Travis Knight
Question RE: gendered nomenclature in Eo Saluton; quick question for any Eo speakers out there. I'm a beginning Eo learner, but a trained English teacher and a low-intermediate Spanish speaker, so I'm going to try and frame what might seem like a trivial question as coherently as I can. In short, how imperative is it that when speaking Eo, one explicitly states the gender of an individual when referring to careers or titles? I've noticed that some sentences can be nebulous because of the affix system: "La homo estas patro" can be read as "The person is a parent" or "the person is a father." A sentence like "La homo estas viro" is far more clear, because it clarifies the gender; likewise for "La homo estas virino." In Eo, is it acceptable to simply refer to a female teacher a "instruisto" or MUST I denote her gender with "instruistino?" for example? And is that gender tied to the sex of an individual, or the subjective identity gender?
Jan 25, 2015 3:20 PM
Answers · 2
2
The words in Esperanto are neutral, only when you want to show specifically that "La instruisto" (the teacher) is a woman you write "la instruistino". Officially (following the Fundamento de Esperanto) there is the posibility to show if an animal or a person is a woman using the suffix "-ino", there isn't any "official suffix" to show specifically the "masculine" gender. "Homo" or "persono" must be understood as "human being" and "person" so it could be a man or a woman. So in Esperanto, it's acceptable to simply refer to a female teacher as a "instruisto" and only in case that your teacher is a "woman" and you want to say it, you can denote her gender with "instruistino". Ghis la!!
January 26, 2015
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