User:Nelischalich/Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender

Historical note
Ancient Greek and Classical Latin had generic words for "human"/"humanity in general" or "human being"—ἄνθρωπος (anthropos) (grammatically masculine or feminine) and homo (grammatically masculine) respectively—which are the etyma of such modern terms as "anthropology" or Homo sapiens. For "male human as opposed to female human", there existed the separate words ἀνήρ/ἀνδρός (aner/andros) and vir (the etyma of English "androgen" and "virile", respectively). Note Ancient Greek is not a romance language but the many borrowings we see demonstrates a good contrast with the Latin.

Most modern derivatives of the Latin noun homo, however, such as French homme, Italian uomo, Portuguese homem, and Spanish hombre, have acquired a predominantly male denotation, although they are sometimes still used generically, notably in high registers. For example, French Musée de l'homme for an anthropology museum exhibiting human culture, is not specifically "male culture". This semantic shift was parallel to the evolution of the word "man" in English. These languages therefore largely lack a third, neutral option aside from the gender-specific words for "man" and "woman". Spanish ser humano, Portuguese ser humano and French être humain are used to say "human being". In Romanian, however, the cognate om retains its original meaning of "any human person", as opposed to the gender-specific words for "man" and "woman" (bărbat and femeie, respectively). In Romansh the word um only refers to a male, whereas "human being" is expressed in different ways in the different dialects: carstgaun or uman.

Scientific Latin
In binomial nomenclature, Latin species names are typically either masculine or feminine, often ending in the -i suffix for masculine names and the -aesuffix for feminine names. In 2021, the species Strumigenys ayersthey was named with the suffix -they (derived from the English singular they pronoun) to create the first gender-neutral Latin binomial name. It was named to honor the non-binary community.

Spanish
Main article: Gender neutrality in Spanish

In Spanish, nouns, pronouns, articles, and adjectives are marked as masculine or feminine. The feminine is often marked with the suffix -a, while masculine is often marked with -o (e.g., cirujano 'male surgeon' and cirujana 'female surgeon'); however, there are many exceptions often caused by the etymology of the word (la mano 'the hand' is feminine and el día 'the day' is masculine).

As in other Romance languages, it is traditional to use the masculine form of nouns and pronouns when referring to males and females collectively. Advocates of gender-neutral language modification consider this to be sexist and favor new ways of writing and speaking. Two methods have begun to come into use. One of them is to use the at-sign (@) or the letter x to replace -o or -a, especially in radical political writing (¡Ciudadan@s! or Compañerxs), but use of the slash (/) as in (el/la candidato/a) is more common. The Æ|ligature æ can be used in the same way (escritoræs for writers of two genders, although escritores/as is more common). Typically these forms are pronounced with an ending [e]. They are also commonly seen simply spelled as -e. There have also been attempts to reword sentences via periphrasis in such way that gendered words referring to people are not used, such as using 'la persona refugiada 'the refugee person' instead of el refugiado'' 'the [male] refugee'. There are also attempts of using more gender-neutral nouns such as la pareja 'the pair/couple' in place of los novios 'the [masculine] couple'. Even the term 'non-binary' is gendered in Spanish, no binario [masculine] and no binaria [feminine]. '''

Some politicians have adopted gender-neutral language to avoid perceived sexism in their speeches; for example, the Mexican president Vicente Fox Quesada was famous for repeating gendered nouns in both their masculine and feminine versions (ciudadanos y ciudadanas). This way of speaking is subject to parodies where new words with the opposite ending are created for the sole purpose of contrasting with the gendered word traditionally used for the common case (like *hombres y hombras instead of hombres y mujeres). '''There are other grammatical work-arounds, such as using the imperative or impersonal form when speaking, these allow the speaker to avoid using gendered nouns and pronouns for more formal and gender neutral ways of addressing. '''

'''The increase in popularity in evolving the Spanish language to be more gender-neutral has come with mixed reception. Particularly the methods of changing the endings of nouns and pronouns seem to be the most controversial as they aim to change the rules of the Spanish language. The capital of Argentina, Buenos Aires, gained attention when they banned the use of 'inclusive language' such as -e, -x, and -@ endings in up to secondary education. '''