Gender reform in Esperanto

There are numerous proposals to regularize grammatical and lexical gender in the constructed language Esperanto.

Gender in Esperanto

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. A couple dozen noun roots are lexically masculine, and a smaller number lexically feminine. Most (though not all) of the masculine roots may be made feminine through the addition of the suffix -ino. However, there is generally no equivalent word that is gender neutral. For example, patro means "father" and patrino "mother", but there is no Esperanto word for "parent".

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"
• Words for boys and men: knabo "boy", viro "man"
• Titles: fraŭlo "bachelor", grafo "count", princo "prince", reĝo "king", sinjoro "mister, sir"

In addition, kuzo "cousin", bubo "brat", and amiko "friend" are generally considered to be masculine, but under English influence are increasingly becoming gender neutral.

Gender-neutral roots such as leono "lion" and kelnero "waiter" may be made feminine (leonino "lioness", kelnerino "waitress"), but there is no comparable way to derive the masculine. Gender is one of the aspects of the language that is most frequently targeted for criticism, especially as it is seen as easy to "fix".

Common elements to regularizing Esperanto gender

Some people 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.

Reforms tend to center around a few key areas:

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

Two specific remedies recur repeatedly, as they derive from the existing resources of the language. These are the masculine suffix *-iĉo, the epicene prefix *ge-, and the epicene pronoun *ŝli.

Masculine suffixes

Perhaps the earliest proposal for a masculine suffix was *-uno. *-Olo is also occasionally seen. However, the most common today is *-iĉo.

*-Uno was created through ablaut of *-ino. It is, in fact, the only such possibility, as -ano, -eno, and -ono already exist. *-Iĉo is popular because it 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 half a century ago. The resulting paradigms are as follows:

	Standard	U-proposal	Ĉ-proposal	Trans.	Endearment	Trans.
Neuter	—	*patro	*patro	"parent"	—	—
Feminine	patrino	patrino	patrino	"mother"	panjo	"mama"
Masculine	patro	*patruno	*patriĉo	"father"	paĉjo	"papa"

There have been a few published books which use *-iĉo.

Advocates of one proposal sometimes claim that the competing proposal is confusing because it resembles another suffix, for example that *patriĉo "father" resembles (standard) 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, and the brain soon filters out such similarities as meaningless. The Ĉ-form *nepiĉo "grandson" is homonymous with ne piĉo "not a vagina", but this is slang; the official meaning of piĉo is "musical pitch".

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 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, as in gepatroj "mother and father". It is only seen in the singular in exceptional cases, such as gelernejo "a coeducational school" (from ge- and lernejo "school"). From this, singular "gepatro" would mean either a person who is both mother and father to the speaker, or perhaps a hermaphrodite. However, such meanings do not normally occur, and in conversation singular ge- is not uncommonly extended to meanings such as gepatro "*a parent" when a speaker either doesn't know or doesn't with to reveal the gender of the noun. Many gender-reform proposals would make such "substandard" speech 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.

Remaining 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, some people retain an additional word or two as inherently masculine, and adopt a separate root for the feminine. The primary example of this is viro "a man", with femo for "a woman", as Esperanto already has words for the neuter equivalent, adolto "an adult" and plenkreskulo "a grown-up". This retention may be due to the number of established masculine derivatives of the root vir-, such as the adjective vira "male" and the common gender work-around of using vir- as a masculine prefix. Another neologism which has come into limited use is matro "mother", from Latin and Ido.

The word eŭnuko "eunuch" has given rise to the back-formation suffix -uko for castrated people or animals, creating forms such as bovuko from bovo "bull/cattle" to replace okso "steer". These are, of course, all masculine.

Gender-neutral pronouns

As in English, Esperanto has a personal pronoun for "he", li, and "she", ŝi, but no good way to avoid mentioning gender in such situations. Paraphrasing li aŭ ŝi "he or she", as in English, quickly becomes tiresome. 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" (for many people the default pronoun when gender is not known), 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 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, and indeed in many European languages this is grammatically required. A shift from li and ŝi to ĝi could be argued 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 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".

In European languages, in such expressions "one" is understood to mean "we", and in any case is not 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 logophor:

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

Although not a full solution, as si refers back to a previous 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:

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.

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

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

This is rare.

New pronouns

If a new pronoun is to have the consonant-i form of existing pronouns, only a few possibilities remain in the language: bi, gi, hi, (ĥi), *ji, ĵi, ri, *ŭi, zi. Of these, *ji and *ŭi violate Esperanto phonotactics, and in any case would be impractical for many people to distinguish from the i- pronouns and vi. In addition, the letter ĥ has become rare, and by many speakers is no longer used at all. Other forms are also potentially problematic: hi would be confounded with the i- pronouns by people who drop their aitches (though many of them could pronounce it something like ĥi); likewise, ĵi would have a tendency to be confused with or mispronounced as ĝi, and likewise ri with li. Such pronouns might be usable, but the likelihood of confusion would need to be accommodated.

Although several of these have promise—zi has parallels in Dutch, and the similarity between ĵi and ĝi would not be a problem for people who do not distinguish those words in their native languages anyway—only three are at all common: gi, hi, and ri. There is also a not uncommon form ŝli.

Gi is a popular proposal because it is iconic: in writing, it resembles ĝi, which it also resembles in meaning, and it is also similar to the occasionally epicene prefix ge-. This makes it readily recognizable.

Making li the epicene pronoun is also a common approach, as it is obviously related to the epicene plural ili "they". Such approaches then diverge in how to treat the masculine. This may simply be abandoned, reducing the inventory to li "s/he" and ili "they", or a new masculine pronoun may be created. The most popular new pronoun 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 riismo, 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 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 using *ri as a pronoun causes 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 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.

Pronoun proposals

	Official	Ĝiism	Ŝliism	Giism	Liism	Riism	Hiism
Epicene	—	ĝi	ŝli	gi	li	ri	li
Masculine	li	li	li	li			hi
Feminine	ŝi	ŝi	ŝi	ŝi			ŝi
Neuter	ĝi	ĝi	ĝi	ĝi	ĝi	ĝi	ĝi
Plural	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, ŝli, or si that use the existing forms of the language, as can be seen by the occasional occurrence of ŝli.

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

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, and problems with vir-. In English.
• Aŭrorurbo—an example of a featured Esperanto Vikipedio article that uses ŝli.
• Gorbuŝo—an example of a Vikipedio article that uses iĉo, though as an independent word for "male", not as a suffix.