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Female version

de ShannonCC, 23 octombrie 2013

Contribuții/Mesaje: 9

Limbă: English

ShannonCC (Arată profil) 23 octombrie 2013, 15:22:53

I'm slightly confused about when to use female versions of things.

With an example from the lesson I'm doing now

"Ŝi studas. Ŝi estas studento."

From previous lessons (which, I admit, I might have misunderstood), I thought it would have been Ŝi estas studentino.

So when do you have to use the female version and when does it not matter?

evanamd (Arată profil) 23 octombrie 2013, 15:47:46

I think nowadays, the -in- suffix is only required if the noun is inherantly masculine (patro vs patrino), or you wish to make it clear that you're referring to a female (Mi vidas belan studentinon).

Back in Zamenhof's day, most words were assumed masculine, which is why the -in- suffix exists, but there is no corresponding male suffix. In modern times, most words are presumed to be gender-neutral, leading to a bit more ambiguity and a proposed male suffix (-iĉ-).

erinja (Arată profil) 23 octombrie 2013, 17:05:10

You neglected to mention that -iĉ- is not strictly necessary, since Esperanto grammar has long included the masculine prefix vir-

So in modern Esperanto, for most people, a "studento" could be a man or a woman. A studentino would be a female student, a virstudent would be a male student.

It's like the animal words; bovo = any bovine, virbovo = a bull (male bovine), bovino = a cow (female bovine).

Nile (Arată profil) 23 octombrie 2013, 20:15:40

Yeah, but -iĉ- makes the system regular, which is what Esperanto's all about.

erinja (Arată profil) 23 octombrie 2013, 20:59:56

Having a male prefix and a female suffix isn't irregular, it's just the way it is. Esperanto has both prefixes and suffixes.

Is Esperanto irregular because dis- is a prefix and -ar- is a suffix? Is it irregular because fi- is a prefix and -aĉ- is a suffix? Because ge- is a prefix and -in- is a suffix? And incidentally, anyone who feels strongly about symmetry in suffixes should logically come up with a suffix instead of ge-; if we show all gender-related ideas as a suffix, then obviously mixed gender should be a suffix and not a prefix.

Anyone supporting -iĉ- is fighting a losing battle. Use it if you want to but it hasn't gone anywhere significant since it was devised, and I haven't seen it increase in use. And encouraging beginners to use it is bad news; anyone using -iĉ- is understood to be making some kind of 'political' statement, and generally beginners want to be speaking with normal language, not making some kind of statement that they are not even aware of the meaning of.

Benjamino (Arată profil) 24 octombrie 2013, 00:29:24

When you say "Ŝi estas studentino", you're being a little redundant. You already made her gender clear with the pronoun, so the suffix adds no information to the sentence.

If you wanted to say "La studentino estas bela", the suffix there adds information to the sentence. If the student was male and you wanted that to be explicit, you could say "La virstudento estas bela" or "La vira studento estas bela".

Bemused (Arată profil) 24 octombrie 2013, 00:58:28

The problem with using virbovo is that man ox could easily be interpreted as Minotaur.
So speakers have to learn that it has a meaning which may not be immediately obvious.
The use of an affix, which specified male, rather than man, would overcome this potential misunderstanding.

RiotNrrd (Arată profil) 24 octombrie 2013, 01:11:11

Bemused:The problem with using virbovo is that man ox could easily be interpreted as Minotaur.
So speakers have to learn that it has a meaning which may not be immediately obvious.
Are there many situations in which the context wouldn't make clear which was meant, a bull or a minotaur?

I mean, there's not a lot of minotaurs on your typical ranch, nor bulls in your typical labyrinth.

Additionally, according to the Benson dictionary at least, the Esperanto word for minotaur is minotaŭro, not virbovo.

It's true that someone could write a story about a minotaur on a cattle ranch, and, not knowing the actual word, use virbovo to describe it. I'd say they needed to work on their vocabulary a bit.

RiotNrrd (Arată profil) 24 octombrie 2013, 01:40:27

Nile:Yeah, but -iĉ- makes the system regular, which is what Esperanto's all about.
There are no rules about what must be a prefix and what must be a suffix, nor any that say that an affix pair with similar meanings (such as gender, in this case) must normally be either both suffixes or both prefixes, but never one and the other. The vir-/-in setup in standard Esperanto doesn't break, or even bend, any of the sixteen rules.

Regularity is a part of what Esperanto is all about. But this is not an example of an irregularity. It's just an asymmetry. Though they might violate one's aesthetic sense, asymmetries are allowed.

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