> Today, young English speakers are trying to popularize "they" as an English neuter pronoun, and it's not too absurd: we already use "they" this way when the gender of the person is unknown. For example, if you found a random wallet, you might say, "Someone lost their wallet," and it would be acceptable.
It's actually reasonably weird to propose since usages historically mattered. Also that's what gives you collocations, idioms, etc. If you look at grammars of English, you find plenty of examples of similar generalizations that people consistently refuse to make, such as the lack of "I could X" in the sense of "I was able to X", even though though nobody bats an eye at "I couldn't X" in the sense of "I wasn't able to X".
No, they're not. In WALS (https://wals.info/chapter/30), almost half of the languages have gendered nouns.
> Today, young English speakers are trying to popularize "they" as an English neuter pronoun, and it's not too absurd: we already use "they" this way when the gender of the person is unknown. For example, if you found a random wallet, you might say, "Someone lost their wallet," and it would be acceptable.
It's actually reasonably weird to propose since usages historically mattered. Also that's what gives you collocations, idioms, etc. If you look at grammars of English, you find plenty of examples of similar generalizations that people consistently refuse to make, such as the lack of "I could X" in the sense of "I was able to X", even though though nobody bats an eye at "I couldn't X" in the sense of "I wasn't able to X".