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this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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China
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You are misunderstanding. We can talk about adopting linguistic conventions in terms of orthography and vocabulary for example, but let's look at a practical example of completely unintentional change in grammar and phonology.
In Latin, there were 3 genders: masculine, feminine and neutral, marked at the ending of words. In the descendants of Latin, the same spontaneous changes that create different accents of the same language happened to make the neutral ending sound identical to the masculine one, and so they were merged.
There is no series of choices, no magical void.