> In Spanish it's fine to say "Bienvenido" even to women.
Not in singular as far as I know. Plurals traditionally prioritize men, so 20 women and 1 guy would be "ellos".
> It's a generic greeting (used in the plural as well, as far as I know... unless you want to be fancy and say "Bienvenidas y bienvenidos", which is rather an idiotic trend).
In plural, software could get away with defaulting to masculine.
But really that sort of thing only gets you so far. In Russian gender goes damn near everywhere, and trying to be gender neutral gets awkward very fast. For instance an instant messenger displaying the notification "Bob is online" needs to know Bob's gender to do it correctly in Russian.
One piece of software I've seen tried to get around it by transliterating the english word "online" in Russian letters. That's also rather awkward, and would be user unfriendly in many cases.
Not in singular as far as I know. Plurals traditionally prioritize men, so 20 women and 1 guy would be "ellos".
> It's a generic greeting (used in the plural as well, as far as I know... unless you want to be fancy and say "Bienvenidas y bienvenidos", which is rather an idiotic trend).
In plural, software could get away with defaulting to masculine.
But really that sort of thing only gets you so far. In Russian gender goes damn near everywhere, and trying to be gender neutral gets awkward very fast. For instance an instant messenger displaying the notification "Bob is online" needs to know Bob's gender to do it correctly in Russian.
One piece of software I've seen tried to get around it by transliterating the english word "online" in Russian letters. That's also rather awkward, and would be user unfriendly in many cases.