Kalantir:Well, it's become pretty clear that most of you don't think this is something worth changing, but do you at least acknowledge my points to be valid on some level?

No.

- Most people who haven't learned Esperanto (that is, most people who have heard of it) made the decision not to learn it without ever bothering to learn a single thing about the grammar. These people decided not to learn it before they ever even found out that -in- is a suffix and vir- is a prefix. So why would changing this encourage them to learn it?

- People have spent the last 125 years using Esperanto's current system of prefixes and suffixes, without the proposed -iĉ- suffix, and they have understood each other perfectly. It works. Why change what works? Languages change and evolve naturally, but we don't just go in and start changing basic aspects of the way the language works.

- "viramiko" would be perfectly understood to mean a male friend; "virkuracisto" would be understood to be a male doctor. Symmetry in prefixes/suffixes isn't really necessary. However...

- The process of change is that people come up with a new language element and use it. So if you love -iĉ- so much, go ahead and use it. See if it catches on. But it was created some time ago and still hasn't caught on now. Some people might not understand it (it is seldom used by anyone) and other people might get annoyed by you using it, and complain.

- Flux in the language and its vocabulary - Esperanto doesn't really have any more flux than any other language you study. Forum threads like this one give a false sense that the language is less fixed than it really is. I was visiting a friend in Slovakia who showed me a dictionary of the Slovak language, written around 1887 (the year Esperanto was published). He told me that this dictionary has many words that today are considered Czech, and that in fact, Slovak has changed much more than Esperanto has in this time period!

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Many beginners in Esperanto are easily caught up in linguistic fads, reforms, and changes. They are enthusiastic about Esperanto, and they see many aspects of the language that they could improve.

My advice is - wait. Just wait. Learn the language as written, reach a decent level of proficiency. And then just see whether you are still interested in these changes and reforms. Maybe you will be, but most people aren't. I know exactly how you are feeling, because when I was a beginner, I was also eager to correct Esperanto's flaws by adding all kinds of new prefixes and prepositions. I reached fluency and realized that all of those things were unnecessary, so I left them behind. This is such a common experience, which is why people are so unsupportive of your proposed changes. They've heard it all before, they've had many of the same feelings, and as they learned the language, they changed their minds.

erinja:
So why would changing this encourage them to learn it?

It's not a matter of making changes to encourage people to learn it so much as changing it to make it a more pleasant language for people who do learn it.

erinja:
- People have spent the last 125 years using Esperanto's current system of prefixes and suffixes, without the proposed -iĉ- suffix, and they have understood each other perfectly. It works. Why change what works?

With that logic, many modern advancements in technology would never happen. As for languages, lets look at English. It works, so why change it right? Well, maybe because it's a terrible language. Just because I can mow the lawn just fine with a push-mower, doesn't mean it wouldn't be preferable to use a rider-mower. I guess my point is... If there was 2 languages with the exact same number of speakers with the same ethnic distribution, and the 2 languages were exactly the same except one is gender neutral and the other isnt... which one would you use?

erinja:
My advice is - wait. Just wait. Learn the language as written, reach a decent level of proficiency. And then just see whether you are still interested in these changes and reforms.

Well, I suppose it'd be foolish of me to ignore the advice of someone much more experienced than myself. I'll stick with it, but once I become fluent don't be surprised if you see another version of this thread in the viewpoints subforum

Kalantir:With that logic, many modern advancements in technology would never happen.

Pitting the evolution of a spoken language against the pace of modern technological development is a specious argument, and you know it.

Maybe it's worth not being so harsh towards Kalantir. It might only backfire, in that he might give up learning Esperanto altogether.

It seems to be a normal part of the learning process to contemplate possible 'improvements' to Esperanto. I remember doing this myself! I suppose we can only explain how Esperanto currently works.

Changes are of course possible to a degree, but this requires the whole community of Esperanto speakers to gradually move in a certain direction over time. That explains why '-iĉ-' hasn't taken off. The vast majority of Esperanto speakers have so far managed perfectly well without this.

It is generally the case that Esperanto speakers prefer to stick as close as possible to the language as presented in the Fundamento, as the very purpose of this document is to guarantee stability to the language. It guarantees that the fundamental qualities of Esperanto are not lost. Adherence to the Fundamento also ensures that Esperanto doesn't become a bloated language similar to other national languages. This would defeat the whole purpose of the language.

It is very interesting to read texts written by Zamenhof himself - they are perfectly understandable to us now as the core aspects to Esperanto have remained constant. This couldn't be said about national languages.

RiotNrrd:
Pitting the evolution of a spoken language against the pace of modern technological development is a specious argument, and you know it.

While it's probably true that erinja doesn't hold the same view towards technological advancements as she does towards Esperanto, I still believe that spoken language loosely falls under the same category. Spoken language is a tool that humans use on a daily basis and I feel that it should be as advanced as humanly possible. Why should we settle for imperfection simply because it was passed on to us from the previous generation?

Maybe it's because I'm still young and naive, but I don't understand why people are so stubborn when it comes to change in languages. Like English for example. Is it really too much to request we make our language phonetic? Dictionaries already have a pronunciation guide for every word in the English language. Wouldn't it make more sense to just use that as the actual way to spell words? Hardly anyone wants to do that because they are so dead set on settling with the terrible language mechanics passed down to us from our forefathers. People are so quick to label change as bad simply because they are too lazy to learn the new way of doing things. The gender reform of Esperanto is even less of an issue then making English phonetic. It would such a painless switch. It's as simple as knowing that all roots are gender neutral and icx implies that it is masculine. If we really want this to be an international language, doesn't it make sense that we should have it be as neutral(in every aspect) as possible?

Chainy:Maybe it's worth not being so harsh towards Kalantir. It might only backfire, in that he might give up learning Esperanto altogether.

I appreciate your comment, but I honestly don't feel like anyone has really been harsh towards me. People shouldn't ever feel uncomfortable with expressing their thoughts and opinions so long as they can do so in a civilized manner. Nobody has been vulgar or rude to me in any way. Different people have different opinions and I accept that. And you don't have to worry about me giving up on Esperanto. I've already pretty much decided that it's the best language out there with the possible exception of Ido which has hardly any speakers...

It totally makes sense that Esperanto would have a little bit of a bias towards the male gender based on the year it was developed... but society evolves, and we should do our best to make sure everything matches the times.

In any case... this thread doesn't have much of a point anymore. I mainly just wanted to see how many people were in on the gender reform movement and apparently it's not anywhere near enough... so, I guess I lose. It's not the end of the world though. Maybe one day it'll become the most widely spoken language in the world. The gender reform could easily happen at any point between now and then or aftwerwards...

Changes do occur to the language. It's just that they happen organically, not in a planned (or particularly fast) fashion.

The word for computer (komputilo) has changed. It USED to be that komputilo meant "calculator", and "komputeko" meant "computer". Now... not so much. I don't believe anyone decided on that change. It just happened over time.

The verbalization of adjectives ("estas vera" = "veras") is something that was apparently not done much in the early days, even though it doesn't violate any rule. It has become more and more common over the years, however, leading David Jordan - the author of "Being Colloquial in Esperanto" - to posit that it will likely become the standard within a few decades. (That is a fantastic book, by the way, and well worth adding to your bookshelf).

The "ĥ" character is slowly on its way out (although it'll probably never be eradicated completely). It has generally been replaced by "k" in words where it used to appear. It's still a perfectly valid letter, and it has its fans, but the trend appears to be against it.

Changes happen. But they tend to happen slowly. It really is best for beginners to fully understand the level of (non-political) conservatism Esperantists display. You are nowhere near the first person to come up with an idea to improve the language. Seriously, there have been a TON of them over the years; probably more proposals than you can imagine, as practically every beginner comes up with a few (myself included).

Nearly all proposals for changes to the language will be met with outright dismissal by the majority of Esperantists. Some are more impolite about it than others (although I think we've avoided that so far), but it's something to bear in mind if you want to keep from being disappointed that no one is enthusiastically supporting your ideas. It is a nearly inevitable reaction to such proposals.

Until you are quite fluent in the language, it is probably best to adopt the idea that Esperanto "is what it is", and just learn it that way, warts and all. There will be plenty of time to try and convince others to do things differently, and being fluent will give your arguments considerably more weight than they have coming from a beginner.

If I wrote Esperanto, I would have done genders differently. But I think it works fine as it is, and I think that changing it now would add unnecessary confusion. There is no perfection; someone can always think of this or that improvement, and at a certain point, you have to say "it's good enough now, this is going to be the normative form". For Esperanto, that point came in 1905, and the Esperanto speakers at the time voted on it. You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and everyone has a different idea of what's perfect.

At any rate, Esperanto is certainly evolving naturally, so it's far from static. We get new words to describe new concepts all the time. And within the bounds described by the Fundamento, I think you'd be surprised at the amount of innovation found in the use of the grammar.

On sexism in the language, I firmly believe that sexism is found in people, not in languages. Esperanto isn't as gender-neutral a language as I might prefer. But Swedish is a highly gendered language; Chinese doesn't have grammatical gender and doesn't even differ between male and female in pronouns (both are pronounced "ta", though they are distinguished in writing). However, I definitely wouldn't say that China has a better history of male/female equality than Sweden.

Some beginners see Esperanto as being more open to innovation than other languages. A person who would learn French and accept its idiosyncrasies without proposing "improvements" and "repairs" suddenly starts up with Esperanto, and has a long list of changes they'd like to make, and they get annoyed at Esperanto speakers for not accepting their marvellous list of changes. It's likely that whatever this beginner is proposing, they've heard it before. It's nearly always beginners, so this is an extra difficulty, that this person has not bothered to learn the language thoroughly, to see how it really works, before proposing their changes.

I'm not saying that this is you, but it happens all the time, and it's the reason why Esperanto speakers tend to be dismissive of proposed changes, if not downright rude.

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On English, one major impediment to phonetic spelling is dialect and accent. Ceigered's phonetic English would look very different from ours. If the English-speaking world were to have a normative phonetic spelling, you would still have to memorize a lot of spellings, at least some of which wouldn't match your local pronunciation.

What about the thoughts that this gender problem reflects sexism in the structure of Esperanto?

Wouldn't that be the legitimate case for seriously thinking about reforms?

RiotNrrd:The word for computer (komputilo) has changed. It USED to be that komputilo meant "calculator", and "komputeko" meant "computer". Now... not so much. I don't believe anyone decided on that change. It just happened over time.

I think you mean "komputero" for the older word. That was the word suggested by the Academy of Esperanto, and the speaking community preferred the constructed word komput/il/o, though usage.

It's a funny one, because some people do still use "komputero", and it's almost all old people.

erinja:I think you mean "komputero" for the older word. That was the word suggested by the Academy of Esperanto, and the speaking community preferred the constructed word komput/il/o, though usage.

It's a funny one, because some people do still use "komputero", and it's almost all old people.

Oops. You're right. I don't use the word "komputero", either, so I remembered it wrong.

My bad.