Epicene alternatives and -iĉ-

• Al feliĉulo eĉ koko donas ovojn. | To a fortunate man even a rooster gives eggs. OR To a fortunate person even a chicken gives eggs.

The issue of gender in Esperanto has always been an ambiguous and sometimes awkward one.

A lupo is a wolf, for example, in modern usage usually one of unspecified gender, but originally — and sometimes still — only a male wolf; which meaning is meant nowadays depends entirely on the speaker. One can add -in- to denote a female (lupino), but there’s no comparable way to unambiguously indicate a male wolf — one must resort to an idiomatic and sometimes ambiguous construction with viro* (“adult male human”, “man”) to produce virlupo, which is literally “man-wolf” or “werewolf” but by convention “male wolf”. (“Werewolf” is by convention homlupo, or “human-wolf”; a male werewolf is unintuitively a lupviro — which, adding to the confusion, was the word for “male wolf” in older Esperanto.)

Some writers have attempted to circumvent the problem by coining unambiguously masculine words like taŭro and stalono, a stopgap measure that would obviously be impractical for all animal words.

Kin relationships are still masculine by default; they can be made female with -in-, neutral in the plural with ge-, but not traditionally in the singular — that is, one could say “parents” (gepatroj), but not “parent” without additional word-building or changing words altogether (gepatrano, generinto).

Sometime after 1980, however, the Plena Ilustrita Vortaro included singular gepatro in its pages to mean “either father or mother” while still maintaining that ge- otherwise means “both sexes together”*. This situational use of ge- does not extend beyond kin relationships as an epicene affix; one does not speak of a gelupo in sheep’s clothing, for example, but only a lupo.

One solution to Esperanto’s gender ambiguity problem is the oft proposed -iĉ-, a masculine counterpart to -in- (ex. caridino “tsarevna”, caridiĉo “tsarevich”) which would make words masculine without the ambiguity that vir- brings. However, though -iĉ- has been independently proposed by many people for a long time (mostly as a suffix logically suggsted by -ĉj-, but at least once as a borrowing of the Russian -ич), it has never been made official or been acknowledged in dictionaries.

Resistance to its adoption reportedly has largely* come from the fear that, in some proposals, traditionally male roots like patro (“father”) and viro would become gender-neutral, so that “father” would become patriĉo, “man” viriĉo, and the new usage would not be compatible with the old. (A strangely selective fear, to be sure, since modern usage already conflicts with the old in that ĉevalviro, once “male horse,” is now “centaur”, and al feliĉulo eĉ koko donas ovojn is generally “to a fortunate person even a chicken gives eggs”, and doesn’t make sense anymore.)

The Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko characterizes this particular strategy as the proposal of “certain extremists”; the same source is cited in Wikipedia and Wiktionary, but there the strategy is presented as basic to all the proposals for -iĉ-.

Elsewhere, however, -iĉ- is proposed not as a reform to the existing lexicon, but as a clarifying suffix for use only with roots that are already gender-neutral. Patro and viro, both un­ambiguously male by definition, would remain unchanged — one would no more add -iĉ- to them than one would -in- to amazono (“Amazon”) or damo (“dame”) — but lupo could be masculinized as lupiĉo without any lycanthropic confusion. Moreover, having -iĉ- would make suffixes for either sex optional unless clarification were necessary — a kato, programisto, and amiko would be unambiguously generic words for “cat”, “programmer”, and “friend” instead of the ambiguously masculine/neuter words they’ve been.

Part of the problem with that solution, though, is that in order to avoid neutering traditionally masculine words — something that’s already been happening over the years with words like kuzo, nepo, and others that aren’t intrinsically masculine in some European languages — some twenty new epicene equivalents (mostly denoting kinship relations and titles) would have to be introduced.

To date, this author has never seen more than a handful of such words, so for the interested Esperantist, here’s a more complete list of epicene alternatives to which one can add -in- or -iĉ- as the need arises:*

ESPERANTO MALE DEFAULT

avo | grandfather

edzo | husband

fianĉo | fiancé

filo | son

frato | brother

nepo | grandson

nevo | nephew

onklo | uncle

patro | father

vidvo | widower

kuzo | male cousin

knabo | boy

viro | man

bubo | male brat

fraŭlo | bachelor

grafo | count

princo | prince

reĝo | king

Sinjoro | Mister

koko | rooster

PROPOSED EPICENE COUNTERPART

avolo | grandparent

spozo | spouse

fidancito (fidanci “to betroth”) | fiancé/fiancée

filjo¹ | child

hermano | sibling

nepto¹ | grandchild

nipoto¹ | nephew/niece

zio | uncle/aunt

ĝenitoro | parent

viduvo | widower/widow

kuzeno¹ | cousin

puero | child, young person

homo, adolto, persono | human, adult, person

pueraĉo | brat

celibulo celiba “unmarried” | bachelor/bachelorette

komito² | count/countess

princepo² | prince/princess

rejo² | king/queen

Sioro² | Mister/Mistress/Miss

galinaco³ | chicken

1. Epicene alternatives might not be necessary for some words, since enough people already use them as such that the words’ gender is no longer stable.
2. Most professions, once regarded as masculine by default, are now treated as gender-neutral. Titles of nobility, insofar as they indicate official ranks that aren’t normally rooted in gender, should probably also be regarded as gender-neutral; the alternate ranks listed here are for those for whom reĝo just doesn’t sound right when referring to a queen.
3. Like most words for animals nowadays, koko is often used as an epicene word to denote the species, not the gender. However, because koko is also in some aphorisms where it definitely means “rooster”, an alternative word seemed appropriate here.

Using these epicene counterparts, a grandparent would be an avolo, a grandfather an avoliĉo, and a grandmother an avolino. The forms avo and avino, while still on the books, would over time become quaint archaisms like bovoviro (originally “bull”, later “minotaur”, and now not used at all).

Postscript

In 2016, Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko dropped its denouncement of -iĉ- as an unnecessary heresy and frankly acknowledged it as a widely proposed — though seldom used — masculine suffix.

In 2019, Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko acknowledged that the ambiguities of vir- have likely led to -iĉ- becoming a growing fact in the Esperanto community, though mostly in the forms iĉo and iĉa. It also mentioned a proposed -j- as a gender-neutral answer to -ĉj- and -nj-, as well as a non-binary suffix -ip-.