Esperanto has no grammatical gender, indeed. However, it isn’t as gender neutral. For example, the word for “woman” (virino) derives from the word for “man” (viro). Lots of other words referring to females (humans or otherwise) can be derived that way. Examples include:
patro (father) → patrino (mother)
onklo (uncle) → onklino (aunt)
kuzo (cousin) → kuzino (niece)
kato (cat) → katino (female cat)
hundo (dog) → hundino (female dog)
This is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it helps with the learning of the language by making it easy to derive words from existing ones, but it also makes it easy for someone ascribe sexism in the language. There’s also no agreed-upon way to make words gender-neutral. There’s a lot of proposals such as listed in this wikipedia article on Esperanto gender reform but I don’t think there’s been a consensus other than “don’t change it!”
Thanks for explaining. So I guess that kind of thing is an artifact of the language being originally designed… what, ~100yrs ago? Still, since the main point is ease of learning and simplicity, maybe this is just something worth putting up with for the time being, no?
Yeah, as far as I’ve seen, that’s the vibe: Esperanto isn’t perfect, it can be improved, but it works and changing it would introduce confusion and would make it harder to learn.
I also sense this unease among the Esperanto-speaking community with regards to changing anything in the language. That allowing any one of the proposed changes will lead to a slippery slope of accommodating any and all proposed changes.
And then there’s the fact that not many of these changes have gained foothold amongst the community (perhaps due to the aforementioned unease in changing anything about the language).
Esperanto has no grammatical gender, indeed. However, it isn’t as gender neutral. For example, the word for “woman” (virino) derives from the word for “man” (viro). Lots of other words referring to females (humans or otherwise) can be derived that way. Examples include:
This is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it helps with the learning of the language by making it easy to derive words from existing ones, but it also makes it easy for someone ascribe sexism in the language. There’s also no agreed-upon way to make words gender-neutral. There’s a lot of proposals such as listed in this wikipedia article on Esperanto gender reform but I don’t think there’s been a consensus other than “don’t change it!”
Thanks for explaining. So I guess that kind of thing is an artifact of the language being originally designed… what, ~100yrs ago? Still, since the main point is ease of learning and simplicity, maybe this is just something worth putting up with for the time being, no?
Yeah, as far as I’ve seen, that’s the vibe: Esperanto isn’t perfect, it can be improved, but it works and changing it would introduce confusion and would make it harder to learn.
I also sense this unease among the Esperanto-speaking community with regards to changing anything in the language. That allowing any one of the proposed changes will lead to a slippery slope of accommodating any and all proposed changes.
And then there’s the fact that not many of these changes have gained foothold amongst the community (perhaps due to the aforementioned unease in changing anything about the language).
Thank you for these thoughts & interesting perspective. :-)