26 February 09
Delighting in a New Vowel
Hanging around the hispanohablantes on Ravelry has introduced me to the gender-unspecific vowel that is apparently now being widely used in Spanish texting: @.
Spanish, like many Romance languages, has an obligatory masculine/feminine divide in nouns. Sometimes the endings are unintuitive (la mano [the hand], el drama [drama]) but mostly “a” is feminine, “o” is masculine. This being a culture where historically the masculine incorporated everyone, in the 60s if you said “hola a todos” it was assumed you meant hello world, or hello everyone, masculine feminine and neuter.
I’m delighted to see new spanish-speaking knitters chime in on Ravelry with the “hola a tod@s,” the ‘o’ encompassing the ‘a’ as a perfect, ambi vowel. It’s particularly heartening because in fact not all spanish-speaking knitters are female, nor are all of them straight, and I love the inclusiveness that’s implied…
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Wow. I didn’t know that. That’s excellent.
whoa, very cool!
I love this. It’s such an elegant solution.
I love this too! Fantastic, and of course another advertisement for the incomparable marvels of Ravelry.
From a friend living in Madrid: “I’ve seen it used for a couple of years now. It could well have started with texting, but is very common in emails and other types of informal messaging etc. You probably won’t see it in the national newspapers or corporate correspondence yet but you never know. I agree, it’s excellent.”
I’ve not encountered it here. It’s an excellent idea. I’m going to ask a couple of the locals as see what they think. The problem is (a) they think the linguistic gender confusion among non-natives is mysterious, and (b) most of our communication is oral, not written.
So how is it pronounced?
Yes, I play my language by ear. Your new vowel will gain a sound sooner or later, I think. Maybe it’ll be a schwa?