"Latina Woman:

I can not understand how moron phrasing like this stays in the public lexicon


edit to fix my initially moronic intro line.

lol

ATM machines. Got tired of all the blank stares when I tried to point out the obvious. :banghead:

'nort redundent' was so i picked 'redundent'. :evilgrin: (actually it's spelled 'redundant'.)

ellen fl

i know that 'latina' means a latin female, be she woman or girl. i understood the redundancy point.

ellen fl

did Judge Sotomayor use the phase in the first place?

"Usage Note: The use of the feminine nouns Latina and Chicana is perfectly proper in American English, and failure to do so (as in She is a Latino) may sometimes be resented. The use of these forms as modifiers, however, poses unfamiliar problems in English. Is it wrong to use a masculine form such as Chicano to modify woman? Can one say She is a Latino novelist, or is Latina novelist required? There is no one answer to these questions, though a few guidelines can be proposed. First, since English nouns do not have gender, the Spanish rules governing adjective-noun agreement cannot reasonably determine English usage; thus the choice between She is the city's first Latino or Latina mayor does not depend on the gender of the Spanish word for mayor. Second, the use of the more general masculine form as a modifier in referring to women—as in "Bush Appoints Latino Woman to U.S. Court" (headline in the Sacramento Bee) and "Juror 1427, a Latino woman who works for the Los Angeles County assessor" (the Los Angeles Times)—is standard in American English. Again, English does not normally inflect for gender, and the use of Latina in cases such as these would consequently strike many people as unusual. And third, when the feminine form is used to modify words like woman and girl, it is often, though not always, suggestive of a liberal or feminist viewpoint, as in "I came to know Chicana women living in a barrio who were organizing women's health-care programs" (Ms. magazine)."

I vaguely dislike using "Latina" as a freestanding noun in English but do it sometimes for brevity and because it's a marker for a certain kind of politics; I don't say "Russkaya" or "Polska" in English, either. I do say "Latino woman" and find it perfectly well-formed, although in Spanish it's a bit odd sounding by virtue of being a bit too explicit for most contexts (because, well, Spanish has morphology that English lacks). I would not say "Latino or Latina mayor" but just say "Latino mayor" and let the gender of the referent sort out the problem; I'd also use "actor" to stand for both "actor and actress". I tolerate overt gender marking on the adjectives "blond/blonde" and "brunet/brunette" only because I'm forced to and would just as soon see the norms shift to having just "blond" and "brunet" (if only because they're shorter and save ink and key-strokes).

"Latina woman" doesn't sound very strange to me, but I'd never be able to say it. I take that to mean I've heard it sufficiently that my ears have no problem with it, even though producing it isn't allowed by any part of my (English) grammar. Such is linguistic diversity in a supposedly "homogeneous linguistic community" (and the first and sufficiently fatal flaw in Chomskyan linguistics as usually formulated). Note that I natively produce open O (wherein "caught" and "cot" do not rhyme), have some of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift ("crab" coming out as "cree-yuhb") and even exhibit Canadian Raising (so that "writer" and "rider" do not rhyme, and "You scream, I scream, we all scream for ice-cream" fails to have "I scream" and "ice-cream" even come close to rhyming), but have lived for the last 30 years in environments lacking all these features. The result is that when I hear these traits produced, even in a recording of my own speech, they all sound damn strange, another mismatch between what I judge to be grammatical and what I actually produce.