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Gender Neutrality...

от Kalantir, 15 октомври 2011

Съобщения: 162

Език: English

darkweasel (Покажи профила) 16 октомври 2011, 08:06:37

marcuscf:
Two new affixes have been added to Esperantoso far: mis- and -acx- (*).
And -end.

ceigered (Покажи профила) 16 октомври 2011, 11:49:30

Ginoman:I'm sorry, it's our firemen, policemen, chairman, etc. just my two cents/sense.
I agree, but the English word "man" originally meant "person/human" anyway (only when "were" fell out of fashion did "man" have to fill in the gap).

-er would be a cool alternative though, since it has the cultural relevance... We'd sound a bit more like Afrikaaners than normal but I don't think that's a bad idea!

In Australia we often say fireys* and police/cops though okulumo.gif (*"firies" I guess but being only spoken it's hard to imagine it spelt!)

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But anyway, point for me is that Esperanto doesn't have 1000's of years of usage to back up these slight additions to the meanings of words, and there's no predictable way to guess the "gender" of a word other than its traditional meaning, so the rigid gender of words like "knabo" isn't really set in cement at all unless we choose to continue to follow the meanings.

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On the flipside, there are gender neutral choices available, like infano, junulo.

"Geedzo" for spouse, though, is that a proper term? I thought "ge" had to be used with plurals?

erinja (Покажи профила) 16 октомври 2011, 14:54:50

patrik:We already have the Academy~! It is they who decides and give the orders, not us, mere speakers.
The Academy makes decisions but most Esperanto speakers are unaware of those decisions, and if they were aware, they don't care anyway. It is the body of speakers that makes real changes in Esperanto.

If you want to use -iĉ-, go ahead and use it. It isn't against the Fundamento. I don't use it personally, since I don't see a need. But if you want to use it, just use it, and see if it catches on.

orthohawk (Покажи профила) 16 октомври 2011, 17:10:34

Kalantir:
RiotNrrd:My advice is to just accept it (because it's a firmly established word that isn't going anywhere at this point).
It seems like I don't have much of a choice in the matter, but I feel like that sort of outlook is what prevents Esperanto from being a popular choice for a second language. People seem to really dislike change...
No more so than if you decided that the middle consonant in "mujer" (Spanish for "woman") was "too ugly to be in a word for something so beautiful" and wanted to use another sound.

(yes, I actually heard that "reason" for changing the word)

orthohawk (Покажи профила) 16 октомври 2011, 17:43:02

erinja:

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.
Not to get off on a tangent here, but a phoneTic system would indeed be bad because of the situation above. But a phoneMic system would work: "However you pronounce the "long A" this is how it's spelled" and then use a rule that's already being used in the current system, although for a few phonemes (like "zh" or the voiced "th") there really isn"t a good current rule so e.g. maybe "zh" and "dh" would be used

darkweasel (Покажи профила) 16 октомври 2011, 18:31:21

There is no evidence that Esperanto has not achieved great success because of its linguistic traits.

einarfa (Покажи профила) 16 октомври 2011, 18:32:38

If one wants to go gender neutral (fo' real) Esperanto allows for that: simply stop using the -in-suffix and use ge- with def.male family words (or accept the ideosyncracies).

barat (Покажи профила) 16 октомври 2011, 18:45:07

I don't understand all this uproar about gender neutrality in Esperanto. Does this offend anybody? Can a language be offensive right from its very root? In Polish we have much worse case of male dominance over women:

Kobiety szły ulicą - women walked in the street - feminine flavour of the verb

Kobiety i chłopczyk szli ulicą - women and a little boy walked in the street - this little boy changes the flavour of the verb to masculine.

Isn't it a male domination in the Polish language? Yes, it is. Will the Polish language be changed because of that? No, we (the Polish) don't even notice that! It is just the way our language works. So are the genders in Esperanto, they are only the part of this language.

Solulo (Покажи профила) 16 октомври 2011, 19:26:53

Stop it, barat. Stop it or else the foreigners will go mad. rido.gif

We have; Psy zatrzymały się - the dogs have stopped.
Subject - masculine, predicate - femenine.
Why? Because pies = dog, in spite of being masculine, is non-human so the verb MUST be femenine. To make matters worse it only works in the past tense and future imperfective.

I like it. Why? Because of patriotic reasons. rido.gif

Hands off our gender!

razlem (Покажи профила) 16 октомври 2011, 19:29:06

I think the uproar about gender neutrality (and other features of Esperanto) is that, unlike natural languages, the decision to include them was decided ultimately by one man and his biases.

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