Hi all.

I've been trying to think about words for e.g. sexual orientation in Esperanto, and I was hoping if we could start a conversation about it.

As I understand it, Esperanto uses derivatives of seks-em-a or seks-am-a interchangably, along with a root to define which way it's "pointing". So Reta Vortaro lists heterosexual as aliseksema and homosexual as samseksema. Words for bisexual and pansexual aren't listed, but aren't that hard to derive (duseksema and ĉiuseksema, respectively?). All well and good.

But this is still rather limited. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing; most English speakers have a pretty limited understanding of this kind of thing. But as a member of the asexual movement, I want to extend it a lot further.

First and more easily: 'asexual'? It doesn't have an RV entry or a wikipedia article, but I would probably say neseksema. And seksemeta for grey-asexuality.

But there are multiple spectra. As a brief exposition, people in the asexual community like to separate four different types of orientation for four different types of activities one could be urged towards: -sexual for intercourse, orgasmic things, etc., -romantic for dating, marriage, etc., an -aesthetic for who you have an urge to look at (don't stare, self, no!) and -sensual for who you have the urge to engage in sensual (as opposed to sexual) things with: kissing, hugging, cuddling, etc.
E.g. "Oh hi, I'm asexual, panromantic, and homoaesthetic, and heterosensual. What are you?!"

Obviously many people have a lot of overlap between these different orientations - thus why a lot of people don't tend to differentiate them - but not everybody experiences these things in the same way, so it would be nice to be able to Esperanto about them properly!

Using what I've already brought up, -seksama would seem to be a good fit to translate -romantic, but could be confusingly ambiguous given its prior usage. And -seksema could be good for mushing them all together, but seems pretty useless for more specific. Also, this would require differentiating between emotions and subjective feelings and objective action, which -em- is more commonly used for, right?

Thoughts anyone?

Anyhow, probably most of people wouldn't know what you mean so it doesn't matter what you'll choose . You can just add an adverb to the adjective: seksume (-sexual), emocie (-romantic), estetikece (-aesthetic), sensece/karesece (-sensual),
Assexual - for example senseksarda.

I've always wondered what is the best translation for "asexual" (as in "orientation", not "asexual reproduction" ). Surprisingly, I cannot find an accepted translation anywhere. The Esperanto Wikipedia doesn't even have an article on asexuality among its ~200k entries.

When I've asked the question before, some people suggested senvolptulo but this doesn't sound appropriate. I am used to the root seks- being used in the sense of "vira sekso" or "ina sekso", not the other sense, so neseksemulo or senseksemulo doesn't sound right either. Neamoremulo is the closest and most direct word I could think of.

More generally, concepts like "aromantic" or "biromantic" aren't well-understood outside the asexual community, so few people are likely to understand you if you try to express them in a single word. I suggest using some phrase like romantike ambaŭseksema, estetike samseksema, etc.

Hmm I looked up volupt- and Reta Vortaro defines it as "pleasure of the senses causing great viva ("living"? "life-based"? "life-long"?) pleasure". In which cause senvoluptulo would seem to work better for asensual people under the definition given. I did do a quick google search for "asexual Esperanto", and out of my first five results one was off-topic, two didn't know, one only talk about the green-grass-growing kind, and the fifth said (ding ding! we have a winner!) senseksemulo. Which would I guess be the noun form. Call me an impatient English-speaker, but I like to use the adjectives when I can; takes less time to say

I see what ĉi-vi are saying about the adverb method, though. It would probably work better for communication, even if it's a bit unwieldy.

In samseksema and aliseksema we are talking about orientation towards persons of a certain sex, female or male (ina sekso aŭ vira sekso). Senseksa therefore is asexual in a biological sense.

Seksumi is to go at it, have your wicked way with.

Persons of low libido might be senlibidaj.

Most European languages have a word like Sexuel or Sexual, so we have a possible rule 15 justification for 'seksuala', which would carry a different meaning to seksa.

Therefore ne-seksuala could be used for asexual in the sexual orientation sense.

Just a side note: bisexual translates very concisely as geema, although it does make use of ge-, which may be frowned upon.

I've never heard "geema", the usual word is "ambaŭseksema".

DerMoi:Just a side note: bisexual translates very concisely as geema, although it does make use of ge-, which may be frowned upon.

My first reaction is that this is a non-standard usage of ge-, which is traditionally appended to substantive (noun) roots describing a person to indicate the presence of both genders, in the plural.

gepatroj - father and mother; both parents collectively.

geamikoj - friends of both genders; mixed company

I've never heard geema, though I'm reminded of the slang gedormi (i.e. amori). On the other hand, I can see the appeal of this form.

More interesting to me is how to best translate "asexual". I finally created the Vikipedio article on Neniuseksemo and nobody complained, but I wonder if an even more precise alternative is available ...

The biggest problem with conversations like this is that they fundamentally fail to understand language. They assume that a word in one language must necessarily have a one-to-one mapping onto another language. Actually, "pansexual" and "asexual" are very imprecise terms that describe broad spectrums of orientations that a fluent Esperanto speaker can probably describe much more precisely in their own words. Esperanto allows such freedom of expression that trying to map English words onto Esperanto ones would be primitive at best.

In English I might call myself pansexual, whereas in Esperanto, if I had to use one word to describe my sexual orientation, I would say "seksprifajfa." This word reflects not only my sexual orientation but also my individual personality, which is hard to do with one word in English! But someone else might use a totally different word to describe their sexual orientation, and that's OK too. We do the same thing all the time in English; that's how words like "pansexual" came into existence.

I would translate "asexuality" broadly as "neamoremo" or "neseksumemo", but I'm not asexual.

In English I might call myself pansexual

What is the difference between this and bisexual?

if I had to use one word to describe my sexual orientation, I would say "seksprifajfa."

I can't quit break this word down into something meaningful. I got the first word, which is sekso but I can't figure out the rest.