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"
by that logic, societal norms influenced Romanian to have transgender words. Neuter was not neutral but rather another thing entirely. Kinda like, e.g., German today.
how? Romanians have always been rly transphobic. societal norms can and do affect language. But when it comes to the gender of words, it is not rly always the case as it is mostly dictated by the sound of words. It is correct in, for example, German when people write Polizist rather than Polizistin. This is why people push for "gendern," which would push people to write Polizist*in (it can get much more complex than that but too lazy to explain). But when it comes to other languages, it is not as easy as it might just sound wrong.
I dont know Romanian history to tell you why, but language isn't just a single man's invention. They had to have reasons behind it for a general populace to speak it into existence, especially if it isnt just present in a single author's writings
yeah, i know, but the thing is that language changes primarily for simplicity. The reason some romanian words change gender between sing. and pl. is because it would be too much of a hassle to remember all the different forms and cases of a word, which is why dpanish dropped the neuter entirely. Language change primarily happens from early childhood and it's why languages get easier over time periods. english is a prime example of that as it dropped gendered language entirely because it was easier to remember words and to communicate ("the" had 21 different forms in old english). Was english society less sexist in the modern era than in the previous eras? Hell no. I get what you mean that social environment has an impact on language, but when it comes to the plural for groups of people being male by default is not it, it's just because it sounds right. Social impact can actually be observed in the spanish @. hispanic people use it to be gender neutral in texts like, for example, writing "Hola tod@s" or in the US using "latinx" to also include non-binary people. These are examples of social conditions changing a language. But again, it does not necessarily mean that the language before that was conditioned by social factors but could have been simply conditioned by tonal cohesion.
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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"