Quote Originally Posted by JoseB View Post
Here is the problem, see... Ubykh (my example) was spoken by a single tribe of not more than some 2000-3000 people, living (at the time of the events I mentioned) in a close-knit community of 4 or 5 villages close to each other, and willing to follow without question the decisions of their elders.

English (the language we are talking about regarding the "special pronouns" here) is a world-spanning tongue spoken by roughly 400 million people as a first language, and close to 1.4 billion as a second language.

Good luck getting those numbers of speakers to agree on something like that. No one is able to move against linguistic inertia when confronted with such numbers. English will change by itself (that is all but guaranteed), but it will do so during an extended lapse of time, measured in centuries, and it will do so in its own way, and in spite of whatever efforts "regulators" or "inventors" might apply to try and "direct" the way it moves.
But I wasn't talking about English specifically, I was talking about the principle. And besides, why is it impossible for a language to change based on some changes some people have suggested? The change has to come from somewhere, and the fact that there are still plenty of English speakers vehemently arguing that using male pronouns to refer to all genders is completely natural, and not the least bit sexist, shows that a change 'from above' so to speak, can easily become a commonly accepted norm.