this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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RoughRomanMemes

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A place to meme about the glorious ROMAN EMPIRE (and Roman Republic, and Roman Kingdom)! Byzantines tolerated! The HRE is not.

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  2. Memes must be Rome-related, not just the title. It can be about Rome, or using Roman aesthetics, or both, but the meme itself needs to have Roman themes.

  3. Follow Piefed.social rules.

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It's less about "dissociation" and more about "indirection". For example:

  • Ho visto tuo fratello. Chiacchierando con un'altra persona; non so chi sia, non la conosco.

At least for me that "la" doesn't imply a woman; it's there because "persona" requires it. You could force a "lo" instead, to highlight social gender, but it feels like agreeing with an omitted word (uomo? tipo? ragazzo? etc.).

This shows gendered pronouns in Italian (and other languages with a similar grammatical gender system) aren't directly associated with the social gender; the association is indirect, intermediated by word choice. And people often do exploit that feature to hide social gender, not just for non-binary people but also others.

In the meantime, check how English handles it:

  • I saw your brother. Chit-chatting with another person; but I don't know her.

There's no way to interpret that "her" as referring to a man. You actually need a non-binary pronoun, like "them", to avoid implying gender. I believe this happens because English lost the grammatical gender system, so all those gendered leftovers (like "he" and "she") are now referring directly to things outside the language, like social gender.

altx, alt[ə]

I've seen both in Portuguese, too. Plus "alt@". But mostly to highlight the issue; "altx" and "alt@" are unpronounceable so usually only written, while "alt[ə]" only in the spoken language (it feels natural or off depending on dialect, since some erode the ending vowels quite a bit.)

Now I'm curious on how to handle this in Latin. For your typical accusative -əm works fine, but for the nominative most masc words use -us, that dangling -s throws a monkey wrench.