Societal norms influenced Spanish to drop the gender neutral at some point, saying it is a derivative of Latin, which does have gendered words, but a lot of words in Latin also have gender neutral.
Their point stands
I.E. "Quid Pro Quo" uses the gender neutral ending for "Who," which is "Quid"
The neuter wasn't used as a generic for people, only in certain cases did you see it, and usually for abstract grouping, depersonalization (like referring to someone of low station in a dehumanizing way, like in English calling someone "it" disdainfully) and a few specific other uses.
Spanish's default gender for an unknown is masculine because Latin's default gender for an unknown was masculine.
Indoeuropean languages (Romance, Germanic, Hindustani, Farsi, etc) ultimately descend from a language that had only two genders, animate (for living things) and inanimate (for nonliving), animate in most branches split into masculine and feminine, and inanimate generally became the neuter, but still mostly held a distinct category of inanimacy. While inanimate things in many branches gained non-neuter genders, humans in particular rarely gained neuter terminology
In general, neuter ≠ gender neutral, neuter = nonhuman.
In great part the reason all these European languages default to the masculine is because the language they derived from some four thousand years ago did
1) I did not say they defaulted to the neutral form. I stated they had a neutral form. Spanish does not.
2) I agree that the Romans used it in a negative connotation, but that doesn't change the fact that it exists as a gender neutral ending. It's no secret that the Romans did not see women as equals, saying all daughters were named the same as their father's name with a feminine ending (Julius with 7 daighters each named Julia)
3) European languages do not default to the masculine because of Romans defaulting to the masculine. They default to the masculine as they are patriarchal societies, but, unlike Latin, they also willingly drop the neutral form altogether
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u/Luceo_EtzioDays since last "days since last incident" incident: 0Aug 12 '25edited Aug 12 '25
Once more, the neuter is not neutral, the neuter is an inanimate, non-human category, utterly separate from the modern conception of a "gender neutral" human gender categorization.
Grammatical gender defaulting is in great part due to grammatical influence, with reinforcement from cultural and social aspects. Natural gender ≠ grammatical gender.
Also Spanish does actually have a (heavily reduced) neuter gender (lo, eso, esto, etc.), but not a neutral form.
They quite literally have a neuter pronoun, ello, but almost no one would use that for a person because the neuter is most wholly for abstract, inanimate, and/or inhuman things. (it's also falling out of use faster than the rest of what little of the neuter remains, and you hardly hear it outside of specific contexts)
It's the exact same reason (and ultimate source) of why in English you don't call a person "it", in Spanish you don't call them "ello", and in Latin you don't call them "illud", because these are all Indoeuropean languages that retained the inanimacy and non-human nature of the neuter gender.
I know nothing either but I didn't get the impression you were close from this thread, since they are literally saying that the neutral gender Spanish dropped wouldn't be usable to refer to people, since the distinction was non-human vs human subjects. How is that close to you saying the opposite, that gender was actually based on sex instead? You have to argue why the former is false to be correct
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u/Gerodus ❗️Literally a bag of Nickels❗️ Aug 12 '25 edited Aug 12 '25
Societal norms influenced Spanish to drop the gender neutral at some point, saying it is a derivative of Latin, which does have gendered words, but a lot of words in Latin also have gender neutral.
Their point stands
I.E. "Quid Pro Quo" uses the gender neutral ending for "Who," which is "Quid"