this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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I’m not sure how common it is, but some nonbinary Spanish speakers use -e (latine, no binarie, etc) as a way to make Spanish gender neutral.
Yeah and elle for gender neutral pronouns, however almost nobody accepts these "because it sounds weird"
Which is a perfectly valid reason to reject it.
Nope. That only means that it isn't really in common use yet. Every neologism "sounds weird" at the start, until it becomes a regular thing in language.
Akchuli, speling und spich moost folow intrinsik rulés. As made self evident by the former sentence, simply changing things arbitrarily won't take you far. Much like mathematics, language follows a set of very much objective rules, despite being a human construct. Forcing change for the sake of change will leave you with garbage like the English language – a complete mess with exceptions to exceptions of exceptions.
I don't quite see you point. Yes, language has intrinsic rules. But language is also dynamic. Those rules can be changed. Forcing change for the sake of change is sometimes needed and welcome. Otherwise, there would be no "laptop", "laser" would still be an acronym and everyone would write "gaol" instead of "jail". There's a reason the proposed shortening from "though" to "tho" still hasn't dropped out of usage yet.
Language adapts to fulfill the needs of the users. After all, it is the best communication tool we have. Prescriptivism doesn't help improve the "complete mess" of a language, it just forces it to become outdated. We need neologisms, grammar changes, spelling reforms and so on.
Notice none of your proposed examples deal with the grammatical structure (syntax, semantics, morphological relationship), only with lexical variety. An apt comparison is as follows: now, plural words in English end in "r".
Okay, bad examples from my side. Changes that affect grammatical structure might be "bro" becoming popular as a pronoun, new tense structure found in Modern Mandarin or plural adjustments like German Kakteen > Kaktusse. Grammatical structure changes just as much as other aspects of a language.
Yeah, but RAE is not happy with this solution. 😅 I think at some point they'll come with their own proposal. For now I think that they emphasize non-gendered language instead of converting gendered words to non-gendered.