Gender reform in Esperanto

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Gender asymmetry is one of the aspects of the constructed language Esperanto that is most frequently targeted for criticism. There are numerous proposals to regularize both grammatical and lexical gender.

In the text below, when a proposed word or usage is not grammatically correct according to the standard rules of Esperanto grammar, it will be marked with an asterisk.

Gender in Esperanto

Main article: Esperanto vocabulary#Gender

Esperanto does not have grammatical gender other than in the two personal pronouns li "he" and ŝi "she". Nevertheless, gender is often a fuzzy issue. In practical usage words formed with the suffix -ul "person" are ambiguous, sometimes used with a masculine meaning in the singular, but generally neuter in the plural. However, concepts of gender have changed over time, and many words that were once considered masculine are now neutral, especially words related to professions and animals. In older texts it is only context that disambiguates. For example, in the saying al feliĉulo eĉ koko donas ovojn "to a happy man, even a koko gives eggs" (Zamenhof), the word koko means "rooster", not "chicken".^[1] However, this can be confusing to those who are not familiar with that saying, as the word koko has become more neuter over time.

In modern usage, most noun roots are lexically neuter, a couple dozen are lexically masculine, and a smaller number lexically feminine. Most masculine roots may be made feminine through the addition of the suffix -ino, and made to describe a group of both males and females with the addition of ge-. For example, patro means "father", patrino "mother", and gepatroj "parents", but gepatroj cannot be used in the singular *gepatro for "parent". For these gendered words there is no easy way to make the singular neuter equivalent. Often there is a separate root that acts like this, for example knabo "boy" → infano "child"; filo "son" → ido "offspring", etc. Some neuter counterparts can be made with word-building. The meaning of "parent" can be achieved with either gener-into "genitor", or ge-patr-ano "member of the parents". However, it is more common to simply say unu el la gepatroj "one of the parents" or patro aŭ patrino "mother or father".

The most common roots that are masculine unless specifically marked as feminine are:

• Kin terms: avo "grandfather", edzo "husband", fianĉo "fiancé", filo "son", frato "brother", nepo "grandson", nevo "nephew", onklo "uncle", patro "father", vidvo "widower", kuzo "(male) cousin"
• Words for boys and men: knabo "boy", viro "man", bubo "brat"
• Titles: fraŭlo "bachelor", grafo "count", princo "prince", reĝo "king", sinjoro "mister, sir"

Gender-neutral roots such as leono "lion" and kelnero "waiter" may be made feminine with a grammatical suffix (leonino "lioness", kelnerino "waitress"), but there is no comparable way to derive the masculine; there was not even originally a word for "male".^[2][3] Words without a feminine suffix may take a masculine reading, especially in the case of people and domestic animals; koko, for example, means "chicken", but is read as masculine in koko kaj kokino "rooster and hen".^[4] Zamenhof used the nominal root vir "man, human male" to make words for animals masculine. Originally this took the form of a suffix -viro,^[5] but in response to criticisms that the resulting words such as bovoviro "bull" were ambiguous with mythological man–animal hybrids such as cherubs (also bovoviro), Zamenhof switched to using vir as a prefix in his translation of Genesis in the 1920s.^[6] This usage has spread, and vir- is now widely used as a prefix in the case of animals (virleono "male-lion", virhomo "male-human"), but as a separate adjective vira for professions^[7] (vira kelnero "male waiter"), with -viro now considered archaic, though neither of these conventions is as common as feminine -ino. Moreover, the prefix vir- is idiomatic, as virbovo (man-bovine) could still mean either "bull" or "minotaur/cherub"; it is only by convention that it is generally understood to mean "bull", and writers have coined words such as taŭro "bull" to bypass the issue.^[2]

Common elements to regularizing Esperanto gender

Some critics^[who?] feel that deriving feminine from masculine words is sexist, while others are bothered by the lack of symmetry. Such sentiments have sparked numerous attempts at reform, none of which have been accepted by the Akademio de Esperanto.^[8]

Reforms tend to center around a few key areas:

• A masculine suffix, parallel to the feminine -ino
• An epicene affix
• An epicene pronoun (he/she)

Three specific proposals surface repeatedly, as they derive from the existing resources of the language. These are the masculine suffix *-iĉo, workarounds and expanded uses of the epicene prefix ge-, and the epicene pronoun *ŝli.

Masculine suffixes

Perhaps the earliest proposal for a masculine grammatical suffix was *-uno. *-Olo is also occasionally seen. However, the most popular today is *-iĉo.^[9]

*-Uno was created through ablaut of -ino. It is, in fact, the only such possibility, as -ano, -eno, and -ono already exist. Similarly, *-olo was created through ablaut of -ulo "person". *-Iĉo was created by analogy with the pet-name suffix -ĉjo, the only masculine suffix in the language, so that the pet names and general gender suffixes are symmetrical:

	Endearment	Gender
Feminine	-njo	-ino
Masculine	-ĉjo	*-iĉo

An element common to all such proposals is that the gender-changing nouns are to be reanalyzed as gender neutral when they occur without a gender suffix, as the names of professions and nationalities, such as policano "policeman" → "police officer" and anglo "Englishman" → "English person", did in the mid twentieth century. This doesn't affect all words: Nouns that never changed gender to begin with, such as taŭro "bull", do not take gender suffixes in these reforms either. The resulting paradigms are as follows:

	Standard	Un-proposal	Iĉ-proposal	Transl.	Endearment
Neuter	gepatroj (plural only)	*patro	*patro	"parent"	—
Feminine	patrino	patrino	patrino	"mother"	panjo "mama"
Masculine	patro	*patruno	*patriĉo	"father"	paĉjo "papa"

Though none of these are widespread, *-iĉo has appeared in books published by Jorge Camacho, Luiz Portella, and Yoshito Usui.

Proponents of one proposal often claim that a competing proposal is confusing because it resembles an existing suffix, for example that *patriĉo "father" resembles pejorative patraĉo "a bad father", or that *patruno "father" resembles patrino "mother", but there does not seem to be a problem in actual use: With the word stress on the suffix vowel, -iĉo/-aĉo and -uno/-ino are as distinct as many other pairs of Esperanto suffixes, such as -ilo/-ulo. One specific objection to the -iĉo proposal is that *nepiĉo "grandson" is homophonous with ne piĉo, piĉo being Esperanto slang for "cunt";^[10][11] on the other hand, uno would mean not just "a male" but also "the UN".

Epicene prefixes

Various epicene affixes have also been proposed. They may be proposed instead of a masculine suffix—that is, gender derivation remains as in standard Esperanto, but the language gains a simple way of saying "a parent"—or in addition to a masculine suffix, often to avoid confusion between people speaking reformed and standard Esperanto. The only such affix commonly seen is the prefix ge-. In standard Esperanto, ge- means both sexes together, and is normally only seen in the plural. In conversation, however, singular ge- is not uncommonly extended to meanings such as *gepatro "a parent" when a speaker either doesn't know or doesn't wish to reveal the gender of the noun. Many gender-reform proposals would make such usage official.

Epicene ge-

	Without masculine	With masculine
Neuter	*gepatro	*gepatro	"parent"
Feminine	patrino	patrino	"mother"
Masculine	patro	*patriĉo	"father"

People who use *patriĉo for "father" may avoid the bare root patro "*parent" altogether as ambiguous, or may use it and switch to *gepatro only when they need to disambiguate.

Treatment of gendered words

Many of these proposals propose that all gender-changing words such as patro become neuter once a masculine suffix is in use, with the only remaining gendered words being those such as taŭro and damo that never changed gender to begin with. However, since viro has numerous masculine uses, and there are already dedicated words for the neutral and feminine equivalents (adolto "adult" or plenkreskulo "grownup", and femino "woman"^[12]), viro is also commonly retained as a masculine root.

The word eŭnuko "eunuch" has through back-formation given rise to the suffix *-uko for castrated people or animals, creating forms such as *bovuko "steer", from bovo "cattle", to replace okso "steer", though eks- "ex-" is sometimes seen in this context: eksvirkato "castrated cat" (lit. "ex-male-cat") vs. *katuko.^[13]

Gender-neutral pronouns

Main article: Esperanto grammar#Pronouns

As in English, Esperanto has a personal pronoun for "he", li, and "she", ŝi. Paraphrasing li aŭ ŝi "he or she" to avoid mentioning gender is, as in English, considered awkward^[who?], and is avoided in conversation and literature^{[citation needed]}. There are two general approaches to resolving this issue: modifying an existing pronoun, and creating a new pronoun.

Extending the range of an existing pronoun

The existing third-person pronouns are li "he" (the pronoun generally used when gender is not known^[14]), ŝi "she", ĝi "it", ili "they", oni "one", si (reflexive), tiu "that one".

As discussed in the main article, ĝi is used principally with animals and objects. Zamenhof also prescribed it to be the epicene pronoun for use when the sex of an individual is unknown, or to refer to an epicene noun such as persono (person). However, in his writing it is only used for children:

La infano ploras, ĉar ĝi volas manĝi "the child is crying, because it wants to eat".

It has not been extended in range since then, but advocates^[who?] maintain that the idea that ĝi cannot be used for people in general is due to interference from English. In Zamenhof's day it was customary to specify gender whenever it was known . A shift from li and ŝi to ĝi could be argued^{[weasel words]} to be a stylistic change similar to the ongoing shift from copula-plus-adjective to verb (such as bluas for estas blua), and that nothing so radical as the creation of a new pronoun is required.

However, when gender becomes a problem it is much more common for people to use the demonstrative adjective and pronoun tiu (that one) as a work-around. Unfortunately, this remedy is not always available. For example, in the sentence,

Iu ĵus diris, ke li malsatas "Someone just said that he is hungry",

the pronoun li cannot easily be substituted with tiu, as that would normally be understood to refer to someone other than the person speaking:

Iu ĵus diris, ke *tiu malsatas "Someone just said that that person is hungry".

Similar problems of confusion arise with trying to use oni "one" in such situations:

Iu ĵus diris, ke *oni malsatas "Someone just said that one is hungry".

This could be used to express deference or other forms of indirectness, but would not be understood to refer to the someone who made the statement.

It would be possible to extend the use of reflexive pronoun si, which officially cannot occur in subject position, to that of a logophoric pronoun:

Iu ĵus diris, ke *si malsatas "Someone just said that himself/herself is hungry".

Although not a full solution, as si refers to a previously mentioned person, this could be used in combination with tiu to introduce a subject. It also has the advantage of clarifying the sentence, since it is ambiguous in standard Esperanto whether li "he" refers to the someone who is speaking, or someone else. However, logophoric pronouns are alien to European languages, and this solution is rare.

Due to English influence, singular "they" has been reported^{[citation needed]}:

Iu ĵus diris, ke *ili malsatas "Someone just said that they are hungry".

but this messes up Esperanto noun agreement and is not readily accepted by people of other language backgrounds.

A proposal which is totally consistent with regular grammar is to hyphenate li (he) and ŝi (she) to li-ŝi (or ŝi-li), similar to some other constructs in Esperanto, such as pli-malpli (more or less).

Finally, the epicene sense of li can be made explicit with singular ge-, though pronouns do not normally take any affixes apart from grammatical inflections:

Iu ĵus diris, ke *geli malsatas "Someone just said that (s)he is hungry".

New pronouns

Existing Esperanto personal pronouns end in i, and only only four proposals for a new pronoun are at all common: gi, hi, ri, and the blend ŝli.

Gi is a popular proposal because it is iconic: in writing, it resembles ĝi, which it also resembles in meaning, and it is similar to the occasionally epicene prefix ge-. This makes it readily recognizable. Also along these lines is the use of the epicene prefix itself, geli.^[15]

Making li the epicene pronoun is also a common approach, as it is transparently related to the epicene plural ili "they". Such approaches then diverge in how to treat the masculine. Gender may simply be abandoned, reducing the inventory to li "s/he" and ili "they", or a new masculine pronoun may be created. One proposal is hi "he", so that the gendered pronouns hi and ŝi both derive from English.

A variant of this that was popular for a time in online newsgroups, called riism, modifies li slightly to ri as a signal that the speaker is using gender-neutral pronouns, but then in order to avoid confusion eliminates li and ŝi completely, so that the inventory becomes ri "s/he" and ili "they". The riist "manifesto" also adopts the masculine suffix *-iĉo and the occasional epicene use of ge- to avoid any resulting confusion. Critics^[who?] maintain that it is important to retain the option of gendered pronouns, if for no other reason than the translation of much of the world's literature; and that in actual rather than theoretical use, *ri as a pronoun would cause chronic confusion with the many verbs that begin with ri-, such as ri gardas "s/he keeps" vs rigardas "looks", ri petas "s/he asks" vs ripetas "repeats", etc.

Breaking with the single consonant-i form of the pronouns, but instantly recognizable to most Esperantists, is another proposal, ŝli. This is just the reading pronunciation of the abbreviation ŝ/li, the equivalent of English "s/he", and is not infrequently seen in informal writing.

Gender-neutral pronoun proposals

	Official	Ĝiism	Ŝliism	Giism	Geism	Liism	Riism	Hiism
Epicene	li[16]	ĝi	ŝli	gi	geli	li	ri	li
Masculine	li	li	li	li	li			hi
Feminine	ŝi	ŝi	ŝi	ŝi	ŝi			ŝi
Neuter	ĝi	ĝi	ĝi	ĝi	ĝi	ĝi	ĝi	ĝi
Plural	ili	ili	ili	ili	ili	ili	ili	ili

The problem with most of these proposals is that it is extremely difficult to add pronouns to a language. Therefore the only ones that are likely to succeed are those such as ĝi or ŝli that use the existing forms of the language.

Gender in plural pronouns

In addition to removing gender from the singular pronouns, proposals have also been made to add gender to the plural in order to better translate material (such as the Bible) that was written in a language that has plural gender.

Due to the symmetry between li "he" and ili "they", the obvious choice is to make ili masculine and to create an analogous feminine form, *iŝi. This was proposed by Kálmán Kalocsay and Gaston Waringhien in the 3rd edition of their Plena Gramatiko de Esperanto (pp 72–73, note 1). They cited the biblical passage Matthew 28:10-11:

Tiam Jesuo diris al ili (la virinoj): Ne timu; iru, diru al miaj fratoj, ke ili foriru en Galileon, kaj tie ili min vidos. Kaj dum ili iris...

"Then Jesus said to them [the women], “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee. They will see me there.” While they were going, ..."

It is obvious from context that "They will see me there" refers to the brothers. However, the identity of the "they" in "While they were going" is completely opaque. Kalocsay and Waringhien proposed the following solution:

Tiam Jesuo diris al *iŝi: Ne timu, iru, diru al miaj fratoj, ke ili foriru en Galileon, kaj tie ili min vidos. Kaj dum *iŝi iris..."

Notes

1. ^ Kalocsay & Waringhien, Plena analiza gramatiko (1985:61)
2. ^ ^{a b} Plena analiza gramatiko, §32(A)
3. ^ Unua Libro in Russian,[1] in German,[2], in English,[3]
4. ^ Wennergren, Bertilo Wennergren. "Seksa signifo de O-vortoj." PMEG. 08 Mar 2008. Web. 11 Feb 2010. <http://bertilow.com/pmeg/gramatiko/o-vortoj/seksa_signifo.html>.
5. ^ For example, in this dictionary from 1906. See also Kabe's 1907 translation of "The Pharaoh" by Bolesław Prus.
6. ^ Plena analiza gramatiko, §372
7. ^ Wennergren, Bertilo Wennergren. "Afiksecaj radikoj kaj kunmetaĵoj." PMEG. 08 Mar 2008. Web. 11 Feb 2010. <http://bertilow.com/pmeg/vortfarado/afiksoj/afiksecaj_elementoj/radikoj_kunmetajhoj.html#i-asp>.
8. ^ "Critiche all'esperanto ed alle altre lingue internazionali." Parra Com Mangi. Web. 11 Feb 2010. <http://bertilow.com/pmeg/vortfarado/afiksoj/afiksecaj_elementoj/radikoj_kunmetajhoj.html#i-asp>.
9. ^ Bertilo Wennergren, Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko [4] (Esperanto)
10. ^ Sonja, Kisa. "Sonja's English-Esperanto Dictionary". 12-12-08 <http://www.kisa.ca/vortaro/search.php?someaction=search&word=cunt>.
11. ^ Godivier, X. "Esperanto-English Dictionary". 12-12-08 <http://www.esperanto-panorama.net/vortaro/eoen.htm>
12. ^ Included in recent editions of the Plena Ilustrita Vortaro. Femino is occasionally back-formed to femo.
13. ^ Wennergren, Bertilo. "PMEG - UK". 12-12-08 <http://bertilow.com/pmeg/vortfarado/neoficialaj_afiksoj/sufiksoj/uk.html>
14. ^ http://bertilow.com/pmeg/gramatiko/pronomoj/tria.html (Esperanto)
15. ^ Ĉu vi geli-as? (Esperanto)
16. ^ http://www.reta-vortaro.de/revo/art/li.html#li.0 (Esperanto)

External links

• The Complete Handbook of Esperanto Grammar—a detailed account of Esperanto lexical gender. In Esperanto.
• The riist manifesto. In Esperanto. (Mirror; the original page went offline in 2006.)
• A critique of riism, supporting -iĉ- but criticizing ri as confusing, and proposing instead the pronoun gi. In English.
• Esperanto Idiosyncrasies : Sexism. Mentions the ri, gi, hi, ĝi, and -iĉ- proposals. In English.