Gender Neutrality...
从 Kalantir, 2011年10月15日
讯息： 162
语言: English
ceigered (显示个人资料) 2011年10月16日上午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
(*"firies" I guess but being only spoken it's hard to imagine it spelt!)----
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.
----
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 (显示个人资料) 2011年10月16日下午2:54:50
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 (显示个人资料) 2011年10月16日下午5:10:34
Kalantir: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.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...
(yes, I actually heard that "reason" for changing the word)
orthohawk (显示个人资料) 2011年10月16日下午5:43:02
erinja: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
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.
barat (显示个人资料) 2011年10月16日下午6:45:07
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 (显示个人资料) 2011年10月16日下午7:26:53
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.
Hands off our gender!
