Esperanto vocabulary: Encyclopedia II - Esperanto vocabulary - Gender

Esperanto vocabulary - Gender

Some Esperanto roots are semantically masculine or feminine. In general, feminine words are derived from their masculine equivalent.

Esperanto vocabulary - Masculine roots

A small (and decreasing) number of noun roots, mostly titles and kinship terms, are inherently masculine unless the feminine suffix -ino is added. For example, there are patro (father) and patrino (mother), with no good word for parent.

In the early twentieth century, members of a profession were assumed to be masculine unless specified otherwise with -ino, reflecting the expectations of most industrial societies. That is, sekretario was a male secretary, and instruisto was a male teacher. This was the case for all words ending in -isto, as well as -ulo (riĉulo "a rich man"), -ano and ethnicities (kristano "a male Christian", anglo "an Englishman"), -estro (urbestro "a male mayor"), and the participles -into, -anto, -onto, -ito, -ato, -oto (komencanto "a male beginner"). Many domestic animals were also masculine (bovo "bull", kapro "billygoat"). These generally became gender-neutral over the course of the century, as many similar words did in English, because of social transformation.

There is still variation in many of the above words, depending on the social expectations and language background of the speaker. Many of the words are not clearly either masculine or epicene today. For example, the plural bovoj is generally understood to mean "cattle", not "bulls", and similarly the plurals angloj (Englishpeople) and komencantoj (students); but a masculine meaning reappears in bovo kaj bovino "a bull & cow", anglo kaj anglino (an Englishman & Englishwoman), komencanto kaj komencantino (a male & female beginner).

We are left with several dozen fairly clearly masculine roots:

A few of these, such as masklo and the words dedicated for male animals, are essentially masculine and are never used with the feminine suffix. The others remain masculine mainly because, officially at least, Esperanto has no good way of indicating masculine gender. One work-around, using vir- (man) as a prefix, is used with animals, but it's ambiguous: virbovo can mean either a bull or a minotaur, and therefore both taŭro and minotaŭro have been borrowed into the language to disambiguate.

Not all of these words are stably masculine. Native English speakers, among others, tend to treat kuzo (a cousin) and amiko (a friend) as gender-neutral, and nepo (a grandson/grandchild), bubo (a brat), and koko (a rooster/chicken) are often ambiguous as well. Once such a word is used ambiguously by a significant number of speakers or writers, it can no longer be assumed to be masculine. Language guides suggest using all ambiguous words neutrally, and many people find this the least confusing approach—and so the ranks of masculine words gradually dwindle.

Esperanto vocabulary - Feminine roots

Besides the suffix -ino, there are several dozen feminine roots:

Unlike their masculine counterparts, feminine words have not generally been reinterpreted as epicene.

Esperanto vocabulary - Common approaches to regularizing Esperanto gender

Some people, including many English speakers, feel that deriving feminine from masculine words is sexist, and attempt to avoid gendered language; others, such as many German speakers, have the opposite view, feeling that subsuming women under a masculine term is sexist, and so consistently specify gender. Either way, gender is often a fuzzy issue in Esperanto.

Gender asymmetry is both one of the biggest issues people have with the Esperanto language (the others being adjectival concord, the accusative, the letters with diacritics, and the eternal debate over borrowing vs deriving technical vocabulary), and the one that seems easiest to "fix". Numerous solutions have been proposed over the years. However, two of these recur repeatedly, as they derive from existing resources of the language. These are the masculine suffix -iĉo and the epicene prefix ge-.

Some people remedy the Esperanto gender asymmetry with an unofficial masculine suffix *-iĉo [created by analogy with -ĉjo] alongside feminine -ino, with the bare root now becoming epicene, as the names of professions such as dentisto did half a century ago:

Compare,

There have been a few books published with such usage. There is also a proposed suffix -uko for castrated animals, creating bovuko for okso.

However, even with the availability of a masculine suffix, some speakers maintain viro (a man) as an inherently masculine word and use *femo (the etymological root of such Esperanto words as femalo, feminismo) for "a woman", with adolto or plenkreskulo (a grown-up) for "an adult". This may be due to the number of established masculine derivatives of the root vir-, such as the adjective vira (male), or perhaps to a desire to have basic dedicated roots for "man" and "woman".

Other Esperantists argue that removing the gender asymmetry requires making all noun roots gender-neutral, and that in such usage viro should mean "an adult". However, feminine nouns such as damo (a lady) will retain their gender regardless, as will inherently masculine words such as taŭro (a bull), so complete gender neutrality will not be accomplished unless such words are removed from the language.

The main objection to this suffix, other than the concern of tinkering with the fundamentals of the language, is that some perceive it as being too similar to the pejorative suffix -aĉ-, and thus consider it to be disparaging to men. However, with the word stress on the vowel, -iĉo and -aĉo are as distinct as many other pairs of Esperanto suffixes, such as -ino -ano, -ilo -ulo, etc, and the brain would soon filter out the similarity as meaningless.

Another approach to gender asymmetry that is often seen is the use of ge- as an epicene prefix in the singular,

To prevent confusion, some -iĉo users adopt this usage of ge- as well and specify gepatro, patrino, or patriĉo, avoiding the bare root patro entirely.

Singular ge- is not generally accepted, however. Ge- is traditionally used only with semantic plurals, and is officially inclusive, indicating both sexes together, rather than epicene. Some argue that singular gepatro describes a hermaphroditic individual that is both mother and father.

Esperanto vocabulary - Gendered pronouns

Esperanto personal pronouns distinguish gender in the third-person singular: li (he), ŝi (she); but not in the plural: ili (they). There are two practical epicene third-person singular pronouns: the demonstrative pronoun tiu (that one), and Zamenhof's suggestion, ĝi.

See the discussions at Esperanto personal pronouns and riism.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Gender", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki