Modern Evolution of Esperanto - Morphology

Morphology

Esperanto morphology has been extended by new suffixes, but outside of international technical terminology few of these are in wide use. Two have been accepted as official: The suffix -io used to derive the names of countries and states, such as Meksikio "Mexico" vs. Meksiko "Mexico City" and Vaŝintonio "Washington state" vs. Vaŝintono "Washington DC". Many Esperantists also use -io in place of -ujo, the original suffix for countries named after their inhabitants, so that Anglio "England" is found alongside the more traditional Anglujo. The other official addition is a suffix -enda indicating that something must be done (pagenda "payable (by)"); this was originally introduced as part of the Ido reform. A few other Ido suffixes have entered the language, especially in poetry, and are widely recognized, such as -oza "full of", as in poroza "porous".

The perceived clash between several national Romance languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, which use the final vowels -o and -a to mark gender, and Esperanto, which uses them to mark parts of speech, has led to a change in some women's names which end in -a in those languages. This has had less effect on names which parallel Esperanto usage, such as Jozefino "Josephine" (from Jozefo "Joseph"), but is now predominant in names such as Johana ~ Johanino "Joanna" and especially Maria ~ Marino "Maria".

Another gender-related change has been a gradual reduction of the number of inherently masculine words. Originally all members of a profession, such as dentisto "a dentist", all people defined by a characteristic, such as junulo "a youth" and Kristano "a Christian", all ethnicities, such as anglo "an Englishman", and all verbal participles used for humans, such as kuranto "a runner", were masculine unless specifically made feminine with the suffix -ino; currently only some twenty words, mostly kinship terms, remain masculine.

A more radical change has been to purposefully eliminate gender from the remaining masculine roots such as patro "father" which are not essentially masculine by the introduction of a masculine suffix to parallel feminine -ino. The most common proposal is -iĉo, which is widely recognized. A parallel change is the introduction of a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun to cover "s/he", but there is little agreement as to what this should be. Both changes are strongly resisted by majority of Esperantists, who hold to the Declaration of Boulogne. (See Esperanto vocabulary#Gender.)