January 25, 2024 @ 1:30 pm
15 years ago everybody was ok with -@ to include both genders, but now -x/-e purport to include all the gender spectrum as part of a political agenda nobody in those minorities was really demanding but woke Academia and their funded studies.
Cervantes said,
January 25, 2024 @ 1:50 pm
JW — yes that's generally true, participles can become adjectives. It's just that in this case the adverb is still there. Bien can be used as an intensifier, in which case the adjectival nature of the participle is obvious, but here it's is used in a sense that usually modifies a verb. I'm just trying to say that's why bienvenido doesn't really seem gendered.
Chris Button said,
January 25, 2024 @ 2:20 pm
In Portuguese you would say "seja bemvinda" (literally "be welcomed") to a woman, where the past participle is gendered in its function as an adjective. But it's a good question about its historical origin as an un-gendered past participle ending in -o as "vindo".
David Morris said,
January 25, 2024 @ 5:15 pm
Is 'Bienvenidxs' meant to be spoken? if so, how?
AG said,
January 25, 2024 @ 5:48 pm
Just for the record, I think -x is hideous and unusable. But I think a public reexamination of gendered language is both necessary and beneficial for every member of society – regardless of gender. People claiming that change in this area would break the language might want to look at the instructive case of singular "they" in English, which demonstrably has not.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 25, 2024 @ 6:13 pm
I am again thinking of German, which I first studied an alarming 45 years ago this coming fall, and the perhaps somewhat cross-linguistically unusual feature that the numerous gender distinctions in inflection/declension relevant to adjectives, nouns, and/or articles accompanying nouns in the singular all melt away in the plural. Which limits (although it does not eliminate*) the problems that can arise in certain other languages when a plurality of humans (or other creatures conventionally differentiated in speech as m v. f) is a mixed-sex group. Inflectional gender distinctions apparently still carried over into the plural in Old High German and then largely dissipated by Middle High German, but I don't know the details of how they fused and in particular whether e.g. the fem. and neut. forms were just displaced by the newly-epicene forms that had previously been specifically masc. or whether some new synthesis emerged or some third thing.
*In particular, when you have paired nouns where in the singular one is understood to have a male-human referent and the other a female-human referent, they may both have plural forms that are understood as "gendered" in terms of referent even though you don't mark that difference grammatically and they both take the same articles, agree with adjectives with the same case-specific endings, etc.
Avi Rappoport said,
January 25, 2024 @ 6:37 pm
The Chinese community in San Francisco started as mostly Cantonese, though of course it's much more diverse now. That led to cultural institutions in the area tending to use Traditional Chinese.
Chas Belov said,
January 25, 2024 @ 11:24 pm
My understanding (not authoritative, not Latinx, and not fluent in Spanish) is that the -x- ending/infix originated in the Latinx transgender community.
I'm fine with the -x- substitution in English words representing Latinx culture, and the -e- substitution in actual Spanish words.
So, bienvenides, not bienvenidxs.
Peter Taylor said,
January 26, 2024 @ 5:49 am
@Terry K., it's an oversimplification to say that "the neuter disappeared by combining with the masculine". Sticking to Spanish, since it's the main focus of the Romance subthread, besides the ambiguous words like mar (the masculine is more salient in current usage, but the feminine is still accepted albeit rare outside poetry) there are neuter words which became feminine, in some cases possibly because they were used more often in the plural than the singular and the -a ending primed a feminine agreement. E.g. the neuter fragum (strawberry) became the feminine fragaria and, via a couple of French forms, the more commonly used feminine fresa.
Chris Button said,
January 26, 2024 @ 7:10 am
@ Peter Taylor
Samba is an interesting one too. It is masculine in Portuguese "o samba" but feminine in Spanish.
Calvin said,
January 26, 2024 @ 10:57 am
Mao himself never bothered to switch to simplified Chinese characters. Even the "Red Guard" (紅衛兵) characters on the armband he wore at the start of the Cultural Revolution were composed with a traditional character (衛) lifted from his calligraphy.
Those ardent Maoists should take note.
Biscia said,
January 26, 2024 @ 11:47 am
@DJL: Actually, I would say that inclusive language is a topic that gets quite a bit of attention in Italy. In more institutional settings it's become pretty standard to say "benvenuti e benvenute" (or vice versa), which at least avoids the "maschile sovraesteso." And in writing, many people have used solutions like "ciao a tutte/i" or "ciao a tutt*" for quite a while now – or, more recently, the hotly debated "ciao a tuttə."
DJL said,
January 26, 2024 @ 12:54 pm
@Biscia I didn’t say it didn’t happen; I said that it wasn’t as prominent as in Spanish-speaking countries. And I must add that within my milieu at least (in Liguria and Milano, with people in their 30-40s), none of those formulas are common at all.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 26, 2024 @ 3:08 pm
I am not aware of any U.S. usage thus far of "Latinəs," or for that matter "Bienvenidəs." But maybe this Italian approach will find adherents in the future, since the "ə" certainly avoids the pronunciation difficulties raised by "x" in those contexts.
Chas Belov said,
January 26, 2024 @ 9:05 pm
@J.W. Brewer: I'm thinking schwa would be problematic for Spanish because English speakers speaking words that come to English from Spanish are likely to pronounce words with a feminine ending as a schwa instead, as I do with "Latina."
maidhc said,
January 27, 2024 @ 4:53 am
I think that the intended audience for this is not Spanish-speaking people, but the people who donate money to the DeYoung Museum.
John Swindle said,
January 27, 2024 @ 5:25 am
Here outside the Sinosphere, when notices have translations into Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese with different text, it's because different translators were hired for the two "languages."
Thomas said,
January 27, 2024 @ 5:28 am
@Biscia
How do ordinary people even type the schwa in “tuttə”? It seems like a major inconvenience to me.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 27, 2024 @ 9:53 am
@Chas Belov: why would it be "problematic" if the generic/inclusive plural ended up for some speakers homophonous with the feminine even though spelled differently? Would that make certain males feel marginalized or something?
Terry K. said,
January 27, 2024 @ 5:23 pm
Perhaps those who type “tuttə” or such are doing so on their phones where it's easy.
Chas Belov said,
January 28, 2024 @ 1:26 am
@maidhc: Right, but if they are supposedly speaking Spanish then they need to follow Spanish rules, including new Spanish rules for neo-gender, which calls for -e.
@J.W. Brewer: If we are creating new word endings, there's no way to know we're using them unless we pronounce them differently from the originals.
DC said,
January 28, 2024 @ 3:15 pm
As a millennial from the Bay Area, I know many native Spanish speakers who are comfortable with, prefer, or encourage using -x. I've seen polling that most hispanohablantes in the US *don't* like it, but there are plenty of things I dislike about how native English speakers express themselves in English, so I don't particularly see why there's a debate about this, other than as another semiotic wedge in the right's kulturkrieg and demonizationnof queer (and especially trans) people. ¡Que viva la diferencia!
J.W. Brewer said,
January 28, 2024 @ 3:37 pm
@Chas Belov: The internet tells me that "Latine" is pronounced in Spanish as /laˈtine/, yet I suspect that in many Anglophone mouths it will end up as /la'tinə/, just as "Latina" is supposed to be /laˈtina/ in Spanish but ends up in many Anglophone mouths as /la'tinə/. Given the fairly strong tendency in English for many vowels in unstressed final syllables to reduce to schwa, it's probably rarely a good idea to think you can disambiguate two words solely by having a "different" vowel in the unstressed final syllable if the predictable reduction-to-schwa of both of the "different" vowels will make that supposed distinction inaudible in practice.
Chas Belov said,
January 28, 2024 @ 4:44 pm
@J.W. Brewer:
I feel like we're talking in circles here.
Anglophones would speak English, for which the word is Latinx.
Spanish speakers would speak Spanish, for which the word is Latine.
Chas Belov said,
January 28, 2024 @ 4:53 pm
And as to the original item,
Bienvenidos and bienvenidas are Spanish, so the non-gendered Spanish would be bienvenides.
Bienvenidxs is pure Spanglish.
Philip Taylor said,
January 28, 2024 @ 5:29 pm
Chas — "Anglophones would speak English, for which the word is Latinx". How is would final word typically be pronounced ? My first guess would be /læ tɪn ˈex/. but other possibilities would seem to include /læ ˈtɪnx/ and /læ ˈti:n ex/
Chas Belov said,
January 29, 2024 @ 4:49 pm
@Philip Taylor: I pronounce it /'læ tɪn ex/ (since it's English and I don't need to worry about where Spanish puts its accents).
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
January 30, 2024 @ 8:31 am
If language is "living", why can't we live and let live, instead of subjecting this poor, living organism to so much experimentation and invasive surgeries?
Jarek Weckwerth said,
January 30, 2024 @ 10:17 am
@ Chas Belov: That's quite surprising, I have to say. The English pronunciation of Latino and Latina are stressed on the second syllable, so I would rather expect /ləˈtiːŋks/, or if /iːŋks/ doesn't do it because of the constraints of English syllable structure, then maybe /ləˈtɪŋks/ or /ləˈtiːneks/ as a very last resort. But the initial stress makes it positively German to my ears. Is there an intention to make it deliberately different from the two original forms?
Either way, it's interesting to note that many of the forms suggested are either a manifestation of the typical layperson's misconception of language as being chiefly written, or of linguistic colonization (by introducing alien elements such as schwa in Spanish). If any of the forms are to succeed, they must be pronounceable in ways that don't violate the phonological system.
James Wimberley said,
January 30, 2024 @ 2:24 pm
Northern Europeans have no use for the confusing North American Latino/Latina category anyway, so a fortiori the comical Latinx is unknown. There was a time when large numbers of Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese migrated to Germany for work. Did the German language develop a category ofGastarbeiter including all three but excluding Greeks and Turks? I think not. Spain and Portugal work together on some things (an integrated electricity market) but not other (trains). Either way, "iberianism" does not come into it.
Biscia said,
January 30, 2024 @ 6:59 pm
@Thomas: As Terry said, on a phone it's easy, and if you're someone who uses a lot of schwas (I don't, myself) I'd assume you'd make a keyboard shortcut on your computer.
@DJL: I'm sure my bubble talks more about these things than most because it's heavily skewed towards translators, who tend to be 1) very attentive to language even in casual communication, and 2) in Italy, female. In a profession where 80-90% of the people being addressed at events and in online forums are women, the maschile sovraesteso starts to feel weird. But tutte e tutti, allievi e allieve, etc. also seems to be pretty standard in the public school system in Tuscany where my spouse works – and there, too, it may have something to do with the fact that male teachers are a small minority up until high school.
I'm also sure that there's more discussion of the subject in Spanish, but considering that Italian has far fewer speakers (who are also rapidly aging), I think it comes up a fair amount in the media and has for a while. I remember people scoffing about "ministra" and "sindaca" fifteen years ago and now they're almost everywhere and have stopped raising eyebrows. At least in my experience.
Chas Belov said,
February 2, 2024 @ 10:36 pm
@Jarek Weckwerth, I'm not an expert on the term and have never heard it pronounced, which left me to guess. I agree that Latino and Latina are accented on the second syllable, so I'm not sure why my mind's ear places the accent for Latinx on the first of the three syllables. Possibly because I consider it pure English. But I would accent latine on the second of the three syllables, since it's Spanish.
David Marjanović said,
February 5, 2024 @ 4:13 pm
Some pronounce latinx with the Spanish name of the letter – as if it were spelled latinequis.
Chas Belov said,
February 8, 2024 @ 1:50 am
Latinequis had occurred to me, and I toyed with it briefly, but I've chosen not to use it on the basis that I consider Latinx to be an English word.
Chas Belov said,
February 26, 2024 @ 2:08 am
El Tecolote, a bilingual Spanish-English paper in San Francisco, is apparently okay with Latinx in both English and some Spanish usages.
In their Febrero 22-Marzo 6, 2024, edition, a story is headlined:
English: Erika Carlos named editor-in-chief of El Tecolote, San Francisco's legacy Latinx publication
Español: Erika Carlos, nombrada editora en jefe de El Tecolote, la publicación periódica del legade Latinx en San Francisco
and a sentence in the article reads:
English: "I am deeply honored to take on this critical role for San Francisco's Latinx community," said Carlos, who used to volunteer for El Tecolote in 2019.
Español: "Me siento profundamente honrada al asumir este papel fundamental para la comunidad latina de San Francisco", reconoció Carlos, quien fue voluntaria para El Tecolote en 2019.
Disclosures:
1. The headlines were in all caps. I attempted to replace them with normal case but am not fluent in the rules of Spanish capitalization.
2. For WCAG 2.0 A accessibility, I've wrapped all Spanish, including the newspaper's name, in span tags with the lang="es" attribute. However, I don't know whether Language Log's comment parser will retain them. We'll see when I publish.
3. I am unable to provide links to screen prints as the article does not appear on El Tecolote's website yet.
Chas Belov said,
February 26, 2024 @ 2:10 am
And indeed, Language Log's comment parser does not retain span tags with lang attributes. Given that this is Language Log, it would be great if there were a way to add the lang attribute.
Trying with a p tag instead. This p tag should have lang="en" as an attribute.
Chas Belov said,
February 26, 2024 @ 2:11 am
Alas, can't accomplish it with a p tag either.
Chas Belov said,
February 26, 2024 @ 2:15 am
Oops, missed a disclosure or three.
4. I don't know whether the same person wrote the headline and the article.
5. I don't know whether the article and/or headline were written in English and translated to Spanish or vice versa. They have made past references to articles being translated and having errors in the translation.
6. I don't know whether Carlos spoke in English or Spanish or both, for that matter.