this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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Sure, but my point is:
In fact, what I mentioned above (about * and the schwa) are processes that exist among speakers to address what some perceive as a problem in the language. However this is something that for obvious reasons only applies to written language as both of them are not pronounceable.
Different languages also have a different prescriptive vs descriptive balance, hence changes happen differently.
You simply can't transport English "solutions" to problems (I.e. neutral words) to Spanish (or Italian), because neutral for this language is the same as masculine. However, for speakers, gender is not perceived in the same way it is perceived in English. It is completely obvious (I can speak for Italian, but given the similarity I am sure the same applies to Spanish) that both "umani" (humans) and "persone" (people) include everyone, even if the first is a masculine word and the second is a feminine word, grammatically speaking. Nobody thinks of the gender of the word as the gender of the concept, because that's not how the language works. When you want to do that, you add context that make it semantically obvious. This is apparently how English works instead, because gender has basically no other function, so you get things like the one in the screenshot, that doesn't make any sense.