In the little corner of Latin America where I live, if people are making a concerted effort to be inclusive in writing, they end a word with @s to include both -os and -as endings: amig@s, chic@s, etc. But that is very uncommon, and I have not encountered a spoken equivalent.
As a non-native speaker, I find Spanish to be quite a bit more flexible than English. It’s very context-dependent, so I think a lot of Spanish speakers just have the mindset that you figure out the meaning of a word through its context. Words ending in -o can be for everyone or for masculine people, and you figure out the speaker’s intention by the context.
But also when your blender has a gender (it’s feminine, for people who don’t know), maybe it takes some of the gravitas out of the conversation about gendered language.
That’s clever honestly. I could see that working well for things like banners addressing a broad audience - marketing type stuff.
My bitching is more geared to why it was structured that way in the first place… and obviously it didn’t just appear overnight, but developed over ages like most other languages. Some trends stick and others don’t… gendering random inanimate objects is one that stuck. …for some weird-ass reason.
In the little corner of Latin America where I live, if people are making a concerted effort to be inclusive in writing, they end a word with @s to include both -os and -as endings: amig@s, chic@s, etc. But that is very uncommon, and I have not encountered a spoken equivalent.
As a non-native speaker, I find Spanish to be quite a bit more flexible than English. It’s very context-dependent, so I think a lot of Spanish speakers just have the mindset that you figure out the meaning of a word through its context. Words ending in -o can be for everyone or for masculine people, and you figure out the speaker’s intention by the context.
But also when your blender has a gender (it’s feminine, for people who don’t know), maybe it takes some of the gravitas out of the conversation about gendered language.
That’s clever honestly. I could see that working well for things like banners addressing a broad audience - marketing type stuff.
My bitching is more geared to why it was structured that way in the first place… and obviously it didn’t just appear overnight, but developed over ages like most other languages. Some trends stick and others don’t… gendering random inanimate objects is one that stuck. …for some weird-ass reason.