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Well yes, but actually no
(jlai.lu)
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this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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No binario is masculine, because it ends in -o. To make it feminine, it is changed to no binaria, ending in -a. Therefore, no binaria is feminine.
There are neutral adjectives that end in something else, such as verde (green) or feliz (happy), but most adjectives do not have a neutral form.
I know, I can actually speak a bit of spanish myself haha.
But what do you do when you speak to a person who doesn't identify as neither? How do you justify the use of either no binario or no binaria? You need a gender for that. And if you can't figure out a gender there probably is a common or more agreed upon version or? I thought in this case more people might just use 'no binaria' for everyone.
Someone else mentioned 'no binarie' so I guess there's another way out of this.
You can use "no binaria", which kind of implies the usage of "persona".
Oh, I misunderstood, I didn't realize in this scenario you were asking them if they were nonbinary. The linguistic answer is everything in Spanish defaults to masculine.
I, personally, would treat it the same as I treat the pronoun game here in the US, because it's essentially the same thing: I start with whichever one jumps out at me and accept correction if necessary, because they are the ones who made the decision to make their grammatical identifiers differ from convention. It's not my responsibility to know it ahead of time.
If they want to be a dick about it, I now know they're not someone I want to spend time around anyway.
Yeah I guess most people are cool with that approach anyhow
An "-e" suffix would indicate a holdover neutral gender word from Latin, which only still exists as a historical artifact – it's not really a valid way to construct new words, if using formal language. It's also important to understand that grammatical gender has no need to align with your social gender, unlike what an anglophone may expect.
I'm not an anglophone, I'm german ;) we use gendered articles/endings for everything. There still is a debate on aligning to gender neutral language however. Not for things, but for everything regarding people, like job positions e.g., because the male version is just socially assumed to be the standard.
Who dictates the 'valid way to construct words'? People made up language, they might as well change the way it's constructed. If people adopt the change, it will prevail, if not it will vanish. That's the only way it works imo. No rules are set in stone regarding language and culture.
Also I took the -e suffix solution from another person on here, wasn't really my point to begin with. But I see your position. It's not exactly an uncommon opinion.
Society does. If I wished to spell words differently and did so in a formal setting, I'd most likely be seen as illiterate, not vanguardist. Also, some countries have prescritivist bodies controlling standard formal language, such as France and Spain (and a Portugal-Brazil joint group, to an extent).
Change always has to start somewhere and culture constantly changes. Sure people might first be opposed to these changes, but wasn't that always the case when something new was popping up? Tale as old as times.
Some changes prevail, some vanish. No matter whether there are prescriptive governing bodies or not.