I've just argued a case for riismo based purely in the Fundamento, so don't try and claim that "riisto" and "fundamentisto" are somehow mutually exclusive.

leporinjo:In written Spanish it's now acceptable to put the letter @ in place of "a" or "o" in similar circumstances. This doesn't stop someone from deciding they want to be a u.

It is not.

RAE:2.2. Para evitar las engorrosas repeticiones a que da lugar la reciente e innecesaria costumbre de hacer siempre explícita la alusión a los dos sexos (los niños y las niñas, los ciudadanos y ciudadanas, etc.; → 2.1), ha comenzado a usarse en carteles y circulares el símbolo de la arroba (@) como recurso gráfico para integrar en una sola palabra las formas masculina y femenina del sustantivo, ya que este signo parece incluir en su trazo las vocales a y o: l@s niñ@s. Debe tenerse en cuenta que la arroba no es un signo lingüístico y, por ello, su uso en estos casos es inadmisible desde el punto de vista normativo; a esto se añade la imposibilidad de aplicar esta fórmula integradora en muchos casos sin dar lugar a graves inconsistencias, como ocurre en Día del niñ@, donde la contracción del solo es válida para el masculino niño.

"desde el punto de vista normativo". However, 13-yrs old school girls will still use it and will still replace i-dots with little hearts.

However if a (phenotypical) man wants to be called ella, or a woman él, or another person ello, ellos or ellas, I see no problem there. Their choice, not mine.

Looch_m1:DUOLINGO DOESN'T TEACH RI OR -IĈ-! DUOLINGO TEACHES STANDARD ESPERANTO! THAT'S IT! ALL THE REFORMS ARE DISCUSSED IN FORUMS WHERE PEOPLE CAN FREELY DISCUSS ANYTHING

Thank you. THis thread isn't about duolingo, it is about lernu. We keep on discussing a post about reform proposals which was posted in another forum.

leporinjo:That's not really for you to decide, though. It's for non-binary people to decide. If they don't like being called "ĝi" or "tiu" (and to be quite honest, I wouldn't either), that's their prerogative, especially if they fluently speak Esperanto and are still seeing a problem.

I think we may be talking past each other. My claim was that it's up to the community of speakers at large to decide what the standardly accepted terms will be. The community has, thus far, demonstrably failed to accept ri, and hence my opposition to it being taught in courses and treated as a pronoun equal to the ones mentioned in the Fundamento.

If in an isolated instance someone wishes to be referred to with a nonstandard pronoun, I'm fine with that, but one can't then conclude that the pronoun is (or ought to be) normative. It would have to enter the language the same way every other term that was once a new word entered the language, e.g. trajno.

Re: mojosa, I've seen it much more frequently than I see ri. I would classify it as a kind of slang - you wouldn't use it in serious contexts, but it has definitely entered the Esperanto community's vocabulary, especially in informal registers.

Tempodivalse:I think we may be talking past each other.

That I can agree on.

I should clarify, I have no problem with using ri in an isolated instance if someone expressly wants to be referred to by it. At the same time, I can fully agree with this:

erinja:I feel this is something that official grammar doesn't need to occupy itself with. It will never be standardized, I would assume it will never be taught in a course (because it won't be standardized and it would in fact be impolite to go calling all genderqueer people "zi" or "oni" or "ri", when presumably they do not all want to be called this). So anyone worried about reforms - I think you can relax. It's not something I see as an issue here. Though for the record if someone thinks they are going to get all genderqueer people to agree on a single pronoun (either invented or repurposed), I think you can forget about that, it simply won't happen in such a diverse community.

Also. I sense in this thread, among some users, the attitude that Esperanto is somehow still up for reform, or that you can use terms any way you want, without looking at or caring for established usage (like ci everywhere for 2nd person singular). They're entitled to that opinion, sure, but they should not expect the rest of the language community to accept their usage as acceptable.

Suppose that I had decided to use "thou", "thee", "thine" in English when talking in the singular, and perhaps taken up some archaic spellings. Nobody's going to put me in jail for that, but if I were (say) submitting an article for publication somewhere, my language use would be flagged by the editors. It would be unrealistic to expect otherwise. The same can be said of ciismo, ichismo, riismo etc.

Esperanto is no more a suitable subject for reforms than English. Both are living languages and well beyond the ability of anyone to legislate a change.

Also. Congratulations on getting to almost 100 messages in under 24 hours. The vortludoj threads are slower! I can see what the hot-button issues are on this forum

Also, @orthohawk, the nominative is surely thou and not thee, unless you're speaking in the rural British-English dialect, which would have tha... (Ever heard Bill Owens on "Last of the Summer Wine"?)

I have an idea:

If it looks like a man, then say Li
If it looks like a woman, then say Sxi

Maybe, if someone wants to be called Ri because they are complicated, then just be nice and call them Ri, or if you hate that, then just call them by their name.

If you don't know the gender then just say homo or ulo. Just my two cents.

If I have to use the word nigra, even though it makes me cringe, they should have to use the standard pronouns, which are spoken/written. There has to be some form of standardization for the language to work.

@Orthohawk

ri would impose a new special rule for the expression of a certain group of people, so it has to be officialized by the Akademio. This is even independent from the question whether §5 FG is exclusive or not.

Of course you're right with the acceptance ĝi in comparison with ci. But the usefulness of a neutral pronoun and neutral expressions for the modern needs is obvious, while in 120+ years the use of ci has not shown to be necessary to a significant portion of speakers.

@leporinjo, Tempodivalse

I can't really understand why we're argumenting around a simple and common sentence like "the personal pronouns are". Take any grammar from any time about any language, open the section on personal pronouns and look at the wording. It will be the same, and every average user will understand the table as exhaustive for the dialect described in the book. I've clarified why ci appears only later, the reason is editorial.
The special wording of §1 is easily understandable, as a system of a definite but no indefinite article (taken over from Hebrew, BTW) is against Western European intuiton.

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Generally, I have never heard someone use ri except on a recodring from a debate about LGBT in Esperanto, while I have used and heard being used mojosa (I still can't get why we're talking about this). These are two totally different things.

Hiismo comes closer to a solution according to the Fundamento (except for the use of hi, as new pronouns are against the norm), but it solves only a part of the problem, as it still gives no possibility to express a parent of unknown sex/uncommon gender and exposes sex instead of hiding it.
So in my opinion it would be more appropriate to propagate the use of neutral bases from which the other forms can be derived, e.g. instead of
patro - patrino - patro(j)/patrino(j) - gepatroj
you would have
virparento/parentiĉo - parentino - parento(j) - geparentoj
The sexistic roots like patro could become archaisms, just like the evolutionary model of Esperanto has foreseen.

I add my 2 cents in a second message because they go beyond scientific arguments:
1) It is a very pity the personal pronouns in E-o all end in i, making them difficultly discernible (Ido makes this better). Adding another pronoun would only make things worse.
2) Although I can only repeat that I morally support queer people's rights, I find it utterly narcistic to come up to someone and say "Hi, I'm XY, please use for me the pronoun [insert invented 3rd person pronoun here]". Heck, should I make a list of my LGBT friends who likes which pronoun? This goes in the direction of Calvin & Hobbes' "maybe we can make language a complete impediment for understanding", IMHO, and does not do anyone anything good.