Gender reform in Esperanto
In the text below, when a proposed word or usage is not grammatically correct according to the standard rules of Esperanto grammar, it will be marked with an asterisk (*).
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.
Often there is a separate root that acts like this, for example knabo "boy" → infano "child"; filo "son" → ido "offspring", etc.
However, it is more common to simply say unu el la gepatroj "one of the parents" or patro aŭ patrino "father or mother".
The most common roots that are masculine unless specifically marked as feminine are: 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".
[6] Zamenhof used the nominal root vir "man, human male" to make words for animals masculine.
[2] Critics such as Dale Spender and Veronica Zundel feel that deriving feminine from masculine words causes women to be either "linguistically excluded… or else named negatively", while others are bothered by the lack of symmetry.
[10] Reforms tend to address a few key areas: Three specific proposals surface repeatedly, as they derive from the existing resources of the language.
One proposed solution to this problem is to introduce new root words for the gender neutral concepts: parent, sibling, grandparent, grandchild, etc.
People who use *patriĉo for "father" may avoid the unaffixed noun patro "*parent" altogether as ambiguous, or may use it and switch to *gepatro only when they need to disambiguate.
The word eŭnuko "eunuch" has through back-formation given rise to the suffix *-uko for castrated people or animals, creating forms such as *bovuko "steer", from bovo "cattle", to replace okso "steer", though eks- "ex-" is sometimes seen in this context: eksvirkato "castrated cat" (lit.
Zamenhof also prescribed it to be the epicene pronoun for people when the gender of an individual is unknown, saying it was "completely correct grammatically".
For example, in the sentence, the pronoun li cannot easily be replaced with tiu, as that would normally be understood to refer to someone other than the person speaking: Similar problems of confusion arise with trying to use oni "one" in such situations: This could be used to express deference or other forms of indirectness, but would not be understood to refer to the person who made the statement.
Due to English influence, singular "they" has been reported[citation needed]: However this causes problems regarding Esperanto’s noun agreements and is not readily accepted by people of other language backgrounds.
A proposal is to hyphenate li (he) and ŝi (she) to li-ŝi or ŝi-li, similar to some other constructs in Esperanto, such as pli-malpli (more or less).
This was proposed by Kálmán Kalocsay and Gaston Waringhien in the third edition of their Plena Gramatiko de Esperanto (pp 72–73, note 1).
