From: 72627.2647@compuserve.com (Don HARLOW)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto
Subject: Sex and the Single Esperantist
Date: 16 Aug 92 22:14:19 GMT
Distribution: inet
Organization: The Internet

To: Esperanto >INTERNET:esperanto@rand.org

Dato: 920816

Sex continues, day after day, to rear its ugly head, so to speak. 
Some comments on comments:

Craig Latta:

>        No, no, no! Tag me as "politically correct" (or even just
>"wrong") if you like, but I use "patro" to mean "parent", "virpatro"
>for "father", and "patrino" for "mother". Complete symmetry is
>possible, and I use it, even if others haven't in the past (including,
>I suppose the creator of the language).
>        But then, I'm just a novice, so what do I know (I certainly
>don't have the patience to translate this into Esperanto at the
>moment).

An inventive "novice" is worth 69 ossified veterans. And, like 
Nicxjo Nicholas with "dolts", you can quote me on that. (Non-
ossified veterans should take no offense, please.)

(Hope you saw the note about the Esperanto courses at UCB, 
Craig.)

Matthew Carruth:

>My understanding is that "amiko" is neutral with respect to gender.  "vir-" and
>"-in-" add the masculine and feminine qualities.  The natural evolution of 
>Esperanto has taken it away from using the masculine and feminine forms and
>towards 
>the neutral.  Every language has some things that seem odd to many.  The use of
>"girlfriend" by women to mean "friend that is a girl", but "boyfriend", used by
>both men and women, means something altogther differnet.

Another problem is that terms differ not only between different 
societies but also between different time-slices of the same society 
(does "girlfriend" mean today what it did when I was a boy? I doubt 
it), and even between different groups within the same society at the 
same time. It would be unwise to suppose that the Esperanto 
"amikino" maps directly onto the English "girlfriend", because that 
latter term has had several different meanings.

Matthew is right in his supposition that "amiko" is today gender-
neutral. Actually, I suspect that this was always the case, and that 
Zamenhof was much less gender-conscious than our gender-
conscious society likes to believe; see his use of the term "gajuloj" 
for what is obviously from context a mixed group in the poem I 
posted earlier.

Gary Snethen writes:

>The need for male-female symmetry in a language is well-founded.  True,
>when I hear the word 'patrino,' I think 'mother' and not 'female father',
>but if I were a young girl growing up learning Esperanto (as a first OR
>second language), I might begin to develop a concept that women are
>variations of men.  With my religeon and culture strengthening this
>viewpoint, by the time I reached womanhood, I would have a built-in
>apprehension that men (meaning males) are the basis of humanity, and
>that women are somewhat 'decorative' variations...  Icing on the cake,
>so to speak.

I don't think this is actually something to worry about. Children learn 
words as words, not as combinations. "Fe-MALE" and "wo-MAN" 
don't seem to have any significant effect on the self-esteem of small 
English-speaking girls; that comes later, and from other factors, which 
you mention. The question of men doing better than women in math 
(which I mention in another posting) is an example; I've also known 
women (e.g., my three daughters) who have grown up in environments 
where their parents, consciously or unconsciously, protected them from 
this sort of female-bashing ("Women just can't do that sort of thing, dear. 
Go play with your Barbie dolls."), and they do as well as at least the 
average male at math, "female" and "woman" notwithstanding.

(Incidentally, in Esperanto the first forms that a child learns are not 
"patro" and "patrino", but "pacxjo" and "panjo" -- "daddy" and 
"mommy" -- which _are_ symmetric, in Esperanto as in English. 
These "endearing" suffixes -- which are, incidentally, the only real 
case of "inflection" in Esperanto -- are common at this age, much 
more so than the more formal -IN-.)

>La opinio de unu viro.     The opinion of one human being.

Viro = man (male), homo = human being. The use of "man" 
for "human being" is a genuinely sexist Anglicism that doesn't 
carry over into Esperanto.

Dr. George Hinkelmyer:

>(Considering how Biologists are
>now saying that the human brain starts out basically 'female' and then
>transformations must be done on it to make it 'male', we humans seem
>to have gotten it somehow backwards! :-)

Excuse me, but how does a woman's brain differ from a man's?  I 
thought the differences were found elsewhere in the body.

Juana Moreno, answering Matthew Carruth:

> Wouldn't it be more logical to introduce a symmetric masculine suffix, like
> -iv or -un or some other? We could just say that the lack of symmetry is due
> to the fact that the creator of the language "forgot" the masculine suffix.
> I'd rather like "patrivo" or "patruno" than "virpatro". It would be the
> solution to eliminate the critics of sexism forever. And maybe I and some
> other people would be more willing to learn the language.

See other postings on this same subject, Juana. The problem is 
not adding a symmetric masculine suffix; the two (symmetric) 
problems are: (a) convincing some two million people scattered 
widely around the world to use it; and (b) convincing its ardent 
proponents that this isn't going to happen overnight. If Esperanto 
were Interlingua or Ido or Novial or some other project with at 
most a handful of speakers, somebody could make such a change 
immediately, by fiat (and who would there be to care?); but the 
only people with authority to do that in Esperanto are all of us 
who speak the language, as a community, by consensus -- and it 
may take a couple of generations to reach that consensus. This is 
a problem that any language that is actually spoken must face. 
The solution, of course, is for the Juana Morenos and those who 
agree with them to start using the language in what they consider 
the right way (as long as this is not a violation of the language's 
structure -- and a symmetric male suffix would not be) and hope 
that others will follow suit.

=============================================
Don HARLOW                                Redaktoro Esperanto U.S.A.
tel. (1 510) 222 0187
CompuServe [72627,2647]
Internet 72627.2647@compuserve.com

"To discipline Esperantists is to eat soup with chopsticks."
                                                          Confucius
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