One of my favorite stories about a neutral gender being preserved is in words like Spanish esto. Typically in comparing Latin with modern Romance, the merger

One of my favorite stories about a neutral gender being preserved is in words like Spanish esto. Typically in comparing Latin with modern Romance, the merger of neuter into masculine is one of the loss of distinguishing suffices. You can't distinguish between bonus and bonum if the final constant is lost and they are both bonu (or bueno in Spanish). But some words didn't distinguish masculine from neuter by just a consonant. Take iste (m) and istud (n). Remove final consonants and you have iste and istu. So in Spanish there's este and esto. The different vowel gets preserved, so you can distinguish between masculine and neuter still, where with most words you cannot.