Clarence666:Right, but they started writing absurd books about "sex justice in language" only 30 years ago. And the present language much differs from the language from 30 years ago. Just pick some texts and compare. The German community lacks, guess what, a usable Academy (like Esperanto does), instead, the infamous "feminazi" groups control the language. AFAIK the last language reform occurred 1911, since then, nobody, except "feminazi" groups, ever succeeded to change anything.

Seriously, that's enough with the "feminazi" talk.

Also - this is the English forum. Please include English translations if you want to put lengthy Esperanto-language discussion into your messages.

Bovo, could be bull, or could be oxen, depending on the point of view of the person writing and the point of view of the person reading. So one could write one thing and another could interpret it differently. Not great if you are in the cattle business.
Solution, vir prefix, virbovo, could be bull or could be some mythical creature half man half ox. Not great if you are at a cattle sale and the minotaurs break loose.
Solution, new word, tauro. Clear, unambiguous, and not likely to start a stampede.

Cxevalo, etc etc
Solution, stalono. Clear, unambiguous and not likely to scare the horses.

Continue the pattern, introduce a new word meaning adult male for every species. So much for the language that claims to ease the learning load by widespread use of affixes.

Alternate solution, icx suffix, meaning "male". Introduce new words as synonyms for those words that are understood by all to be male only using the icx suffix in those words, eg patro = genitoricxo. Keep the words that have evolved/(devolved?) into being gender neutral and add icx to denote male. Fewer words introduced, zero potential for ambiguity.

Of course this is all mere discussion. The reality is that the language will evolve depending not on what people say about the language but by what they say in the language. In other words the language will evolve depending on how the majority of speakers use it, and not academic discussion that something is superior to something else, or what is allowed by the fundamento

I don't really see how gepatroj → gepatro works as an expansion.
Tradional ge- means "both sexes present" (originally even "as a pair"; Zamenhof did not use e.g. gesinjoroj to talk to an audience), while the innovative singular use actually states the opposite: "only one sex present (but I don't know which)".

As gepatroj etc. is some kind of group, I think gepatrano would do the trick, much better than patrulo, which is indeed odd.

Another problem: AlanHartwell is right, both kok' and bov' are defined in the Universala Vortaro as the male animals, not the general species. Sh*t, didn't know that before. This may come from the manner chicken and cattle is breeded (many females, few males; in comparison e.g. to the neutral katoj and ĉevaloj).

By the way: Wouldn't it be kontraux-Fundamenta to change the meaning of "ge-" (even if it's just an "expansion")?

> "geptrano"
Hmm, kind of. But it somehow presupposes that "gepatro" is a conglomerat of things/persons. So it just softens the trouble with "gepatro" a little bit.

Kirilo81:I don't really see how gepatroj → gepatro works as an expansion.
Tradional ge- means "both sexes present" (originally even "as a pair"; Zamenhof did not use e.g. gesinjoroj to talk to an audience), while the innovative singular use actually states the opposite: "only one sex present (but I don't know which)".

As gepatroj etc. is some kind of group, I think gepatrano would do the trick, much better than patrulo, which is indeed odd.

Another problem: AlanHartwell is right, both kok' and bov' are defined in the Universala Vortaro as the male animals, not the general species. Sh*t, didn't know that before. This may come from the manner chicken and cattle is breeded (many females, few males; in comparison e.g. to the neutral katoj and ĉevaloj).

In my mind when I use a word like "gepatroj" I am talking about a group of people where both sexes should be present, but might not be. I can use it when I don't know the exact composition of the group I'm speaking of, so it's more like "ge-" == "both sexes (possibly) present". With this in mind the singular usage is most correctly interpreted as "possibly female, possibly male".

As Broso pointed out earlier it is nonsense to interpret "gepatro" as being some kind of hermaphrodite parent, because this would directly extend to "gepatroj" and any other commonly used plural forms (if we're strict with "patro" this doesn't make sense because it implies a "father" who is both male and female).

Also, how about "edukinto" as parent? This combined with the more biologically specific words covers pretty much any case of "parent" I can think of. Who says there must be one word for "parent" anyway? Is it not better to be more specific?

Clarence666:This is my friend Joyce.

Se iu provizos gxustan kaj efikan tradukon, mi neniam plu skribos pri la problemo.

I think this point is moot. There is no 1-to-1 mapping between languages, and this lack doesn't make one language less or more suited for human communication than the other (and by no means makes a language "foriginda" ). And it doesn't make it necessary to imitate the behaviour of one language in the other.

How do you translate in a concise way the following into English:

"La maestra nos dio dos tareas y el maestro nos dio una."
?"The teacher gave us two assignments, and the teacher gave us one."
You will need some additional words or constructs in English to convey the same meaning. I am not a native speaker, so please do correct me, if I am wrong on this assumption.

(Even my son (1st grader) saw this idiosyncrasy, when he had to copy his vocabulary list "primo - cousin; prima - cousin". He argued that the second one couldn't be right, because "cousin" already meant "primo". I explained to him, that in English there was no difference between "primo" and "prima", and his first verdict was "¡Qué tonto!". But in this case we are talking about a five years old child.)

Or try to translate in a concise way the following into Spanish (or maybe even Esperanto):
"Die Rose ist eine Blume mit schönen Blüten."

Some things are easier expressed in certain languages, and other things in other languages. Translate a Japanese causative passive (~させられる) into English: you will need quite a few words.

I personally find it e.g. inconvenient that when I am reading an article about a murderer, that I have to read half the article until I find a "he/she" or "his/her" in order to know whether the murderer was a man or a woman. Nevertheless, I don't say that this is a flaw of English, it is just the way English is and that's it.

Clarence666:This is my friend Joyce.

Se iu provizos gxustan kaj efikan tradukon, mi neniam plu skribos pri la problemo.

Actually this argument is even mooter as I first thought.

If I understand correctly, the point is that you cannot translate this into Esperanto, without defining the sex of the friend.

Let's try this the other way round:

"Vi a la víctima." [1]
"I saw the victim."
No problem so far, we are still saying nothing about the victim's sex.

"Vi a la víctima y a su padre."
"I saw the victim and _______ father."
How do you maintain the neutrality in English in this case? Singular "their"?
(This question isn't just for the argument's sake, but I am really interested in how to tackle this in English.)

[1]: "víctima" is of feminine gender (genus), but doesn't imply sex (sexus). "María (female) fue la víctima" and "Pedro (male) fue la víctima" are both correct.

I use "amiko" as gender-neutral. I only say "amikino" or "viramiko" when I feel the need to specify, for whatever reason. In my usage, "mia amiko Joyce" doesn't mean that Joyce is a man.

Fenris_kcf:By the way: Wouldn't it be kontraux-Fundamenta to change the meaning of "ge-" (even if it's just an "expansion")?

> "geptrano"
Hmm, kind of. But it somehow presupposes that "gepatro" is a conglomerat of things/persons. So it just softens the trouble with "gepatro" a little bit.

Expanding "ge-" to include epicene gender of a singular root is not changing it. REPLACING the "both sexes taken together" meaning with the epicene gender would be changing it..........but for all practical purpses, not really since the "epicene" gender of a couple means one of each gender.

IOW, if it's against the F to add a meaning to "ge-" then it's against the F to ADD any affix or even any roots to the language at all.

I share your interpretation, Erinja (that amiko is gender-neutral), and I suspect that enough people, either through conscious choice or unawareness of the "traditional" interpretation, do the same, such that one cannot fairly claim that "amiko" is inherently male in modern Esperanto.

Nornen's last couple comments raise excellent points. Each language has different syntactic requirements regarding what is obligatorily expressed and what is not. I believe it's important to clarify what it would mean to say that a language is "sexist". While obviously a language can't imbue all its speakers with certain beliefs, it can encode cultural assumptions. For example, in Japanese, one word for "wife" is kanai (家内), whose characters plainly mean "inside the home". And increasingly, there is discussion in Japan over whether this is an appropriate term for a person who may or may not be a dedicated homekeeper.

In the case of vocabulary, socially conscious change is often possible (English speakers might note how quickly, in linguistic terms, "that's gay" as a perjorative went from relatively common to generally taboo), but grammar is much slower and more resistent to change. And can grammar encode sexist assumptions? In many European languages, maleness is treated as the "default" gender (e.g. in Spanish, a group of eight girls and a boy is grammatically masculine). And I reall some interesting studies, of which the details escape me, in which English speakers read a passage featuring a gender-unspecified character, which they - men and women alike - later retold overwhelmingly as "he".

The question, then, is: were the speakers forced, subconscoiusly, by their language, to assign the person a gender, and did the language further push them toward maleness as what is "normal"? Or is it a cultural assumption that maleness is default, which they simply used their linguistic tools to express? As usual, picking apart the two is nearly impossible.

I wouldn't go as far as saying that having a default grammatical gender is inherently sexist, but I can understand the frustration of someone who sees a constructed language - an opportunity to avoid such a thing - which then carries the trend of assuming male and deriving female from male when necessary. (Somewhat ironic, since the biological process is somewhat the reverse, if I recall correctly). In Esperanto, this tendency has largely faded away, with nearly all words now being epicene, but in the core kinship terms, one can fairly wonder why all the basic roots are inherently male, and whether this stemmed from, or subtly reinforces, some subconscious assumption.