User:Edpe77/Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender

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Overview
Languages with grammatical gender, such as French, German, Greek, and Spanish, present unique challenges when it comes to creating gender-neutral language. Unlike genderless languages like English, constructing a gender-neutral sentence can be difficult or impossible in these languages due to the use of gendered nouns and pronouns. For example, in Spanish, the masculine gender generally precedes the feminine, and the default form of address for a group of students is the masculine plural "los estudiantes," regardless of the gender composition of the group. On the other hand, the feminine plural "las estudiantes" refers to a group consisting only of female students. However, there is no gender-neutral plural form that can be used to refer to mixed-gender groups. Yet, in German, the pronoun "sie" is used for all genders as well as for the feminine singular, and the capitalized form "Sie" is used as a formal, honorific way to address someone.

The challenge of accurately representing all genders in nouns is a common issue faced by languages with grammatical gender, particularly in job titles and professions. One solution has been to create alternative versions of the words, such as using "presidenta" in Spanish when referring to a female president. At the same time, the newer feminine forms in most such languages are usually derived from the primary masculine term by adding or changing a suffix (such as the German Ingenieurin from Ingenieur, engineer). Citing German as an example, almost all the names for female professionals end in -in, and because of the suffix, none can consist of a single syllable as some masculine job titles do (such as Arzt, doctor). A few times, the female form derives and is employed for both sexes, like in "male nurse" and "male midwife" across several languages. And in a few cases, the male form is derived from the female, as in words for "widow/widower" and "whore/manwhore". However, this solution does not make the noun gender neutral as the noun is still associated with a gender. In many cases, gendered nouns can be replaced by gender-neutral alternatives, such as "docente" instead of "profesor/a" to refer to a teacher, regardless of gender. Gender-neutral nouns can be applied to groups of people to avoid the precedence of one gender over the other. By working within the existing lexicon, modern ideas of gender inclusivity are able to advance without developing entirely new explicit gender-neutral forms.

A further complication is that the creation of distinctly different job titles for men and women means that in writing about hypothetical people of undetermined gender, both words must be mentioned each time, which can become quite cumbersome, or one of the titles must be accepted as genderless which is inherently divisive. In languages where the gender of a noun also affects the formation of other words in a sentence, such as gender-marked adjectives, pronouns, or verbs, this can lead to repetitive or complicated sentences if both terms are used, as the sentence must essentially be repeated twice. The one alternative is the use of gender-neutral nouns that can enclose all people regardless of gender, but this cannot be applied on all cases and on every language.