PC/AHC: A Romance language develops a third grammatical gender

Most Romance languages have two genders. Feminine derived from Latin feminine, and masculine derived from Latin masculine and neuter. Some keep a vestigial neuter, but this thread is not about that.

In many Romance languages, feminine nouns end with -a while masculine nouns end with -o. In these, the ending -e can be found on both masculine and feminine words. Could a language naturally develop this into a third epicene gender? For a rough example, this would lead to something like: gato bello "handsome tomcat"; gata bella "pretty she-cat"; gate belle "attractive cat"

With any POD, is this at all possible? If not, could it be introduced later due to some kind of language reform?
 
Spanish HAS a neuter gender with lo article. :confused:
Point to you: there's no desinence for neuter gender :coldsweat: (it's used the masculine ending in -o)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender_in_Spanish

So Spanish is a Romance language with an equivalent for the German 'Das' and the Dutch 'het', like 'the house', 'das Haus' and 'het huis' in German and Dutch respectively (IMHO a logic word to be neither male nor female), which doesn't seem to be so. Spanish has the concept of neuter, but no words with a neuter gender AFAIK.
 
Spanish HAS a neuter gender with lo article. :confused:
Point to you: there's no desinence for neuter gender :coldsweat: (it's used the masculine ending in -o)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender_in_Spanish
Spanish lo is like English "it" as far as I understand it; not used to refer to people.

Your best bet would probably be keeping a proper neuter gender, much as Latin had.
Neuter gender is like English "it", used for inanimate things. IIRC, one Romance language keeps a neuter gender used for abstract uncountable objects like hair, sand, water, etc., using -o for neuter and -u for masculine.

What I'm looking for is something used to refer to animate beings without specifying gender. Like a specific ending for the epicene gender mentioned at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender_in_Spanish:
Wikipedia said:
Epicene (epiceno): "Epicene gender" is the term applied to those nouns that have only one grammatical gender, masculine or feminine, but can refer to a living creature of either sex. Most animal names are of this type. E.g.: el ratón ('mouse'), la rata ('rat'), la rana ('frog'), la comadreja ('weasel'), la liebre ('hare'), la hormiga ('ant'), el búho ('owl'), el escarabajo ('beetle'), el buitre ('vulture'), el delfín ('dolphin'), el cóndor ('condor'), la paloma ('dove'), la llama ('llama').

So when used for people: amigo "male friend", amiga "female friend", amigue "friend of any gender"
 
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So when used for people: amico "male friend", amica "female friend", amique "friend of any gender"
one Romance language keeps a neuter gender used for abstract uncountable objects like hair, sand, water, etc., using -o for neuter and -u for masculine.
Your best bet would probably be keeping a proper neuter gender, much as Latin had.

Actually, on this note could the Latin neuter be preserved but take on an epicene meaning? So something like, amigu, amiga, amigo? Possibly flipping -u to be neuter and -o to be masculine?

Found the Romance language that preserved the neuter, it's Asturian.
Wikipedia said:
Asturian is the only western Romance language with three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter.

  • Masculine nouns usually end in -u, sometimes in -e or a consonant: el tiempu (time, weather), l’home (man), el pantalón (trousers), el xeitu (way, mode).
  • Feminine nouns usually end in -a, sometimes -e: la casa (house), la xente (people), la nueche (night).
  • Neuter nouns may have any ending. Asturian has three types of neuters:
    • Masculine neuters have a masculine form and take a masculine article: el fierro vieyo (old iron).
    • Feminine neuters have a feminine form and take a feminine article: la lleche frío (cold milk).
    • Pure neuters are nominal groups with an adjective and neuter pronoun: lo guapo d’esti asuntu ye... (the interesting [thing] about this issue is ...).
Adjectives are modified by gender. Most adjectives have three endings: -u (masculine), -a (feminine) and -o (neuter): El vasu ta fríu (the glass is cold), tengo la mano fría (my hand is cold), l’agua ta frío (the water is cold)

Neuter nouns are abstract, collective and uncountable nouns. They have no plural, except when they are used metaphorically or concretised and lose this gender: les agües tán fríes (Waters are cold). Tien el pelo roxo (He has red hair) is neuter, but Tien un pelu roxu (He has a red hair) is masculine; note the noun's change in ending.
So the hypothetical neuter we're discussing wouldn't function like Asturian's, but could it be derived in the same way? So functionally like Spanish epicene, but with its own ending like Asturian's neuter, which would allow it to be used to avoid referring to a person's or animal's gender. Also, could this hypothetical neuter have its own plural ending and dedicated articles, unlike Asturian's?

So if we use -u for neuter and -o for masculine (probably due to different sound changes in this hypothetical language), we would get something like: el amigo "the male friend", los amigos "the male friends"; la amiga "the female friend", las amigas "the female friends"; lu amigu "the friend", lus amigus "the friends" (lu could be derived from Latin illud)
 
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Romanian has neutral nouns; they share singular suffixes with masculine nouns and plural suffixes with female nouns.

But that does not seem to be what your examples aim for, @Angel Blaise. What you appear to be looking for is a generic neuter.
While this is an interesting option from a critical contemporary perspective, it is highly unlikely to historically appear in any Romance language unless you change patriarchal society profoundly. Or, in fact, in any language currently spoken in Europe, for the Germanic, Baltic, Slavic and Greek languages haven`t developed something like this, either. (I don`t know about Basque, or the Uralic and Celtic languages, though.) What many of these languages have, though, are neutral nouns. But none of them has neutral nouns as neutral denominators of categories which contain male and female exemplars, like your tomcat, she-cat and cat-in-general example.

Do you actually know a synthetic language (i.e. one with suffixes or prefixes indicating gender of nouns) which has developed this?
Viewing it from a gender-critically perspective, I should say that it is certainly a possibility, nobody says that the generic masculinum must develop everywhere.
 
Spanish lo is like English "it" as far as I understand it; not used to refer to people.


Neuter gender is like English "it", used for inanimate things. IIRC, one Romance language keeps a neuter gender used for abstract uncountable objects like hair, sand, water, etc., using -o for neuter and -u for masculine.

What I'm looking for is something used to refer to animate beings without specifying gender. Like a specific ending for the epicene gender mentioned at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender_in_Spanish:


So when used for people: amigo "male friend", amiga "female friend", amigue "friend of any gender"

The general way of specifying animate beings of indeterminate gender is to use the masculine. I guess it's possible for a different system to develop, but given the commonness of generic masculine I think it would be unlikely.
 
What many of these languages have, though, are neutral nouns. But none of them has neutral nouns as neutral denominators of categories which contain male and female exemplars, like your tomcat, she-cat and cat-in-general example.
The general way of specifying animate beings of indeterminate gender is to use the masculine. I guess it's possible for a different system to develop, but given the commonness of generic masculine I think it would be unlikely.
Would it be possible for a system like Asturian, with -u for masculine, -a for feminine, and -o for neuter, to reanalyze its masculine -u as indeterminate due to its use that way, and to later have old neuter -o fill in the gap for masculine? This would create an interesting flip where -u becomes neutral and -o becomes masculine.

So, for example, amigu used to mean "male friend", but comes more and more to just mean "friend", so amigo is coined to fill in when the masculine needs to be specified, using the (possibly deprecating) old neuter. This happens to all gender pairs, while the old neuter loses its original function, completing the flip.

This would also affect articles, causing el to become neutral and lo to become masculine, since the flip affects the masculine and neuter genders in their entirety. So in this instance, this language would have a different phonology than Asturian, having lus (or maybe les) as its old masculine (now neutral) plural, so that it can coin los as a new plural for lo. Similarly, un would become neutral, while uno would become the new masculine.

I assume in such a scenario that all words which used to be masculine would keep their gender, thereby becoming neutral, with the new masculine gender being only used for specification in gender pairs (now triplets). Perhaps this could even affect pronouns, having old el "he", elles "they (m)" become neutral, while ello fills in for "he" and ellos for "they (m)".
 
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Your best bet, really, would be for the neuter gender to survive. It's going to be very tough to recreate one.

The problem with that is that Vulgar latin slurred endings, so the 2nd declension nouns ending in -us (masculine) and -um (neuter) were both pronounced like '-o' (as I understand it, anyway).

That makes it difficult to seperate the masculine and neuter in speech...
 
Your best bet, really, would be for the neuter gender to survive. It's going to be very tough to recreate one.

The problem with that is that Vulgar latin slurred endings, so the 2nd declension nouns ending in -us (masculine) and -um (neuter) were both pronounced like '-o' (as I understand it, anyway).

That makes it difficult to seperate the masculine and neuter in speech...

This is true. I researched further and found that Asturian's masculine and neuter endings differ only in spelling, not pronunciation.
In the spoken language the final -u is often pronounced [o]. Writing -o instead of -u is admissible, however, for the following nouns:
  • el fierro
  • el pelo
  • el filo

Perhaps a system similar to Asturian's could develop, with the masculine and neuter developing different pronounciations due to pronunciations based on the spelling, though I don't know how likely this is.

Is there any way -us and -um could naturally develop into different sounds? If -us keeps the s to begin with, maybe this could later be elided and have an impact on the vowel, similar to some dialects of Spanish?
 
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