4 ms·

I have a mother, not a fatheress. (Esperanto speakers got the joke)

JdeBP 6y ago
There have been efforts to fix this over the years, but this is indeed a problem with the way that the language was designed.
- anticensor 6y ago
  Esperanto has chosen all words to be masculine positive by default, they could have introduced a feminine-only word like French does though, such as mino.
  - JdeBP 6y ago
    Esperanto didn't choose anything, it being a language not a person. Zamenhof made a choice, but even he considered the alternatives back in the 1880s, albeit that he decided in the end that a balanced gender mechanism that had the masculine as a marked form was too foreign a concept to speakers of existing languages with unmarked and marked masculines, such as English. In the more than a century and a quarter since, there have been efforts to fix this, as I said. Several of them are over four decades old at this point. Use of the prefix "ge-" in the singular (giving "patro" for father, "patrino" for mother, and "gepatro" for parent of unspecified gender) goes back to the 1980s. This has in the decades since even that become mainstream enough that in the last 10 to 15 years "gepatro" is now in Esperanto dictionaries such as Wells's 2010 dictionary. Indeed, it made it into the Plena Ilustrita Vortaro by 2002. * https://vortaro.net#gepatro_kd https://vortaro.net#gepatro_kd The infix "-iĉ-" was another product of the 1970s/1980s. This gives "patro" for parent of unspecified gender, "patriĉo" for father, and "patrino" for mother. It's less mainstream than singular "ge-", but it was popular enough that Jorge Camacho used it in 1991. It's a more logical and consistent system than singular "ge-", but I suspect that resistance to it is partly rooted in the fact that the L1 languages of "Esperantistoj" do not in the majority have unmarked gender-neutrals and marked masculines for similar words. The claim is that it reinterprets a large corpus of existing past Esperanto works, but a counter to that claim is that similar things are currently happening with words like "actor" in English without similar objections. And, finally, Ido reformed this all the way back in 1907. It went the marked masculine route (of Esperanto's "-iĉ-") with the infix "-ul-".
learnstats2 6y ago
I don't see any young people choosing to learn a language which has such problems with gender - when a learner has to deal with this in the first lesson. Assuming male as the default seems to me to be increasingly evolving out of natural languages. Agreeing a reform among Esperanto-speakers seems impossible, given that many are attached to its historical roots.
- anticensor 6y ago
  It is obvious Zamenhof artificially selected the vocabulary to equate grammatical and natural genders. This artificial selection also applied to all words being positive by default: to say bad, you need to say ungood instead.
  - learnstats2 6y ago
    Yes - "implicit assocation tests" for cognitive bias work on exactly this principle: identifying when 'male' follows the same process as 'good'.

There have been efforts to fix this over the years, but this is indeed a problem with the way that the language was designed.

anticensor 6y ago
Esperanto has chosen all words to be masculine positive by default, they could have introduced a feminine-only word like French does though, such as mino.
- JdeBP 6y ago
  Esperanto didn't choose anything, it being a language not a person. Zamenhof made a choice, but even he considered the alternatives back in the 1880s, albeit that he decided in the end that a balanced gender mechanism that had the masculine as a marked form was too foreign a concept to speakers of existing languages with unmarked and marked masculines, such as English. In the more than a century and a quarter since, there have been efforts to fix this, as I said. Several of them are over four decades old at this point. Use of the prefix "ge-" in the singular (giving "patro" for father, "patrino" for mother, and "gepatro" for parent of unspecified gender) goes back to the 1980s. This has in the decades since even that become mainstream enough that in the last 10 to 15 years "gepatro" is now in Esperanto dictionaries such as Wells's 2010 dictionary. Indeed, it made it into the Plena Ilustrita Vortaro by 2002. * https://vortaro.net#gepatro_kd https://vortaro.net#gepatro_kd The infix "-iĉ-" was another product of the 1970s/1980s. This gives "patro" for parent of unspecified gender, "patriĉo" for father, and "patrino" for mother. It's less mainstream than singular "ge-", but it was popular enough that Jorge Camacho used it in 1991. It's a more logical and consistent system than singular "ge-", but I suspect that resistance to it is partly rooted in the fact that the L1 languages of "Esperantistoj" do not in the majority have unmarked gender-neutrals and marked masculines for similar words. The claim is that it reinterprets a large corpus of existing past Esperanto works, but a counter to that claim is that similar things are currently happening with words like "actor" in English without similar objections. And, finally, Ido reformed this all the way back in 1907. It went the marked masculine route (of Esperanto's "-iĉ-") with the infix "-ul-".

learnstats2 6y ago

I don't see any young people choosing to learn a language which has such problems with gender - when a learner has to deal with this in the first lesson. Assuming male as the default seems to me to be increasingly evolving out of natural languages. Agreeing a reform among Esperanto-speakers seems impossible, given that many are attached to its historical roots.

anticensor 6y ago
It is obvious Zamenhof artificially selected the vocabulary to equate grammatical and natural genders. This artificial selection also applied to all words being positive by default: to say bad, you need to say ungood instead.
- learnstats2 6y ago
  Yes - "implicit assocation tests" for cognitive bias work on exactly this principle: identifying when 'male' follows the same process as 'good'.