asakiyume | (Reply)

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I suspect this is a purely Anglo usage (and that only among a subset of Anglos). The 'x' ending looks very foreign to Spanish. Plus Spanish is regulated, and while the Royal Spanish Academy is less hide-bound than one would expect, I think the structural alien-ness of this construction would be unacceptable. If one needed a (personal) gender-neutral ending for persons (since Latinate languages use the masculine for the universal), I think an 'e' ending would be more consistent with the language, rather than an 'x'. It already exists. For instance, "Hispano-hablantes' - 'Spanish-speakers' is both sex and (grammatical) gender neutral.

Not that I am in any way knowledgeable about linguistics! I learned Spanish in a Latin American country, so there was quite a lot of interesting discussion with my various teachers about grammar, vocabulary and accent, and the differences in usage in different South and Central American countries. I still recall having my teacher absolutely refuse to help me translate a local tabloid (which had numerous words not found in any dictionary) on the grounds that I was a lady, and would therefore never in my life have occasion to use those words...