I have to tell you all, I am still rather taken by the artificial language Esperanto. I am certainly ‘one who hopes’ too. I even seriously considered learning it about 25 years ago. Now I guess I a still just a ‘friend of Esperanto’.
Anyway, I understand the grammar. It is pretty straightforward. But I don’t fully understand a recent development in the language.
For most speakers now, proper feminine names end in ‘A’. Don’t adjectives **already ** end in ‘A’? How do you tell them apart now? And specifically, how do you express feminine names, if they are in the objective case?
Esperanto is so regular, and logical too. This just seems like a departure from that for me. Frankly it doesn’t even seem necessary, to me at least. Mario can be either masculine or feminine. What’s wrong with that? We now live in a very unisexual culture anyways, some would even say androgynous. Works for me.
From what I understand of Esperanto, proper names, for the most part, are just carried directly over (just like “John” doesn’t become “Jean” just because he moves to Nice.) When proper nouns are fully translated into Esperanto, they get a -o ending like any Esperanto noun (Jesus Christ becomes “Jesuo Kristo.”) If the name hasn’t been Esperantized, it’s not necessary to decline it, and if it has, then it follows the regular -o/-on/-oj/-ojn form.
As far as the masculine/feminine divide, Esperanto is designed to be simple and logical, not organic, so while people are used to differentiating between genders in their language, it’s rarely useful and more often a hindrance to non-native speakers. I’m not sure if I recognize the unisexual/androgynous culture you live in, but I’m sure it’s one that’s ripe for Esperanto to thrive in.
Simple, logical absence of grammatical gender is a fine thing, as long as it isn’t applied in a stupid, insulting manner.
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” —Mencken
Zamenhof could think of no word for woman other than “man” plus a derivative suffix. Woman is a mere afterthought in the wake of the default human being, Man. It smacks of Aristotle’s opinion that Man is the real human being while Woman is just an incomplete, defective version of Man.
It wouldn’t be quite as misogynistic if Zamenhof had applied the female suffix to the general Latin word for human being, homo. But he derived it from the Latin vir, the precise word for a male human being. Zamenhof was educated enough in Latin to the implication of what he was doing, calling woman a “female male person.” It would have been even more egalitarian to derive both words for man and woman from a gender-neutral root like homo plus a male suffix for man and a female suffix for women. What he chose was the most demeaning to women of all.
The same goes for Zamenhof’s word for mother: nothing but “female father.” Which, again, smacks of Aristotle’s howlingly wrong belief that a person is fully formed in the sperm, while a woman is nothing but an incubator who makes no substantial contribution to forming a person.
Zamenhof simply obliterated the root words denoting women as full persons in their own right. These sorts of constructions have no place in our world where women are legally and philosophically fully equal to men—let alone in a “universal” language.
Props to Ido for acknowledging women as people in their own right with muliero for woman and matro for mother. Ido is also miles ahead in gender egalitarianism by establishing gender-neutral words as the default and adding the respective pronouns for male and female alike, as needed.
Juan may, though; it’s one of those things which vary by culture.
For those of us who are used to localizing names, how weird would it be if someone whose name happens to be Esperanza introduced herself as Esperas in Esperanto, or an Ibai as Rivero?
I imagine it would be pretty odd. I’m guessing that Ibai comes from antique word for river in Spanish, and I imagine it’d be odd if he decided to go by “Rio” occasionally. When people Anglicize their names, I’ve found that they often go for names that sound similar rather than have the same root meanings. I’d expect Ibai coming to the US to go by Evan or Ian or something similar if he wanted to blend in.
Esperanza as Esperas (or, more likely, Espero) seems pretty natural to me, though.
Ibai is Basque for river. I’ve known Ibais who, when speaking with people who have problems with “Ibai”, preferred to go by Río or River than by something similar-sounding such as Iván. Ian sounds ayan, it’s as similar to Ibai as George to Charlemagne.
We don’t do it to blend in, we do it to have people use a name that they can pronounce without murdering it and that we still recognize as being “us”.
Ian is a Welsh name, and as such is pronounced ee-an, same as it would be in Spanish. Or Basque.
By the rules of Esperanto, I suppose you could convert anybody’s name by sticking -o onto the end, willy-nilly. So Juan > Juano, Juana > Juanao, Esperanza > Esperanzao, Ibai > Ibaio, etc. Quite the no-brainer, as it’s designed to be. OP: Mario stays Mario, but perhaps Maria becomes Mariao. Maria by itself, due to ending in -a, would be an adjective meaning ‘of the Mario-type’.
Thank you, Nava, but I wouldn’t call that information. It was an educated guess. I’m no Esperantist, as I made clear above. mattmcl is our resident Esperanto expert who could give the correct answers. Besides, I goofed. Ian isn’t a Welsh name, it’s Scottish. There are only two Celtic peoples on Great Britain, and I had a 50/50 chance of guessing right, but I blew it.
