Gender Reform in Esperanto - Gender in Esperanto

Gender in Esperanto

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 neuter in the plural. However, concepts of gender have changed over time, and many words that were once considered masculine are now neutral, especially words related to professions and animals. In older texts it is only context that disambiguates. For example, in the saying al feliĉulo eĉ koko donas ovojn "to a happy man, even a koko gives eggs" (Zamenhof), the word koko means "rooster", not "chicken". However, this can be confusing to those who are not familiar with that saying, as the word koko has become more neuter over time.

In modern usage, most noun roots are lexically neuter, a couple dozen are lexically masculine, and a smaller number lexically feminine. Most masculine roots may be made feminine through the addition of the suffix -ino, and made to describe a group of both males and females with the addition of ge-. For example, patro means "father", patrino "mother", and gepatroj "parents", but gepatroj cannot be used in the singular *gepatro for "parent". For these gendered words there is no easy way to make the singular neuter equivalent. Often there is a separate root that acts like this, for example knabo "boy" → infano "child"; filo "son" → ido "offspring", etc. Some neuter counterparts can be made with word-building. The meaning of "parent" can be achieved with either gener-into "genitor", or ge-patr-ano "member of the parents". However, it is more common to simply say unu el la gepatroj "one of the parents" or patro aŭ patrino "mother or father".

The most common roots that are masculine unless specifically marked as feminine are:

• Kin terms: avo "grandfather", edzo "husband", fianĉo "fiancé", filo "son", frato "brother", nepo "grandson", nevo "nephew", onklo "uncle", patro "father", vidvo "widower", kuzo "(male) cousin"
• Words for boys and men: knabo "boy", viro "man", bubo "brat"
• Titles: fraŭlo "bachelor", grafo "count", princo "prince", reĝo "king", sinjoro "mister, sir"

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; koko, for example, means "chicken", but is read as masculine in koko kaj kokino "rooster and hen". 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.