Eltwish:It's not unreasonable to speak of the general ethos of "the lernu community", though one has to be careful not to overgeneralize.

Yes, and that overgeneralization point is kind of important.

Lernu cannot control the actions of its members without taking a very hard stance. The moderators would be forced to evaluate every post for line-crossing, and the cries of "censorship!" would become even more common than they already depressingly are. There would be endless discussions about exactly where those lines should be drawn. Lernu cannot enforce a code of behavior other than of the sort that it already does.

It's all well and good to say that people should be nicer. If saying that on its own actually made it happen, however, the world would already be a much nicer place.

Instead, I think it's better to realize that, yes, people sometimes say things I don't like, but I'm an adult and have learned how to deal with that like an adult. I'll say my piece and be done with it.

RiotNrrd:"The Lernu forum" could not have said any such thing. "The Lernu forum" is not an individual. "The Lernu forum" does not have a single voice.

Sometimes I say “people in this forum” or “certain people” or even cite specific people; as you say, I’ve taken this position for a while now, so “the Lernu forum” seemed like a shorthand that would be readily understood as “the forum’s vocal core”. But I’ll try to be more specific next time.

RiotNrrd:Nevertheless, you just don't want to seem to let go of this one incident

I haven’t been here all that long, but it doesn’t read like an isolated incident. Remember that the thread we’re posting on now was started by a guy who thinks we’re not going far enough with stamping out the ASCarrolls of the world.

RiotNrrd:I haven't seen you propose any solutions to the problem that you identify

I thought I’ve been questioning people’s reasons for this attitude pretty much the whole time, at first simply calling for civility, later pointing out their hypocrisy. The response so far has been “we reserve the right to haze any noob that doesn’t take our advice”. Until that attitude changes — until people see that the problem isn’t the noobs, but the spertuloj — there are no “solutions”. But in this continued climate of “we need a watch list so we can root out the traitors”, it seems overly complacent to not point out the absurd level of hostility here and hope that some people dial it back.

orthohawk:Oh, yeah! Let's just introduce needless same-meaning words for EVERY root that somebody, somewhere doesn't like for whatever reason! I'm sure hat will go over well. All thy scheme above does is needlessly increase the vocabulary burden on new learners, something which is diametrically opposed to the raison d'etre of Esperanto's word building system in the first place.

It’s not a matter of not liking a word; it’s not knowing what a word really means. Most words that could have gender were originally masculine, and only in modern usage have come to be used as gender-neutral — but not by everyone. Whether koko is “chicken” or “rooster” or amiko is “friend” or “male friend” depends entirely on the usage habits of the speaker, which can’t always be guessed at by the listener, which has obliged some writers to coin new words for the sake of being understood.

Wikipedia’s two cents on the ambiguity issue:

Wikipedia:Esperanto does not have grammatical gender other than in the two personal pronouns li “he” and ŝi “she”. Nevertheless, gender is often a fuzzy issue. In practical usage words formed with the suffix -ul “person” are ambiguous, sometimes used with a masculine meaning in the singular, but generally neutral in the plural....

...Gender-neutral roots such as leono “lion” and kelnero “waiter” may be made feminine with a grammatical suffix (leonino “lioness”, kelnerino “waitress”), but there is no comparable way to derive the masculine; there was not even originally a word for “male”. Words without a feminine suffix may take a masculine reading, especially in the case of people and domestic animals .... Zamenhof used the nominal root vir “man, human male” to make words for animals masculine. Originally this took the form of a suffix -viro, but in response to criticisms that the resulting words such as bovoviro “bull” were ambiguous with mythological man–animal hybrids such as cherubs (also bovoviro), Zamenhof switched to using vir as a prefix in his translation of Genesis in the 1920s. This usage has spread, and vir- is now widely used as a prefix in the case of animals (virleono “male-lion”, virhomo “male-human”), but as a separate adjective vira for professions (vira kelnero “male waiter”), with -viro now considered archaic, though neither of these conventions is as common as feminine -ino. Moreover, the prefix vir- is idiomatic, as virbovo (man-bovine) could still mean either “bull” or “minotaur/cherub”; it is only by convention that it is generally understood to mean “bull”, and writers have coined words such as taŭro “bull” to bypass the issue.

morfran:Remember that the thread we’re posting on now was started by a guy who thinks we’re not going far enough with stamping out the ASCarrolls of the world.

Yes, a guy who signed up with Lernu for the first time eight days ago, and whose activity so far spans 21 messages. Do you really believe that he is representative of this forum? Compared to him, you, who signed up significantly further back, are an old-timer. Yet, you don't seem to have any trouble bashing on THAT newbie. Is it just because you disagree with him, so it's OK, but you kind of were on ASCarrolls side, so that wasn't?

RiotNrrd:Do you really believe that he is representative of this forum?

Oh, he’s comically extreme in his jackbooted jingoism, I’ll grant you, but he does share a basic “Esperanto, love it or leave it” tribalism with much of the forum.

RiotNrrd:you don't seem to have any trouble bashing on THAT newbie. Is it just because you disagree with him

That’s like saying “If you’re so anti-bashing, why are you bashing the bashers?” A little self-evidently sophistic, no?

morfran:Oh, he’s comically extreme in his jackbooted jingoism, I’ll grant you...

Yeah, no real argument from me on this point.

RiotNrrd:you don't seem to have any trouble bashing on THAT newbie. Is it just because you disagree with him

morfran:That’s like saying “If you’re so anti-bashing, why are you bashing the bashers?”...

Yes, it is, a little. But what it's more like is asking "If you're so against the bashing of newbies, why are you bashing a newbie?" The answer to that, I think, would be so much more revealing than the answer to your straw interpretation.

RiotNrrd:what it's more like is asking "If you're so against the bashing of newbies, why are you bashing a newbie?" The answer to that, I think, would be so much more revealing than the answer to your straw interpretation.

I’m afraid I’m not following you.

My criticism of A.H. is not based on his noobitude, his command of Esperanto or lack thereof, or anything else to do with Esperanto per se.* It’s based on his over-the-top hostility, which has nothing to do with being a noob or spertulo, but simply with being a jerk. Even if he were the longest-standing member of the forum and the scion of Zamenhof himself, I’d still be advising him to take his meds before booting up his computer.

Or not. In his own way, A.H. might be making a better case for basic civility himself than I or anyone else ever could.

*I might have countered his representation of iĉ once or twice — memory fails — but I’ve done that with a number of people here, and certainly not as a form of bashing, but of reclarifying the iĉ issue.

RiotNrrd:Lernu cannot control the actions of its members without taking a very hard stance.

I agree. Please note that I never advocated a top-down approach to changing behavior, which would never work. I suggested that we, as individuals and members of the community, decide on a personal basis to conduct ourselves with greater civility.

RiotNrrd:It's all well and good to say that people should be nicer. If saying that on its own actually made it happen, however, the world would already be a much nicer place. Instead, I think it's better to realize that, yes, people sometimes say things I don't like, but I'm an adult and have learned how to deal with that like an adult. I'll say my piece and be done with it.

But I've given you examples of cases where "saying people should be nicer", in specific ways, did trigger positive change, and I'm sure you can find plenty more on your own. "Saying people should be nicer" is how we raise children to be kind; second, of course, to actually being role models of kind behavior. Every time someone whom we value tells us "hey man, that wasn't cool, what you said really hurt me/him/her" and we subsequently feel shame, we internalize a desire to behave differently, which as far as I'm concerned counts as "making the world a nicer place". Of course it doesn't happen instantaneously, and of course it's not easy. In fact it's really really hard to recognize and admit our shortcomings and rudenesses, but you didn't ask for an easy solution; you asked for a solution, and I don't know of any other.

I'm not saying we shouldn't say people should be nicer. Of course we should. A nicer forum is a fine goal, and definitely something we all should strive towards. But saying it does nothing to make people who just aren't nice any nicer.

There is going to be a subset* of the population that thinks they're being plenty nice already, whether you agree with their assessment of their own behavior or not. And some may not think they're being nice at all but just don't care, and whose response to "be nicer" is likely to involve stuffing things. Again, if people go beyond certain limits, matters do get taken care of. But those limits are fairly broad, to accommodate a certain level of freedom of speech. Sometimes people don't agree with where those lines get drawn. That's too bad. They should start their own version of Lernu and draw those lines where they want.

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* A very large subset, I would guess.

AllenHartwell:That which doesn't conform to its specifications for what Esperanto is isn't Esperanto.

No. That's wrong. Esperanto is a living language which transmits a living culture, and for that very reason, it changes over time. That's how living languages (and cultures) work.

A great example of this is word gender. According to the specifications, nouns describing living things are male unless modified. In modern Esperanto usage, however, that is only true for a small fraction of words, particularly words that describe interpersonal relationships. To wit: when you see or hear "doktoro," or any profession, it's gender-neutral unless modified. Likewise any animal noun: "bovo" means gender-neutral bovine, not "bull," not "cow." The only words that currently retain gender bias are words that label a person: "fraŭlo," "patro", etc. That's just how it is. All the rule-mongering in the world isn't going to change that, because Esperanto as a language and a culture have moved on. The rule is no longer valid except in a historical sense.

Eventually, all words will end up being gender-neutral, because over half the Esperanto population just freaking hates that gender-bias. I expect that "vir-" will deprecate in favor of something less awkward that better matches the "-in-" suffix, like maybe "-if-." "Patrifo" or "fratifo" actually sounds fairly good, now that I think about it. But something similar will eventually catch on, and it will be no different than adding a new word to the dictionary. But of course the rule-mongers will complain about it the whole while.

So you see, the idea that Esperanto is forever fixed in its orignal form is simply wrong. It's actually changed a lot over the years. I've only detailed one example. There are many.