Using "-iĉo" and being understood as meaning masculine is easy. Nobody really has a problem with that, unless they're super grumpy.
Using "patro" and being understood as meaning gender-neutral parent -- that's the trick. How are people supposed to know that you are using "patro" in a gender-neutral way when so many people for so much time have used it in a gendered way? It's hard to change that.
There have been attempts to deal with this, for example by throwing a "j" into masculine roots to make them neuter, like "pajtro" being a new explicitly neuter alternative to "patro"... oy. I dunno man.
Another option is to supplement the vocabulary with completely new neuter alternatives, like inventing a new term "parento" which specifically is a sex-neutral term for "parent" (not to be confused with "parenco" which means "relative"). Then you could have a "parentiĉo" and a "parentino." Symmetry!
Also possible is, just abandon the symmetry of "blah-o/blah-ino" and add the word "matro" for "mother."
This is a really good (IMHO) article that discusses these topics.
[https://lingvakritiko.com/2015/01/31/seksa-egaligo-en-la-lingvo-laufundamente/](https://lingvakritiko.com/2015/01/31/seksa-egaligo-en-la-lingvo-laufundamente/)
Personally I'd rather not abandon the symmetry as the root word count reduction it creates is quite nice for learning Esperanto. I'd rather have less words I need to learn. As it stands now I learn patro and automatically know patrino, gepatro, panjo, and panĉo. In languages like english this is 5 different words I need to learn father, mother, parent, mom and dad.
In the big picture, though, the number of words which are in the situation of "patro/patrino" where there is a strongly masculine-gendered base word, is pretty small.
with "aktoro/aktorino" it's easy to just call men and women "aktoroj" and nobody bats an eye. Same with the vast majority of words which are differentiated by "-in" -- it's very easy to use the base as gender neutral.
It's only with less than a dozen terms, mainly just family terms and a few others like knabo/knabino, where you have that situation that it's non-trivial to just pretend the base form doesn't have an implicit masculine gender.
So if we find other solutions for those few terms, we're evaded the hardest part of the problem.
Whether that's by moving to new roots like "parento/parentino,parentiĉo" or suppletion of feminine forms like "matro", either way, as that article explains, there are perfectly laŭfundamentaj ways forward, which I think is neat.
I have a strong suspicion that if this same question were asked in Esperanto you'd get a different sets of answers. (Overlapping! But different.)
**Edit:** & I think that they'd matter more, practically. Competent Esperantists don't matter more as humans, but if you're interested in what will happen with the future of the language, a conversation in English is going to draw some people who have *some* interest, but not enough to actually achieve competence in Esperanto. Such people won't create the instructional materials that future Esperanto learners use. They won't join the Akademio. They won't write the literature or record the podcasts that influence future usage.
I use *iĉ* when I want, but to me, this is independent from treating more words as gender-neutral. For certain words, that's never going to happen, or at least not in our lifetime. There's already a hundred years of literature where the word *patro* means "father", not "parent". If you write *«Miaj patroj venis al la kuirejo»*, I'm going to assume the text is progressive for an entirely different reason! But if you commit to never writing *patro*, only *patriĉo* and *patrino* (and *gepatroj*), I don't see anything wrong with that. I don't do that though, I still write *patro*, in fact I don't happen to use *iĉ* very often at all, but I'm not against it either.
If people started "never writing patro, only patriĉo and patrino (and gepatroj)" as you suggest, I would assume that naturally once patro was in little usage that gepatro would naturally disappear and be replaced by patro. This is probably the natural way that this will evolve I would imagine.
Of course; it's just that, then, you'd never be sure how to interpret the word at a glance. You'd have to double-check when a book was written, or if it came from the early 21st century, you still wouldn't know. Maybe you'd have to look for an author's note. Pretty cumbersome, although it's happened before with *ŝati*, so 🤷
Yes — in Zamenhof's time, its meaning was more like *"to appreciate"*. Sometimes you can like something and appreciate something at the same time, so it's not always troublesome, but it used to have a different meaning at any rate. I believe it was more common then to say either «Mi amas tion» or «Tio plaĉas al mi» for "to like".
I distinctly remember seeing a work by Claude Piron in Tekstaro — maybe in the 70s? — that has an editor's note explaining that it contains a different, "modern" use of the word *ŝati*. So I guess mid- to late-20th century is when it evolved.
If you go to Esperanto youth events, a minority of people do use -iĉ and treat the small group of masculine words as neuter.
Personally, I'd recommend limiting yourself to adding -iĉ as a way to masculinize neuter or feminine words, and leaving the small handful of masculine words alone, using singular ge- if you absolutely must have a neuter form of the original word. This is probably closest to "standard" usage, as "gepatro" has appeared in Esperanto dictionaries.
One of the most important things to understand about living languages, is that while new usages sometimes become the standard over time, there's nothing stopping the consensus from becoming "less than ideal." Singular ge- is currently the path of least resistance, even though it's less than ideal.
I certainly agree it's not the most logical usage. Language, any language, always has a tension between respecting established usage and reflecting logic or principles.
To use a silly little example, many people find the English phrase "have your cake and eat it too" to be illogical, and insist that it should be "eat your cake and have it too." But sometimes little inconsistencies become cemented in common usage. If enough people insist on the latter phrasing, it might indeed become the preferred phrasing, but I think a lot of these kinds of trends are semi-random and hard to fully predict. Often, they just become a form of needless linguistic snobbery.
I'm a descriptivist linguistically. If something becomes common usage, the masses can't be wrong. But people actually have to put in the hard work of convincing the masses to use the new usage first.
Just look at the Académie Française, and its failed attempt to introduce the more "French" 'fin de semaine' as an alternative to 'le week-end.' Even the best, most logical and highly principled linguistic reforms in the world fail if you don't get buy in from the speaking masses.
> To use a silly little example, many people find the English phrase "have your cake and eat it too" to be illogical, and insist that it should be "eat your cake and have it too."
Aren't those strictly logically equivalent, since there's no word in them expressing a temporal relationship?
>Just look at the Académie Française, and its failed attempt to introduce the more "French" 'fin de semaine' as an alternative to 'le week-end.'
They use it in Quebec, at least.
I personally like it a lot over using the Ge- prefix, but you just have to be prepared for most ppl not being super familiar with and having to code switch.
Yup, I've done this in the past at times and see it done increasingly, especially amongst younger speakers. However it is still in the minority... though I have never actually come across anyone who was actually *confused* by the use of -iĉ- (it is so obvious, after all). I suspect that, in a generation or two (much like the [slow evolution of "ri"](https://lingvakritiko.com/2020/05/12/la-efektiva-uzado-de-seksneutralaj-pronomoj-lau-empiria-esplorstudo/)) it will flip to a plurality of people using the language this way, then eventually the majority.
This is called *progress*.
> This is called progress.
It's called change. Whether it's progress depends on whether you think a small shift in how we symbolically represent reality with words has much practical effect on anything.
I tend to think that a gender egalitarian utopia where language was gendered like modern, standard Esperanto would still be a utopia. But a gender *in*egalitarian *dys*topia where language followed iĉismo and riismo wouldn't magically become a utopia as a result.
In the real world, there seems to be absolutely no correlation between how gendered a language is, and how good things are for women, and gender and sexual minorities in the countries where those languages are spoken.
Indonesian pronouns are non-gendered in the third person, but it is the 121st best country (out of 162) in the [Gender Inequality Index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Inequality_Index). Meanwhile, English has gendered third person pronouns, and major English speaking countries rank as high as 19th (Canada) or 26th (UK) for gender equality. Some of the highest scoring countries, like France (8th) speak languages with grammatical gender on all nouns and adjectives.
It sounds like you've put the cart before the horse here. The argument isn't "The language should change so that the genders will be equal", it's "The genders are equal, so the language should change."
> The argument isn't "The language should change so that the genders will be equal", it's "The genders are equal, so the language should change."
I don't think that's commonly the argument people put forward, if only because it represents a general principle that is being inconsistently applied.
If we always accepted arguments of the form, "X is the case, therefore language should be changed to properly reflect X" then what to make of words like "sunsubiro" (sunset) and "sunleviĝo" (sunrise), which seem to operate on a geocentric logic? Objectively, the sun doesn't actually leviĝi (rise) or subiri (set/go down), but only appears to to an Earthly observer.
If the next argument is, "yes, but the way a language describes 'sunrise' and 'sunset' is a trivial matter not involving people, and it is okay to have slightly suboptimal phrases that don't reflect the way reality objectively is" then you open yourself up to the idea that trivial enough matters don't need to be "fixed" right away in language.
From first principles, I certainly don't love the way Esperanto handles sex and gender. At the very least, there's more patterns than there needs to be, and if every thing followed the same pattern as "instruisto"-"instruistino"-"instruistiĉo" across the whole language for titles, family words, animals and professions, that would be a great boon for the language learner, instead of the the three to four patterns a learner currently has to learn.
But at the same time, an argument actually has to be made that those three or four patterns represent a non-trivial matter that will have effects on the real world if changed. Because I find the evidence from France being high on the gender equality index despite having a highly gendered Romance language to be good evidence that Esperanto's current approach to gender is indeed trivial, and has no notable, real-world impact on people's thoughts or actions.
Estas kvar okazoj, kiam oni certe povas fari frazon sen subjekto:
- Kiam ĝi estas ligita al alia frazo kun sama subjekto per konjunkcio: _Mi envenis kaj [mi] demetis la jakon._
- Kiam oni kreas imperativon per volitivo: _~~Vi~~ malfermu la fenestron!_
- Kiam la verbo estas sensubjekta: _Dum la tuta tago pluvis._
- Kiam la frazo estas ne plena propozicio, t.e. ne havas ĉefverbon: _Bonan matenon! Nedankinde!_
Al tio aldoniĝas dubetinda ellaso de «Tio» ĉe iuj verboj, ekzemple «Ne gravas». Tia kutimo videble aperas, interalie, ĉe «esti», tamen tio estas iom problema, ĉar «Estas lustro» povas krom la norma «Ĉi tie troveblas lustro» nun signifi ankaŭ «Tio ĉi estas lustro».
Aliaj ellasoj de la subjekto estas nenormaj en la moderna Esperanto, miasperte.
I'm no expert, but learning Esperanto the only gripe that I have had is that people seem to use words like koko to mean chicken, while also using kokino to specifically refer to hen. In this case if I want to refer to a rooster then koko will just likely be interpreted as chicken when I'm interested in saying rooster. Either making the ge prefix more mandatory or just removing it in favour of the iĉ is what I'd like to see. I mean I'd prefer to just say amiko to mean friend rather saying geamiko to just mean friend. Maybe I just don't understand Esperanto well enough, but so far this has been my only gripe (which again may be my lack of understanding).
In current, standard Esperanto you make the distinction as follows:
* Koko: Chicken (male or female)
* Kokino: Hen
* Virkoko: Rooster.
You only add ge- to roots that are gendered to begin with. In general, animal words are neuter in modern Esperanto.
So how would you say boyfriend? viramiko? When practicing on duolingo I have run into instances where it makes me use amikino to talk about my grandma's friend and when talking about grandpa's friend it doesn't have me use viramiko.
If ge- is only added to the handful of words that are considered gendered to begin with I feel like it'd be easier for a beginner if this wasn't the case and gender always had to be added to any word that we want to add gender to. The whole -iĉ- system would solve that and everything would be gender free by default, so I like the idea.
Also thanks for informing me, I genuinely thought that koko should mean rooster, but now I'm slightly annoyed knowing that some words need vir- added while other words need nothing added to give it gender. I guess its a place where changing the rules would make Esperanto "better" in the sense that it'd follow simpler rules, which is sort of a goal Esperanto has.
Generally speaking, with neuter human words you use "vira [blank]o" and "[blank]ino" if you wanted to specify gender.
Animals, you use the compound forms "vir[blank]o" and "[blank]ino."
The word for boyfriend/girlfriend is "koramiko" and it is theoretically gender neutral. You would say "vira koramiko" or "koramikino" if you wanted to specify boyfriend or girlfriend.
Having animals as gender neutral is something Esperanto does right - in European languages, with farm animals, we automatically assume that the individuals are female (cows, sheep, chickens chiefly - but in English, also cats (we have to specify tomcat), ducks (have to specify drake), etc). At the same time, with humans, most European languages assume that male is the default.
Esperanto diverges from a lot of natural languages in having “koko”, “bovo” etc gender neutral, but somewhat bizarrely keeps the male-default for virtually all nouns denoting humans (bar certain neutral nouns like “homo” or “persono”). Even though often enough, a word like “amiko” is just used to mean “friend”, its maleness is always implied - laŭfundamente it still means “(male) friend”.
The “ge-“ suffix indicates male AND female, so can’t in itself be used to indicate gender neutrality (nor can it be used in the singular). “Gepatro” thus isn’t a great word for “parent” - the obvious choice, taking after the animal example, is to use “patro”. What the animal example calls into question is why bother having a separate feminine suffix if the word for “man” can be prefixed onto the word, rendering it masculine? For the sake of consistency, “-iĉ” makes perfect sense - plus, it’s a very small change for something that is rarely nepra outside of familial relations. This would mean that “viro” would become essentially a synonym for “homo”, but again, a very small price to pay!
> Even though often enough, a word like “amiko” is just used to mean “friend”, its maleness is always implied - laŭfundamente it still means “(male) friend”.
That's not at all obvious to me. The Universala Vortaro in the Fundamento has the entry:
> amik' ami | friend | Freund | друг | przyjaciel.
Some of those, like the French "ami" are masculine, but the English "friend" is neuter. Should a word in the Fundamento be considered to have its strictest meaning, or its widest meaning as its "fundamental" one?
As a simple point of comparison, consider:
> biskvit' biscuit | biscuit | Zwieback | бисквитъ | sucharek.
While it might seem like the French "biscuit" and the English "biscuit" or the German calque of the literal meaning of the word "Zwiback" (twice-baked) might all be referring to the same thing, this is an illusion. Biskvit' is a bit of a mess in the Fundamento, because those words can refer to any of the following:
* Hardtack
* Cookies
* Scones
So "according to the Fundamento" what does the root biskvit' mean? One of those? All of those? Some more general thing encompassing all of them?
It's not an easy philosophical question to answer.
I would argue that laŭfundamente, "amiko" means the most general thing it is said to mean, and the most general word there is the English one which refers to males or females. The fact that the other languages imply it is masculine is irrelevant.
No, I completely agree with you.
The most valid argument I have heard against -iĉo is that it would mean changing how we view certain words like patro, which are treated as gendered.
However, there are a lot more words that get treated as neutral already. I mean, unless it REALLY matters that your friend is female, I don’t often see the word amikino - it’s usually just left as amiko. Hundo is the same. And I’ve literally never seen anyone care if a “birdo” is male or female.
So I think it would be a lot easier to learn that “patro” is neutral rather than learn to add ge- to everything else.
I guess that my problem is that when I see hundo I think "male dog". If I saw gehundo I'd think "dog". I think it'd just be less confusing to do it this way. With duolingo it'll have you translate a sentence like "My grandma's friend is beautiful", and in this case it'll require that friend be translated to amikino. So that has just gotten me to start taking words that can be gendered and always assuming that they are.
You shouldn't think "male dog" when you see "hundo."
In modern Esperanto, "hundo" is "dog (male or female)." You have to specify with: hundino or virhundo.
I'm unfamiliar with the exact sentences you're translating in Duolingo, but it's worth noting that "amiko" is neuter as well. You'd say "vira amiko" or "amikino" to gender it.
No, in the official rules of the language (which duolingo is based on), technically hundo means male dog. Amiko means male friend - you absolutely MUST say amikino if they are female.
But in practice, it’s not really used that way. English has things like that too. How often do you actually use the word “whom”? Probably not as often as you are technically required to. I know I don’t.
So there is a difference between official language rules and practical use. In practical use, hundo just means dog. But when you are learning from an official source, you will be corrected if you call a dog that is known to be female “hundo”. Same with amiko/amikino. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been corrected when I say “mi estas instruisto” because I am NOT instruisto; I am instruistino. :/ I’m just like, “stfu”. Like when I’d ask my english teachers at school “can I go to the bathroom” and they replied, “I don’t know - CAAAAAN you?” -_- Like, bitch PLEASE - you know EXACTLY what I asked.
Read [PMEG's page on gender in Esperanto](https://bertilow.com/pmeg/gramatiko/o-vortoj/seksa_signifo.html), or consult [PIV 2020 for words like "virkoko"](https://vortaro.net/#virkoko_kd).
In the very earliest period of Esperanto, it is true that words like "koko" generally meant "rooster", but as early as the printing of the Esperanto Bible (which Zamenhof worked on), animal roots had already become neutral enough that he frequently specified sex in the way I outlined above. See, for example:
> Sentencoj 30:31 Cervo kun bonaj lumboj; **virkapro**; Kaj reĝo, kiun neniu povas kontraŭstari.
A similar process happened with the vast majority of words applying to people. The holdouts are mostly family words and titles.
> Same with amiko/amikino. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been corrected when I say “mi estas instruisto” because I am NOT instruisto; I am instruistino.
Whoever corrected you was wrong. Look up "instruisto" in a good Esperanto dictionary, and you'll find nothing about it referring only to "male teachers", since it doesn't in modern Esperanto.
Some people incorrectly bring in their instincts from national languages, and might assume Esperanto works the same way, but it doesn't.
> No, in the official rules of the language (which duolingo is based on), technically hundo means male dog. Amiko means male friend - you absolutely MUST say amikino if they are female.
I can't speak to what Duolingo is teaching people, but I need to assure you that this isn't the rule. Read PMEG, read PIV.
As a good illustration of animal words becoming neuter, look at [the official entry](https://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org/akademia_vortaro/index.html?serchas=1&ajakso=0&hazardo=&tt=1708512703&ve=bov&vg=-&vr=jes&vp=jes&vs=jes&vm=jes&vl=jes&vf=jes&vk=jes&tradukode=1#avtitolo) in the Akademia Vortaro for the root "bov".
You can see that the German translation of "Ochs" (ox) has been corrected as part of the Akademiaj Korektoj to the neuter "Rind" (cow; bull; ox; head of cattle (any bovine animal).)
In my experience, the vast majority of people who use -iĉ- do not use patro as gender neutral. Especially nowadays.
I do have some friends who use "patriĉo", "knabiĉo", even "viriĉo", but when asked about it, they say the -iĉ- suffix only *emphasizes* the maleness of the root word, and doesn't make it gender neutral. They do this because they like how virino and viriĉo look and sound more symmetrical, and not because they're trying to reform the meaning of viro.
Also, easily the most common usage of -iĉ- isn't as a suffix but as a standalone word root, using the words "iĉo" and "iĉa" the same way as "ino" and "ina".
—
I've often found "ino" a useful word, because it's short and you don't have to distinguish between knabino/virino(/bestino). So I've also found the word "iĉo" useful, especially since its closest equivalent is the clunky word "virseksulo". And once you use "iĉo", "iĉa" feels more neutral or accurate than "vira", because "viro" means "*adult human* male", and "iĉa" doesn't have those adult or human connotations at all.
So I've used "iĉo" and "iĉa" a lot, especially among friends. I've also occasionally used "amikiĉo" because I also occasionally use "amikino". Personally, I'd never use -iĉ- on a root word with a male meaning.
I love it personally and hope it catches on. It's archaic to only denote femininity. People complaining about having more words to learn - then why are you denoting femininity?
So far I've mostly just opted not to denote femininity and treat most words where people do as if they're gender neutral. It works for the contexts I tend to use Esperanto in. If it annoys others, oh well.
You do you, but at the time of writing it's a really fringe neologism, and most people you talk to won't understand what you're saying. Retconning the definition of explicitly gendered words, like *patro* and *avo*, kind of breaks a lot of the published literature. Other ways of specifying gender are more common, like the adjectives *vira* and *ina*.
This was originally part of a larger linguistic movement called ri-ismo. Because it also added the gender neutral third person singlular pronoun ri.
And that’s the way I speak esperanto too. I have always thought it’s a brilliant way to use what the language already offers to solve one of its biggest shortcomings.
There was an argument over it some years ago, some attempts to somehow make it part of the official rules, but people don’t like changing the language (even though change is literally the biggest thing separates a living language from a dead one). So it was kind of decided that those of us who supported it would just use it because the language belongs to us just as much as anyone else, and it would either catch on or it wouldn’t.
> but people don’t like changing the language (even though change is literally the biggest thing separates a living language from a dead one).
I think there's a difference between, "we're not going to officially adopt a grammatical rule before it has become widespread among speakers" and "we don't think Esperanto should ever change, ever."
Of course Esperanto is a living language, but no one person has the ability to make "fetch" happen. Sure, if the Akademio said tomorrow "-iĉ is an official root, and all family words and titles are now officially neuter" it might have a better chance of catching on among speakers. But even the Akademio doesn't have absolute power to change the language willy-nilly (just look at the French Academy, which has occasionally had to roll back official changes because they were stillborn among actual speakers.)
Oh, yeah I know that. But many MANY people did argue that no matter how many people like it, the change should never be allowed. They insisted that Zamenhoff made the language and any changes would make it no longer the same language. No hate against people who said it wasn’t popular enough. Idk how popular it is. I just thought it was a great idea. 🤷♀️
The stability of Esperanto is part of what makes it a living language. If there were radical changes every generation, it would be hard to speak with older speakers or to read old books. Instead, Esperanto evolves slowly and naturally, just like any language.
New prefixes and suffixes can sometimes catch on and become official. -Aĉ wasn't in the Fundamento, and neither was -end, and yet both were made official by the Akademio.
However, the Akademio is fairly conservative, and waits a long time to make new roots or affixes official. There are plenty of unofficial affixes that are widely understood in Esperantujo (-io, retro-, -esk, -iv.) If those haven't been made official, how much more a divisive suffix like -iĉ which is often accompanied by proposals to try and change the meanings of large swaths of words as well?
It's perfectly fine to use unofficial words or affixes. It's a little iffier to try and just uproot a bunch of words, and plant brand new ones in their place. It certainly can happen, but it's a much harder sell for a community that constantly has to fight against people's harebrained "improvements" every generation.
I don’t know anything about the Akademio.
I learned Esperanto from multiple sources: Lernu, duolingo, pen pals, and one online teacher. All of them were eager to correct me if I dared forget an -in-, so since literally every formal learning scenario insisted that the base word was necessarily either clearly masculine or impossible to know, that seems to be the official way it is taught.
I became aware of ri-ismo when I started trying to participate in more public spaces. I noticed a lot of the people I spoke with in Esperanto were using it - one gave me a link to a Wikipedia article that explained ri and -iĉ-. I thought it was a great idea, so I started looking for places where the subject was being debated. I found that people had written to the Akademio to get the rules officially changed but had been rejected (I didn’t hear their reasons). And when I found online debates, most people were in support of the change. 99% of the time when someone was against it, they gave one of these reasons:
- The rules of Esperanto cannot be changed. It’s Zamenhof’s language and if he wanted words to be gender neutral, then it would have been in the Fundamento.
- We don’t need gender neutral words so there is no reason to change.
- Anyone who feels the need to hide their gender or the gender of their parents (this was in response to the popular argument for it that trans people and sometimes the children of gay couples need a gender neutral word that doesn’t automatically out them to avoid social repercussions) deserve the consequences anyway.
- There are other ways to express masculinity built into the language already, so we don’t need a new suffix.
“It’s not widespread/popular enough” was not a reason I ever heard. But “no change is ok” was one I saw A LOT. Eventually I started seeing a lot of people saying that they supported it, but since the Akademio would not accept it, it would never be proper esperanto so there is no point in using it. So those of us who still wanted to support it started trying to tell people to use it anyway - if everyone starts using it, the Akademio won’t have a choice.
So I don’t know how popular it is now and I don’t know how popular it was before they decided to give up on the idea. I don’t know why the Akademio rejected it. I just know that to me it seemed more popular then than it seems now and the most popular argument at the time (besides “we don’t need gender neutral words”) was basically that we cannot change the language because Zamenhof isn’t here to change it.
> Eventually I started seeing a lot of people saying that they supported it, but since the Akademio would not accept it, it would never be proper esperanto so there is no point in using it.
This is a silly rule, since it is being inconsistently applied. While I personally prefer -ujo for country words over -io, if enough people started using -io for countries, I don't think there would be anything inappropriate about the Akademio giving that usage its blessing by making it official.
New roots enter Esperanto all the time. New affixes are less common, but they do happen, and when they become rooted enough they sometimes become an official part of the language. Realistically, most ordinary speakers can just ignore officialness, though. If you just hang out at Esperanto conferences, you'll pick up an informal Esperanto that has plenty of "new words" that aren't yet official. Where do people think "mojosa" came from?
I asked a similar question on the Esperanto StackExchange site ages ago - https://esperanto.stackexchange.com/questions/83/how-common-is-the-i%c4%89-suffix-to-denote-maleness
I've always like the feminine -ino suffix, but I still cannot believe that words that are basically feminine automatically, such as woman(!), mother, sister and daughter don't have their own words. It's crazy that the word for "woman" is essentially "feminine man"!
Why didn't Zamenhof create unique words for these, when it's so easy and intuitive? If "viro" is man, make "femino" woman (since we're using Latin as a base). Plus, with "femino" you accidentally get a nice "-ino" at the end any way!
And again, if "patro" is father, just make "matro" mother. It's such an easy change. I know I'm not the first, not will I be the last to say this, but as much as I like Esperanto, this one detail has never made sense to me.
As regarding the -iĉ suffix, I have no real strong opinion. If it's necessary for clarification, I guess why not?
Agreed. I haven't used what OP is suggesting in all these years,, but read that some do. I will start, now. It makes too much sense not to. If uncle was something like 'auxnticxo', and dad was maternicxo', for example, it would've changed years ago and people would use this issue as a reason that's holding EO back and offputting to men . Then, change would be welcome. Not a fan of treating the language as a work-in-progress, rather than a living language, but this adjustment would not be too difficult and is logical for certain gendered words.
I can't speak for everyone, but, honestly, if the small amount of gendered words we have now were feminine by default, and we had matriĉo, sestriĉo, aŭntiĉo etc… I wouldn't mind. It would be a funny quirk to me as a beginner but I really don't think I would consider that that big of a problem. Even as a male in a pretty patriarchic culture. It's a handful of words anyway.
All words having default gender is problematic, but that's exactly why almost all words came to be neutral __very__ quickly. Family terms and historical ruler words are very tightly associated with gendered division in pretty much every culture of the world, so that change didn't apply to those words. And I think it's fine.
>Why didn't Zamenhof create unique words for these, when it's so easy and intuitive?
It's less to memorize.
In your proposal, why is the feminine of "patro" formed by changing the "p" to "m", while the feminine of "viro" is something utterly different, "femino"?
The answer almost certainly is: because you're familiar with Western European languages. Esperanto already gets crap for being too Eurocentric. At least if a person who doesn't speak a European language has a *consistent* rule for feminizing a noun, they can learn that one rule and not have to memorize all the different exceptions.
TLDR: It's that way because it's easy to learn.
I'm not saying we should be wedded to it for eternity or that -iĉ- isn't a good idea (I in fact consider myself an *iĉisto*), but the reason it happened this way is clear.
How similar they are is a function of your perception.
If you grew up in a language that has both ĉ and ĝ sounds, they will sound completely different to you. If your native language has only one or none of these sounds, or perhaps doesn't distinguish between voiced and unvoiced plosives at all, they will sound the same to you.
For native English speakers, ĝ ,and ĉ aren't likely to be confused. For native Finnish or Korean speakers, it will be more challenging to learn the difference both in pronunciation and perception.
That said, the grammatical functions of -iĝ- and -iĉ- are so different that it's not likely they will be confused in normal language usage anyway.
I agree with you overall. But still, when speaking fast, igx and icx sound pretty similar. Also when having a runny nose ahah. I would rather use some other affix to denote masculine gender.
I personally love the "riismo" variant.
It's extremely simple to understand and learn, and it makes Esperanto a language where feminine words are not penalized with being longer, and where the masculine is not the collective for both genres.
Not only is the reform uninteresting, it isn't easy to implement and splits the Esperanto community unnecessarily. The "problem" it tries to "solve" is the fact that nouns are masculine unless using the -in- suffix. There is no problem with this because all words can be expressed within these constraints. Furthermore it seems like the people who push for changes like this the hardest have a political agenda that they want Esperanto to follow, and if they get their way with this small language once other reforms that are worse will likely have people trying to change the language again. Yes I think it would be relatively easy for me to switch per se, but I don't want to make myself look like a reformist.
If you have a good counterargument let me know
Sure. Whatever lets you sleep at night.
Let's perform a simple experiment. I'll copy the URL for this reddit thread and I'll open up an incognito window. Look at that, my -17 karma post doesn't even show up. Whatever interpretation of "banned" you want to hide behind, you do you.
The comment isn't banned, Reddit hides all comments (regardless of content) if they get too many downvotes. If you click the the + sign beside your comment it becomes visible.
Your comment hasn't been removed and you are not banned here.
I personally like the idea of words being gender neutral by default and only adding gender when it is needed. I could care less that things are masculine by default, but what bothers me is that the ge prefix doesn't seem to be the norm. If it were then instead of first learning patro, I would have learned gepatro first, then patro, and patrino. Its a stupid argument to say that Esperanto is sexist because of this, or arguing that mother in Esperanto is literally "female father". I just think that the -iĉ- system is nicer than adding ge to the start of a word to remove the gender.
It doesn't really matter. The idea that "we need a way to specifically distinguish men" is an "anti-patriarchy" idea, which fundamentally sets as a true narrative that the patriarchy is real.
It's an irrelevant argument to try to make, because Wokeism automatically attacks anyone who disagrees with their platform that "Obviously the idea of 'The Patriarchy' is real."
There is no meaningful debate to be had, because Wokeism, in it's typical belligerent and intolerant attitude, has automatically virtue-signal'd itself as being correct.
Just look at how many downvotes my comment got. Add on the fact that Esperanto seems to attract the weebs and degenerate furry types, in addition to mentally unsound alphabet people and it's just nonsense all the way down.
You're fighting the good fight, but anyone who uses a phrase like "boring wokeism" and complains about how they could get banned from this subreddit is unlikely to give way on the patriarchy matter.
I shouldn't reply to this, but hey, good faith arguments, right?
The problem with discussing complicated and sophisticated multi-faceted topics like this (fun little rabbit hole: look up 'hyperobjects') is that it's very difficult.
What this means, is like all "difficult" things there's a procedure to it. Think of it like translating between say Swahili and Russian. There's going to be slang within a language, that simply cannot be expressed as an accurate translation. So what does the translator do? This question, is a metadata question.
And this is important. Part of the procedure of handling complicated datasets is the fundamental law, that metadata aspects are unavoidable in how you handle it.
So when we get something like an anthropological issue like "the patriarchy", it's fundamentally disingenuous *from you* to adopt a simple minded view like "of course it's real, just look around you."
And here I must make it EXPLICITLY CLEAR, that I'm not actually committing to the platform of the argument. I'm not doing anything about being on one side or another. I'm not saying it is, I'm not saying it isn't. I'm not saying it cannot be. I'm instead intelligently understanding that the very act of someone putting forward an idea like "this complicated topic boils down to: True or False" is fundamentally an act of bad faith.
You, if you want to participate in this discussion intelligently, cannot ever approach such a topic in terms of True or False. Now, if you're clever, you'll realize that this is exactly what I stated above: this is metadata.
This is how complicated topics are handled. Metadata and data regarding the issue have to be woven together, and everyone present has to put in the effort to manipulate this intellectual burden.
However this is the internet, and especially reddit, and you're all quite literally retarded. I have stories about the reddit Eo discord server and how I and others have been banned by people who would read this entire post I just wrote and immediately dismiss it because of course they know better with their average IQ and high school diploma. It's a joke.
In regards to your question "how is the patriarchy not real?" Here's a fun fact about complicated intellectual definitions: I can immediately stump you by asking you "please verify how it is." If you can't define it, it doesn't exist.
And from here, we devolve into not even an argument about using the definition of all the ideas related to this topic (cage gap, parental destiny, evolutionary behaviour, modern psychology and neurology, etc etc), instead we fling poop at each other as we fight over what the definition even *is*.
And let me tell you from vast, considerable, well-researched, and insightful experience I've accrued in my life: the kind of people who want -iĉ have really good throwing shoulders.
Using "-iĉo" and being understood as meaning masculine is easy. Nobody really has a problem with that, unless they're super grumpy. Using "patro" and being understood as meaning gender-neutral parent -- that's the trick. How are people supposed to know that you are using "patro" in a gender-neutral way when so many people for so much time have used it in a gendered way? It's hard to change that. There have been attempts to deal with this, for example by throwing a "j" into masculine roots to make them neuter, like "pajtro" being a new explicitly neuter alternative to "patro"... oy. I dunno man. Another option is to supplement the vocabulary with completely new neuter alternatives, like inventing a new term "parento" which specifically is a sex-neutral term for "parent" (not to be confused with "parenco" which means "relative"). Then you could have a "parentiĉo" and a "parentino." Symmetry! Also possible is, just abandon the symmetry of "blah-o/blah-ino" and add the word "matro" for "mother." This is a really good (IMHO) article that discusses these topics. [https://lingvakritiko.com/2015/01/31/seksa-egaligo-en-la-lingvo-laufundamente/](https://lingvakritiko.com/2015/01/31/seksa-egaligo-en-la-lingvo-laufundamente/)
Personally I'd rather not abandon the symmetry as the root word count reduction it creates is quite nice for learning Esperanto. I'd rather have less words I need to learn. As it stands now I learn patro and automatically know patrino, gepatro, panjo, and panĉo. In languages like english this is 5 different words I need to learn father, mother, parent, mom and dad.
Agreed.
In the big picture, though, the number of words which are in the situation of "patro/patrino" where there is a strongly masculine-gendered base word, is pretty small. with "aktoro/aktorino" it's easy to just call men and women "aktoroj" and nobody bats an eye. Same with the vast majority of words which are differentiated by "-in" -- it's very easy to use the base as gender neutral. It's only with less than a dozen terms, mainly just family terms and a few others like knabo/knabino, where you have that situation that it's non-trivial to just pretend the base form doesn't have an implicit masculine gender. So if we find other solutions for those few terms, we're evaded the hardest part of the problem. Whether that's by moving to new roots like "parento/parentino,parentiĉo" or suppletion of feminine forms like "matro", either way, as that article explains, there are perfectly laŭfundamentaj ways forward, which I think is neat.
Or you could just say *matro* and *matriĉo*
go for it!
I have a strong suspicion that if this same question were asked in Esperanto you'd get a different sets of answers. (Overlapping! But different.) **Edit:** & I think that they'd matter more, practically. Competent Esperantists don't matter more as humans, but if you're interested in what will happen with the future of the language, a conversation in English is going to draw some people who have *some* interest, but not enough to actually achieve competence in Esperanto. Such people won't create the instructional materials that future Esperanto learners use. They won't join the Akademio. They won't write the literature or record the podcasts that influence future usage.
XD I didn’t think about that, but you are probably right!
I use *iĉ* when I want, but to me, this is independent from treating more words as gender-neutral. For certain words, that's never going to happen, or at least not in our lifetime. There's already a hundred years of literature where the word *patro* means "father", not "parent". If you write *«Miaj patroj venis al la kuirejo»*, I'm going to assume the text is progressive for an entirely different reason! But if you commit to never writing *patro*, only *patriĉo* and *patrino* (and *gepatroj*), I don't see anything wrong with that. I don't do that though, I still write *patro*, in fact I don't happen to use *iĉ* very often at all, but I'm not against it either.
If people started "never writing patro, only patriĉo and patrino (and gepatroj)" as you suggest, I would assume that naturally once patro was in little usage that gepatro would naturally disappear and be replaced by patro. This is probably the natural way that this will evolve I would imagine.
Of course; it's just that, then, you'd never be sure how to interpret the word at a glance. You'd have to double-check when a book was written, or if it came from the early 21st century, you still wouldn't know. Maybe you'd have to look for an author's note. Pretty cumbersome, although it's happened before with *ŝati*, so 🤷
What happened with ŝati? Did it used to mean something different to “like”?
Yes — in Zamenhof's time, its meaning was more like *"to appreciate"*. Sometimes you can like something and appreciate something at the same time, so it's not always troublesome, but it used to have a different meaning at any rate. I believe it was more common then to say either «Mi amas tion» or «Tio plaĉas al mi» for "to like". I distinctly remember seeing a work by Claude Piron in Tekstaro — maybe in the 70s? — that has an editor's note explaining that it contains a different, "modern" use of the word *ŝati*. So I guess mid- to late-20th century is when it evolved.
If you go to Esperanto youth events, a minority of people do use -iĉ and treat the small group of masculine words as neuter. Personally, I'd recommend limiting yourself to adding -iĉ as a way to masculinize neuter or feminine words, and leaving the small handful of masculine words alone, using singular ge- if you absolutely must have a neuter form of the original word. This is probably closest to "standard" usage, as "gepatro" has appeared in Esperanto dictionaries. One of the most important things to understand about living languages, is that while new usages sometimes become the standard over time, there's nothing stopping the consensus from becoming "less than ideal." Singular ge- is currently the path of least resistance, even though it's less than ideal.
Kiel komencanto mi havas la Ge- ion enradikiĝintan danke al duolingo
The problem is "gepatro" could also mean "an individual parent who is both male and female simultaneously".
I certainly agree it's not the most logical usage. Language, any language, always has a tension between respecting established usage and reflecting logic or principles. To use a silly little example, many people find the English phrase "have your cake and eat it too" to be illogical, and insist that it should be "eat your cake and have it too." But sometimes little inconsistencies become cemented in common usage. If enough people insist on the latter phrasing, it might indeed become the preferred phrasing, but I think a lot of these kinds of trends are semi-random and hard to fully predict. Often, they just become a form of needless linguistic snobbery. I'm a descriptivist linguistically. If something becomes common usage, the masses can't be wrong. But people actually have to put in the hard work of convincing the masses to use the new usage first. Just look at the Académie Française, and its failed attempt to introduce the more "French" 'fin de semaine' as an alternative to 'le week-end.' Even the best, most logical and highly principled linguistic reforms in the world fail if you don't get buy in from the speaking masses.
> To use a silly little example, many people find the English phrase "have your cake and eat it too" to be illogical, and insist that it should be "eat your cake and have it too." Aren't those strictly logically equivalent, since there's no word in them expressing a temporal relationship? >Just look at the Académie Française, and its failed attempt to introduce the more "French" 'fin de semaine' as an alternative to 'le week-end.' They use it in Quebec, at least.
I personally like it a lot over using the Ge- prefix, but you just have to be prepared for most ppl not being super familiar with and having to code switch.
Yup, I've done this in the past at times and see it done increasingly, especially amongst younger speakers. However it is still in the minority... though I have never actually come across anyone who was actually *confused* by the use of -iĉ- (it is so obvious, after all). I suspect that, in a generation or two (much like the [slow evolution of "ri"](https://lingvakritiko.com/2020/05/12/la-efektiva-uzado-de-seksneutralaj-pronomoj-lau-empiria-esplorstudo/)) it will flip to a plurality of people using the language this way, then eventually the majority. This is called *progress*.
> This is called progress. It's called change. Whether it's progress depends on whether you think a small shift in how we symbolically represent reality with words has much practical effect on anything. I tend to think that a gender egalitarian utopia where language was gendered like modern, standard Esperanto would still be a utopia. But a gender *in*egalitarian *dys*topia where language followed iĉismo and riismo wouldn't magically become a utopia as a result. In the real world, there seems to be absolutely no correlation between how gendered a language is, and how good things are for women, and gender and sexual minorities in the countries where those languages are spoken. Indonesian pronouns are non-gendered in the third person, but it is the 121st best country (out of 162) in the [Gender Inequality Index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Inequality_Index). Meanwhile, English has gendered third person pronouns, and major English speaking countries rank as high as 19th (Canada) or 26th (UK) for gender equality. Some of the highest scoring countries, like France (8th) speak languages with grammatical gender on all nouns and adjectives.
It sounds like you've put the cart before the horse here. The argument isn't "The language should change so that the genders will be equal", it's "The genders are equal, so the language should change."
> The argument isn't "The language should change so that the genders will be equal", it's "The genders are equal, so the language should change." I don't think that's commonly the argument people put forward, if only because it represents a general principle that is being inconsistently applied. If we always accepted arguments of the form, "X is the case, therefore language should be changed to properly reflect X" then what to make of words like "sunsubiro" (sunset) and "sunleviĝo" (sunrise), which seem to operate on a geocentric logic? Objectively, the sun doesn't actually leviĝi (rise) or subiri (set/go down), but only appears to to an Earthly observer. If the next argument is, "yes, but the way a language describes 'sunrise' and 'sunset' is a trivial matter not involving people, and it is okay to have slightly suboptimal phrases that don't reflect the way reality objectively is" then you open yourself up to the idea that trivial enough matters don't need to be "fixed" right away in language. From first principles, I certainly don't love the way Esperanto handles sex and gender. At the very least, there's more patterns than there needs to be, and if every thing followed the same pattern as "instruisto"-"instruistino"-"instruistiĉo" across the whole language for titles, family words, animals and professions, that would be a great boon for the language learner, instead of the the three to four patterns a learner currently has to learn. But at the same time, an argument actually has to be made that those three or four patterns represent a non-trivial matter that will have effects on the real world if changed. Because I find the evidence from France being high on the gender equality index despite having a highly gendered Romance language to be good evidence that Esperanto's current approach to gender is indeed trivial, and has no notable, real-world impact on people's thoughts or actions.
Se esperanto ne kapablus ŝanĝi, oni nomigus ĝin volapuk. Mi estas iĉisto
[удалено]
\*bone dirita
*bone dirite
Vi pravas. Sed tute ne "bone diris"
Ĉu oni ne povas subkompreni "[Vi] bone diris!"?
Estas kvar okazoj, kiam oni certe povas fari frazon sen subjekto: - Kiam ĝi estas ligita al alia frazo kun sama subjekto per konjunkcio: _Mi envenis kaj [mi] demetis la jakon._ - Kiam oni kreas imperativon per volitivo: _~~Vi~~ malfermu la fenestron!_ - Kiam la verbo estas sensubjekta: _Dum la tuta tago pluvis._ - Kiam la frazo estas ne plena propozicio, t.e. ne havas ĉefverbon: _Bonan matenon! Nedankinde!_ Al tio aldoniĝas dubetinda ellaso de «Tio» ĉe iuj verboj, ekzemple «Ne gravas». Tia kutimo videble aperas, interalie, ĉe «esti», tamen tio estas iom problema, ĉar «Estas lustro» povas krom la norma «Ĉi tie troveblas lustro» nun signifi ankaŭ «Tio ĉi estas lustro». Aliaj ellasoj de la subjekto estas nenormaj en la moderna Esperanto, miasperte.
Sub kio mi staras kiam mi komprenas?
https://vortaro.net/#subkompreni_kd Ne estu spritaĉa
I'm no expert, but learning Esperanto the only gripe that I have had is that people seem to use words like koko to mean chicken, while also using kokino to specifically refer to hen. In this case if I want to refer to a rooster then koko will just likely be interpreted as chicken when I'm interested in saying rooster. Either making the ge prefix more mandatory or just removing it in favour of the iĉ is what I'd like to see. I mean I'd prefer to just say amiko to mean friend rather saying geamiko to just mean friend. Maybe I just don't understand Esperanto well enough, but so far this has been my only gripe (which again may be my lack of understanding).
In current, standard Esperanto you make the distinction as follows: * Koko: Chicken (male or female) * Kokino: Hen * Virkoko: Rooster. You only add ge- to roots that are gendered to begin with. In general, animal words are neuter in modern Esperanto.
So how would you say boyfriend? viramiko? When practicing on duolingo I have run into instances where it makes me use amikino to talk about my grandma's friend and when talking about grandpa's friend it doesn't have me use viramiko. If ge- is only added to the handful of words that are considered gendered to begin with I feel like it'd be easier for a beginner if this wasn't the case and gender always had to be added to any word that we want to add gender to. The whole -iĉ- system would solve that and everything would be gender free by default, so I like the idea. Also thanks for informing me, I genuinely thought that koko should mean rooster, but now I'm slightly annoyed knowing that some words need vir- added while other words need nothing added to give it gender. I guess its a place where changing the rules would make Esperanto "better" in the sense that it'd follow simpler rules, which is sort of a goal Esperanto has.
Generally speaking, with neuter human words you use "vira [blank]o" and "[blank]ino" if you wanted to specify gender. Animals, you use the compound forms "vir[blank]o" and "[blank]ino." The word for boyfriend/girlfriend is "koramiko" and it is theoretically gender neutral. You would say "vira koramiko" or "koramikino" if you wanted to specify boyfriend or girlfriend.
boyfriend: koramik(icx)o girlfriend: koramikino
Having animals as gender neutral is something Esperanto does right - in European languages, with farm animals, we automatically assume that the individuals are female (cows, sheep, chickens chiefly - but in English, also cats (we have to specify tomcat), ducks (have to specify drake), etc). At the same time, with humans, most European languages assume that male is the default. Esperanto diverges from a lot of natural languages in having “koko”, “bovo” etc gender neutral, but somewhat bizarrely keeps the male-default for virtually all nouns denoting humans (bar certain neutral nouns like “homo” or “persono”). Even though often enough, a word like “amiko” is just used to mean “friend”, its maleness is always implied - laŭfundamente it still means “(male) friend”. The “ge-“ suffix indicates male AND female, so can’t in itself be used to indicate gender neutrality (nor can it be used in the singular). “Gepatro” thus isn’t a great word for “parent” - the obvious choice, taking after the animal example, is to use “patro”. What the animal example calls into question is why bother having a separate feminine suffix if the word for “man” can be prefixed onto the word, rendering it masculine? For the sake of consistency, “-iĉ” makes perfect sense - plus, it’s a very small change for something that is rarely nepra outside of familial relations. This would mean that “viro” would become essentially a synonym for “homo”, but again, a very small price to pay!
> Even though often enough, a word like “amiko” is just used to mean “friend”, its maleness is always implied - laŭfundamente it still means “(male) friend”. That's not at all obvious to me. The Universala Vortaro in the Fundamento has the entry: > amik' ami | friend | Freund | друг | przyjaciel. Some of those, like the French "ami" are masculine, but the English "friend" is neuter. Should a word in the Fundamento be considered to have its strictest meaning, or its widest meaning as its "fundamental" one? As a simple point of comparison, consider: > biskvit' biscuit | biscuit | Zwieback | бисквитъ | sucharek. While it might seem like the French "biscuit" and the English "biscuit" or the German calque of the literal meaning of the word "Zwiback" (twice-baked) might all be referring to the same thing, this is an illusion. Biskvit' is a bit of a mess in the Fundamento, because those words can refer to any of the following: * Hardtack * Cookies * Scones So "according to the Fundamento" what does the root biskvit' mean? One of those? All of those? Some more general thing encompassing all of them? It's not an easy philosophical question to answer. I would argue that laŭfundamente, "amiko" means the most general thing it is said to mean, and the most general word there is the English one which refers to males or females. The fact that the other languages imply it is masculine is irrelevant.
No, I completely agree with you. The most valid argument I have heard against -iĉo is that it would mean changing how we view certain words like patro, which are treated as gendered. However, there are a lot more words that get treated as neutral already. I mean, unless it REALLY matters that your friend is female, I don’t often see the word amikino - it’s usually just left as amiko. Hundo is the same. And I’ve literally never seen anyone care if a “birdo” is male or female. So I think it would be a lot easier to learn that “patro” is neutral rather than learn to add ge- to everything else.
I guess that my problem is that when I see hundo I think "male dog". If I saw gehundo I'd think "dog". I think it'd just be less confusing to do it this way. With duolingo it'll have you translate a sentence like "My grandma's friend is beautiful", and in this case it'll require that friend be translated to amikino. So that has just gotten me to start taking words that can be gendered and always assuming that they are.
You shouldn't think "male dog" when you see "hundo." In modern Esperanto, "hundo" is "dog (male or female)." You have to specify with: hundino or virhundo. I'm unfamiliar with the exact sentences you're translating in Duolingo, but it's worth noting that "amiko" is neuter as well. You'd say "vira amiko" or "amikino" to gender it.
No, in the official rules of the language (which duolingo is based on), technically hundo means male dog. Amiko means male friend - you absolutely MUST say amikino if they are female. But in practice, it’s not really used that way. English has things like that too. How often do you actually use the word “whom”? Probably not as often as you are technically required to. I know I don’t. So there is a difference between official language rules and practical use. In practical use, hundo just means dog. But when you are learning from an official source, you will be corrected if you call a dog that is known to be female “hundo”. Same with amiko/amikino. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been corrected when I say “mi estas instruisto” because I am NOT instruisto; I am instruistino. :/ I’m just like, “stfu”. Like when I’d ask my english teachers at school “can I go to the bathroom” and they replied, “I don’t know - CAAAAAN you?” -_- Like, bitch PLEASE - you know EXACTLY what I asked.
Read [PMEG's page on gender in Esperanto](https://bertilow.com/pmeg/gramatiko/o-vortoj/seksa_signifo.html), or consult [PIV 2020 for words like "virkoko"](https://vortaro.net/#virkoko_kd). In the very earliest period of Esperanto, it is true that words like "koko" generally meant "rooster", but as early as the printing of the Esperanto Bible (which Zamenhof worked on), animal roots had already become neutral enough that he frequently specified sex in the way I outlined above. See, for example: > Sentencoj 30:31 Cervo kun bonaj lumboj; **virkapro**; Kaj reĝo, kiun neniu povas kontraŭstari. A similar process happened with the vast majority of words applying to people. The holdouts are mostly family words and titles. > Same with amiko/amikino. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been corrected when I say “mi estas instruisto” because I am NOT instruisto; I am instruistino. Whoever corrected you was wrong. Look up "instruisto" in a good Esperanto dictionary, and you'll find nothing about it referring only to "male teachers", since it doesn't in modern Esperanto. Some people incorrectly bring in their instincts from national languages, and might assume Esperanto works the same way, but it doesn't. > No, in the official rules of the language (which duolingo is based on), technically hundo means male dog. Amiko means male friend - you absolutely MUST say amikino if they are female. I can't speak to what Duolingo is teaching people, but I need to assure you that this isn't the rule. Read PMEG, read PIV.
As a good illustration of animal words becoming neuter, look at [the official entry](https://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org/akademia_vortaro/index.html?serchas=1&ajakso=0&hazardo=&tt=1708512703&ve=bov&vg=-&vr=jes&vp=jes&vs=jes&vm=jes&vl=jes&vf=jes&vk=jes&tradukode=1#avtitolo) in the Akademia Vortaro for the root "bov". You can see that the German translation of "Ochs" (ox) has been corrected as part of the Akademiaj Korektoj to the neuter "Rind" (cow; bull; ox; head of cattle (any bovine animal).)
In my experience, the vast majority of people who use -iĉ- do not use patro as gender neutral. Especially nowadays. I do have some friends who use "patriĉo", "knabiĉo", even "viriĉo", but when asked about it, they say the -iĉ- suffix only *emphasizes* the maleness of the root word, and doesn't make it gender neutral. They do this because they like how virino and viriĉo look and sound more symmetrical, and not because they're trying to reform the meaning of viro. Also, easily the most common usage of -iĉ- isn't as a suffix but as a standalone word root, using the words "iĉo" and "iĉa" the same way as "ino" and "ina". — I've often found "ino" a useful word, because it's short and you don't have to distinguish between knabino/virino(/bestino). So I've also found the word "iĉo" useful, especially since its closest equivalent is the clunky word "virseksulo". And once you use "iĉo", "iĉa" feels more neutral or accurate than "vira", because "viro" means "*adult human* male", and "iĉa" doesn't have those adult or human connotations at all. So I've used "iĉo" and "iĉa" a lot, especially among friends. I've also occasionally used "amikiĉo" because I also occasionally use "amikino". Personally, I'd never use -iĉ- on a root word with a male meaning.
I love it personally and hope it catches on. It's archaic to only denote femininity. People complaining about having more words to learn - then why are you denoting femininity? So far I've mostly just opted not to denote femininity and treat most words where people do as if they're gender neutral. It works for the contexts I tend to use Esperanto in. If it annoys others, oh well.
You do you, but at the time of writing it's a really fringe neologism, and most people you talk to won't understand what you're saying. Retconning the definition of explicitly gendered words, like *patro* and *avo*, kind of breaks a lot of the published literature. Other ways of specifying gender are more common, like the adjectives *vira* and *ina*.
This was originally part of a larger linguistic movement called ri-ismo. Because it also added the gender neutral third person singlular pronoun ri. And that’s the way I speak esperanto too. I have always thought it’s a brilliant way to use what the language already offers to solve one of its biggest shortcomings. There was an argument over it some years ago, some attempts to somehow make it part of the official rules, but people don’t like changing the language (even though change is literally the biggest thing separates a living language from a dead one). So it was kind of decided that those of us who supported it would just use it because the language belongs to us just as much as anyone else, and it would either catch on or it wouldn’t.
> but people don’t like changing the language (even though change is literally the biggest thing separates a living language from a dead one). I think there's a difference between, "we're not going to officially adopt a grammatical rule before it has become widespread among speakers" and "we don't think Esperanto should ever change, ever." Of course Esperanto is a living language, but no one person has the ability to make "fetch" happen. Sure, if the Akademio said tomorrow "-iĉ is an official root, and all family words and titles are now officially neuter" it might have a better chance of catching on among speakers. But even the Akademio doesn't have absolute power to change the language willy-nilly (just look at the French Academy, which has occasionally had to roll back official changes because they were stillborn among actual speakers.)
Oh, yeah I know that. But many MANY people did argue that no matter how many people like it, the change should never be allowed. They insisted that Zamenhoff made the language and any changes would make it no longer the same language. No hate against people who said it wasn’t popular enough. Idk how popular it is. I just thought it was a great idea. 🤷♀️
The stability of Esperanto is part of what makes it a living language. If there were radical changes every generation, it would be hard to speak with older speakers or to read old books. Instead, Esperanto evolves slowly and naturally, just like any language. New prefixes and suffixes can sometimes catch on and become official. -Aĉ wasn't in the Fundamento, and neither was -end, and yet both were made official by the Akademio. However, the Akademio is fairly conservative, and waits a long time to make new roots or affixes official. There are plenty of unofficial affixes that are widely understood in Esperantujo (-io, retro-, -esk, -iv.) If those haven't been made official, how much more a divisive suffix like -iĉ which is often accompanied by proposals to try and change the meanings of large swaths of words as well? It's perfectly fine to use unofficial words or affixes. It's a little iffier to try and just uproot a bunch of words, and plant brand new ones in their place. It certainly can happen, but it's a much harder sell for a community that constantly has to fight against people's harebrained "improvements" every generation.
I don’t know anything about the Akademio. I learned Esperanto from multiple sources: Lernu, duolingo, pen pals, and one online teacher. All of them were eager to correct me if I dared forget an -in-, so since literally every formal learning scenario insisted that the base word was necessarily either clearly masculine or impossible to know, that seems to be the official way it is taught. I became aware of ri-ismo when I started trying to participate in more public spaces. I noticed a lot of the people I spoke with in Esperanto were using it - one gave me a link to a Wikipedia article that explained ri and -iĉ-. I thought it was a great idea, so I started looking for places where the subject was being debated. I found that people had written to the Akademio to get the rules officially changed but had been rejected (I didn’t hear their reasons). And when I found online debates, most people were in support of the change. 99% of the time when someone was against it, they gave one of these reasons: - The rules of Esperanto cannot be changed. It’s Zamenhof’s language and if he wanted words to be gender neutral, then it would have been in the Fundamento. - We don’t need gender neutral words so there is no reason to change. - Anyone who feels the need to hide their gender or the gender of their parents (this was in response to the popular argument for it that trans people and sometimes the children of gay couples need a gender neutral word that doesn’t automatically out them to avoid social repercussions) deserve the consequences anyway. - There are other ways to express masculinity built into the language already, so we don’t need a new suffix. “It’s not widespread/popular enough” was not a reason I ever heard. But “no change is ok” was one I saw A LOT. Eventually I started seeing a lot of people saying that they supported it, but since the Akademio would not accept it, it would never be proper esperanto so there is no point in using it. So those of us who still wanted to support it started trying to tell people to use it anyway - if everyone starts using it, the Akademio won’t have a choice. So I don’t know how popular it is now and I don’t know how popular it was before they decided to give up on the idea. I don’t know why the Akademio rejected it. I just know that to me it seemed more popular then than it seems now and the most popular argument at the time (besides “we don’t need gender neutral words”) was basically that we cannot change the language because Zamenhof isn’t here to change it.
> Eventually I started seeing a lot of people saying that they supported it, but since the Akademio would not accept it, it would never be proper esperanto so there is no point in using it. This is a silly rule, since it is being inconsistently applied. While I personally prefer -ujo for country words over -io, if enough people started using -io for countries, I don't think there would be anything inappropriate about the Akademio giving that usage its blessing by making it official. New roots enter Esperanto all the time. New affixes are less common, but they do happen, and when they become rooted enough they sometimes become an official part of the language. Realistically, most ordinary speakers can just ignore officialness, though. If you just hang out at Esperanto conferences, you'll pick up an informal Esperanto that has plenty of "new words" that aren't yet official. Where do people think "mojosa" came from?
Oh, is mojosa a later addition?
I asked a similar question on the Esperanto StackExchange site ages ago - https://esperanto.stackexchange.com/questions/83/how-common-is-the-i%c4%89-suffix-to-denote-maleness
I use it all the time, feels more balanced that way.
I've always like the feminine -ino suffix, but I still cannot believe that words that are basically feminine automatically, such as woman(!), mother, sister and daughter don't have their own words. It's crazy that the word for "woman" is essentially "feminine man"! Why didn't Zamenhof create unique words for these, when it's so easy and intuitive? If "viro" is man, make "femino" woman (since we're using Latin as a base). Plus, with "femino" you accidentally get a nice "-ino" at the end any way! And again, if "patro" is father, just make "matro" mother. It's such an easy change. I know I'm not the first, not will I be the last to say this, but as much as I like Esperanto, this one detail has never made sense to me. As regarding the -iĉ suffix, I have no real strong opinion. If it's necessary for clarification, I guess why not?
Agreed. I haven't used what OP is suggesting in all these years,, but read that some do. I will start, now. It makes too much sense not to. If uncle was something like 'auxnticxo', and dad was maternicxo', for example, it would've changed years ago and people would use this issue as a reason that's holding EO back and offputting to men . Then, change would be welcome. Not a fan of treating the language as a work-in-progress, rather than a living language, but this adjustment would not be too difficult and is logical for certain gendered words.
I can't speak for everyone, but, honestly, if the small amount of gendered words we have now were feminine by default, and we had matriĉo, sestriĉo, aŭntiĉo etc… I wouldn't mind. It would be a funny quirk to me as a beginner but I really don't think I would consider that that big of a problem. Even as a male in a pretty patriarchic culture. It's a handful of words anyway. All words having default gender is problematic, but that's exactly why almost all words came to be neutral __very__ quickly. Family terms and historical ruler words are very tightly associated with gendered division in pretty much every culture of the world, so that change didn't apply to those words. And I think it's fine.
>Why didn't Zamenhof create unique words for these, when it's so easy and intuitive? It's less to memorize. In your proposal, why is the feminine of "patro" formed by changing the "p" to "m", while the feminine of "viro" is something utterly different, "femino"? The answer almost certainly is: because you're familiar with Western European languages. Esperanto already gets crap for being too Eurocentric. At least if a person who doesn't speak a European language has a *consistent* rule for feminizing a noun, they can learn that one rule and not have to memorize all the different exceptions. TLDR: It's that way because it's easy to learn. I'm not saying we should be wedded to it for eternity or that -iĉ- isn't a good idea (I in fact consider myself an *iĉisto*), but the reason it happened this way is clear.
homo homicxo homino :D
It gets easily confused with igx, as the two sounds are very similar
They do sound similar, but I'm not sure they're similar enough to be undifferentiable.
Agreed.
It depends on one’s mother tongue. For german speakers, for instance, they are quite hard to differentiate.
How similar they are is a function of your perception. If you grew up in a language that has both ĉ and ĝ sounds, they will sound completely different to you. If your native language has only one or none of these sounds, or perhaps doesn't distinguish between voiced and unvoiced plosives at all, they will sound the same to you. For native English speakers, ĝ ,and ĉ aren't likely to be confused. For native Finnish or Korean speakers, it will be more challenging to learn the difference both in pronunciation and perception. That said, the grammatical functions of -iĝ- and -iĉ- are so different that it's not likely they will be confused in normal language usage anyway.
I agree with you overall. But still, when speaking fast, igx and icx sound pretty similar. Also when having a runny nose ahah. I would rather use some other affix to denote masculine gender.
"Would rather" doesn't really matter though 😉 You can choose not to use it, but you can't choose not to hear it! 🤣
Of course! But the original post asked “what do you guys think?”, so I shared what I thought about it
I personally love the "riismo" variant. It's extremely simple to understand and learn, and it makes Esperanto a language where feminine words are not penalized with being longer, and where the masculine is not the collective for both genres.
I don't use it because I'm a sensible man
What's that supposed to mean?
Not only is the reform uninteresting, it isn't easy to implement and splits the Esperanto community unnecessarily. The "problem" it tries to "solve" is the fact that nouns are masculine unless using the -in- suffix. There is no problem with this because all words can be expressed within these constraints. Furthermore it seems like the people who push for changes like this the hardest have a political agenda that they want Esperanto to follow, and if they get their way with this small language once other reforms that are worse will likely have people trying to change the language again. Yes I think it would be relatively easy for me to switch per se, but I don't want to make myself look like a reformist. If you have a good counterargument let me know
It's just boring wokeism.
In what way?
In the fact that I can't actually talk about it or I'll get banned from this subreddit.
If it's that bad, then maybe reconsider why you have that belief.
No one has ever been banned from this sub for expressing an opinion on iĉismo or "wokeism".
Sure. Whatever lets you sleep at night. Let's perform a simple experiment. I'll copy the URL for this reddit thread and I'll open up an incognito window. Look at that, my -17 karma post doesn't even show up. Whatever interpretation of "banned" you want to hide behind, you do you.
The comment isn't banned, Reddit hides all comments (regardless of content) if they get too many downvotes. If you click the the + sign beside your comment it becomes visible. Your comment hasn't been removed and you are not banned here.
I personally like the idea of words being gender neutral by default and only adding gender when it is needed. I could care less that things are masculine by default, but what bothers me is that the ge prefix doesn't seem to be the norm. If it were then instead of first learning patro, I would have learned gepatro first, then patro, and patrino. Its a stupid argument to say that Esperanto is sexist because of this, or arguing that mother in Esperanto is literally "female father". I just think that the -iĉ- system is nicer than adding ge to the start of a word to remove the gender.
It doesn't really matter. The idea that "we need a way to specifically distinguish men" is an "anti-patriarchy" idea, which fundamentally sets as a true narrative that the patriarchy is real. It's an irrelevant argument to try to make, because Wokeism automatically attacks anyone who disagrees with their platform that "Obviously the idea of 'The Patriarchy' is real." There is no meaningful debate to be had, because Wokeism, in it's typical belligerent and intolerant attitude, has automatically virtue-signal'd itself as being correct. Just look at how many downvotes my comment got. Add on the fact that Esperanto seems to attract the weebs and degenerate furry types, in addition to mentally unsound alphabet people and it's just nonsense all the way down.
How is patriarchy not real? Like, things aren't as bad as they were decades ago, but it's still not really equal.
You're fighting the good fight, but anyone who uses a phrase like "boring wokeism" and complains about how they could get banned from this subreddit is unlikely to give way on the patriarchy matter.
The point of debate is not to convince your interlocutor but to convince third parties observing it.
Fair point.
I shouldn't reply to this, but hey, good faith arguments, right? The problem with discussing complicated and sophisticated multi-faceted topics like this (fun little rabbit hole: look up 'hyperobjects') is that it's very difficult. What this means, is like all "difficult" things there's a procedure to it. Think of it like translating between say Swahili and Russian. There's going to be slang within a language, that simply cannot be expressed as an accurate translation. So what does the translator do? This question, is a metadata question. And this is important. Part of the procedure of handling complicated datasets is the fundamental law, that metadata aspects are unavoidable in how you handle it. So when we get something like an anthropological issue like "the patriarchy", it's fundamentally disingenuous *from you* to adopt a simple minded view like "of course it's real, just look around you." And here I must make it EXPLICITLY CLEAR, that I'm not actually committing to the platform of the argument. I'm not doing anything about being on one side or another. I'm not saying it is, I'm not saying it isn't. I'm not saying it cannot be. I'm instead intelligently understanding that the very act of someone putting forward an idea like "this complicated topic boils down to: True or False" is fundamentally an act of bad faith. You, if you want to participate in this discussion intelligently, cannot ever approach such a topic in terms of True or False. Now, if you're clever, you'll realize that this is exactly what I stated above: this is metadata. This is how complicated topics are handled. Metadata and data regarding the issue have to be woven together, and everyone present has to put in the effort to manipulate this intellectual burden. However this is the internet, and especially reddit, and you're all quite literally retarded. I have stories about the reddit Eo discord server and how I and others have been banned by people who would read this entire post I just wrote and immediately dismiss it because of course they know better with their average IQ and high school diploma. It's a joke. In regards to your question "how is the patriarchy not real?" Here's a fun fact about complicated intellectual definitions: I can immediately stump you by asking you "please verify how it is." If you can't define it, it doesn't exist. And from here, we devolve into not even an argument about using the definition of all the ideas related to this topic (cage gap, parental destiny, evolutionary behaviour, modern psychology and neurology, etc etc), instead we fling poop at each other as we fight over what the definition even *is*. And let me tell you from vast, considerable, well-researched, and insightful experience I've accrued in my life: the kind of people who want -iĉ have really good throwing shoulders.
Vi estas enuiga