TL;DR: ges’njor’ and g’jora as hyper-contracted forms of gesinjoro.
When creating a non-binary equivalent to sir/ma’am, we would prefer if:
- The word clearly evokes non-binarity as opposed to just gender neutrality.
- The word is not just a blend of masculine and feminine forms.
- The word is clearly understood in context as a term of address.
- The word comes across as having a real history, even if it really doesn’t.
- The word looks and sounds nice and lacks any unintended negative connotations.
- The word is at most two syllables in length.
All the current proposals for a non-binary equivalent to sir/ma’am tend to fail at least a few of these criteria, but I figured that loaning from another language that’s already created such a word could solve most of these issues. And that’s when I remembered Esperanto gesinjoro, a back-formation from gesinjoroj (“ladies and gentlemen (and others)”), from sinjoroj (“sirs”) + ge- (forms words of mixed, unspecified, or non-binary gender; from the German collective prefix, presumably motivated by its use in the German word for siblings).
An unadapted borrowing of gesinjoro would fill all but the last of my six criteria as long as you’re in a crowd of samideanoj, which you will be some day, inshallah. In order to fill the last of my six criteria, then, we’re gonna have to contract and contract and contract gesinjoro in the same way as senior → sir and mea domina → ma’am until we get a short enough word.
We begin with gesinjoro /ˌgɛsɪnˈjɔːɹow, ˌgej-/, matching the original Esperanto pronunciation as closely as possible; then we reduce all the vowels and delete the vowel before the stress, giving us ges’njora /gəˈsnjɚ.ə/. Then after this point we can take two paths: We can delete the final vowel, as is commonly done in Esperanto itself; or we can delete the vowel before the stress.
The first route gives us ges’njor’ /gəˈsnjɚ/ as the final form of this word, which is what is rationally best. It remains recognizable enough to the original form, and I especially like how the beginning /gəs-/ sounds like the beginning of the Russian words for sir and ma’am, gospodín and gospozhá.
The second route gives us g’jora /ˈ(d)ʒɚ.ə/, which I kinda love just for how wacky it is, like deleting that one vowel forced a whole wave of sound changes for the sake of phonotactics. I’m listing /dʒ-/ as a variant pronunciation because I’ve known people who merge /ʒ/ into /dʒ/, and g’jora might give rise to a spelling pronunciation, anyways. There’s not many words that start with /ʒ/, though!
Whether /ˈgsnjɚ.ə/ actually ends up becoming specifically /ˈʒɚ.ə/ for the sake of phonotactics kinda depends on the order of your constraints in optimality theory, though, so maybe your own surface realization has a marginal onset or deletes different consonants or whatever. For that matter you might not apply all the vowel reductions, or you might drop the /j/. All these variants can of course coexist, as can any number of variant spellings matching the different pronunciations. I went for the g’jora spelling just because I think it looks cool and that irregular spellings are neat sometimes.
As for those who might say that this is all pointless because we don’t need honorifics to begin with: I just like making up words, OK?
Main for the main gods
Esperanto actually has borrowed a lot of words from non-European languages because it is a living language and its speakers have over the centuries increasingly tended to loan words for new concepts rather than coin Esperantisms for them. But even setting that aside, “international” is not when loanwords from many different languages from around the world: Esperanto’s aim is to have a small number of root words which should be recognizable to as many people as possible, and then to have a whole lot of highly productive and regular derivation. This means in practice that the roots are European, but that the derivation often feels decidedly un-European. The derivation will stand out to you especially if you read or listen to non-European Esperantists.
Edit: But this isn’t to say that I actually support Esperanto because it’s the best designed language in the world, because objectively speaking it is very flawed and very clearly rooted in the place and time it was invented in. The reason to back Esperanto is really just that there’s no empire backing it, that it’s good enough, and that it happens to have a large and dedicated community. The ideal future would probably have International Sign as the global lingua franca, but there’s a few more contradictions that need to be solved before the whole world learning to sign will be on the table.
You aren’t communicating very well here. I would like to address your points but I think it’s best to give you an opportunity to formulate them more clearly instead of assuming I understand what you mean.
“Degenderifying with plural is just such a common European feature too” — What is this feature? Name a few languages in which this feature can be found, and provide examples of what it looks like in practice in them.
“that the claim it is superior to working up from gender neutral to specifically construct a non-binary” — Where in the text does it say that this feature is superior to working up from gender neutral? What does it mean to work up from gender neutral?
“also feels hollow when given as a requirement to met.” — What is the requirement to be met and where in the text is this indicated? What does it mean for the claim to feel hollow?
“Why is plural degender is meant to be better than gender neutral by default?” — Where in the text does it say that this is better?
I mean Esperanto might have borrowed from other languages now though calling it centuries when the language has only been around since 1880s seems a bit of a stretch. It is just so thoroughly European in its inception that it is using a less word borrowings from other languages even for terms which are common even in plain English, so it fails already at a basic level on providing any grounding for anyone but speakers of Romance or Germanic languages for the most part. Nor is having a smaller vocabulary base and using grammar function something easier to learn necessarily especially when said vocabulary is derived only from aforementioned Romance and Germanic languages. In my experience learning a highly analytical language like English which doesn’t have as much inflection or agglutination is easier than either highly inflective languages like German or languages with varying levels of agglutination, since a greater vocabulary is more common in analytical languages to increase specificity but in reality you can get by with basic words which tend to be around same percentage of words in daily use for most. Overall I don’t find it a particularly easy language or productive language to learn for anyone who isn’t already coming from some sort of Romance or Germanic baseline. English or Chinese makes much more sense to me as an international language than a language constructed with assumption that more conjugation with fewer words is more conductive to international communication like this.
Languages in which the third person pronouns are gendered in singular but either are or can be gender neutral in plural. Such as English they.
This part “The word clearly evokes non-binarity as opposed to just gender neutrality.” and then using in Esperanto a gendered term and degendering it with plural to make it non-binary. Why is this a requirement? Why not just use a gender neutral term or perhaps work with that to specify non-binary instead? You started with a gendered term (sirs), which is degendered in plural (ge-sirs) and worked up from that to make it non-binary (ge-sir). As opposed to using for example they.
The first criteria in the list which you then talk about other words failing said criteria, strong implication that these criteria and requirements to met and that gender neutrality by default is a failing requirement?
That if the criteria used to seek a specific word just results in using a gendered term and making it plural then back to singular, it feels hollow because many languages are already doing this if they lack gender neutral third person plurals, as opposed to just using a gender neutral third person singular (if it exists in the language aside from polite speech).
Here: “The word clearly evokes non-binarity as opposed to just gender neutrality.” (in context of using a gendered term then making it degendered with plural, which is meant to be preferable to using a gender neutral term).
Jeez, this reminds me of when I tried arguing with a liberal about how Seychelles was under socialism for a long time, and he correctly pointed out that it was only for 14 years… Sometimes it seems like folks only call me red because I constantly embarrass myself.
I could argue more but I won’t because you seem annoyed, I’ve already embarrassed myself, and I don’t want to make it worse.
I think I still might need more clarification, but I’m worried that pressing further will cause a conflict.
I am not at all annoyed or tense nor seeking conflict in this, I apologize if I come off as confrontational as it is a general fault of mine.
I just felt a bit flabbergasted that it is of import that a non-binary pronoun ought to not be gender neutral by default. As to put it in more concise terms, I am trying to understand why a non-binary pronoun not being gender neutral is a criteria, and why using an originally gendered pronoun to reach a gender neutral pronoun meets this criteria but using a gender neutral pronoun to create another gender neutral pronoun doesn’t. I would definitely want to hear your arguments against English or Chinese as international languages, in context of both being highly analytic languages with a wealth of general and specific vocabulary.
It’s also natural to make mistakes especially one is making statements of to top of their head, what I said was not meant as a gotcha about how long Esperanto existed but the fact that its borrowings seem much more recent rather than it being a history of centuries long process. Feeling embarrassed if one feels they failed to live up to their own standards is okay too of course, we do have obligations to ourselves.
For clarity and in sake of honesty I do have somewhat of a negative opinion on Esperanto but that mainly is due to its existence as the most popular conlang and the fact I find its claim to internationality a bit fanciful and optimistic to say the least.
I think this is all I need, thank you for your patience and sorry if this is a bit long.
To start with, I should clarify that these are honorifics and not pronouns. That might be a minor distinction but I still think it’s worth clarifying.
I make a distinction between gender-neutral and explicitly non-binary terms. A gender-neutral term is one that could refer to anyone, cis or trans, binary or non-binary, any gender; whereas an explicitly non-binary term almost exclusively refers to someone who is specifically non-binary. So if someone’s called they then that doesn’t always or even usually imply anything about the person it refers to, it can only circumstantially imply that the person being referred to is non-binary. But if someone’s called xe then there’s a >99% chance in any situation that the person being talked about is non-binary, because although xe was originally coined as a replacement for he or she, i.e. coined as a gender-neutral term, it has become obsolete for its original purpose and taken on a new meaning as a result.
And I think it’s important to have both gender-neutral and explicitly non-binary alternatives to gendered terms, because some non-binary people want to be completely de-gendered, and others want to make their genders as visible as possible, and some might be a mix of these two, and everybody should be respected in any case. I’d say I belong to the “as visible as possible” group, which is why I strongly prefer being called xe over they — people only call me they when they don’t want to acknowledge my gender.
In the realm of honorifics, the easiest gender-neutral option in English is either to forgo honorifics altogether, or otherwise to use something like doc or chef or comrade or whatever else. This strategy might be stilted or eccentric, but it still gets the job done.
The explicitly non-binary honorifics are also plentiful, but less used. I’m fond of several of the honorifics used as replacements for Mr/Ms, like Mx, Mys, Mre, and Mm; but I don’t really like any of the explicitly non-binary honorifics used as replacements for sir/ma’am that I know of, words like fren or tiz or mir. Those words are great for the people who go by them, of course, and I wouldn’t take that away from them, but I’d just personally prefer something else. And this is maybe the problem with me saying “we would prefer if” in the original post, because really it’s just “I would prefer if” and I probably shouldn’t have expected people to understand that I was just speaking subjectively.
You absolutely could come up with an explicitly non-binary honorific by making something out of pre-existing gender-neutral or explicitly non-binary words. The only reason I didn’t do that myself was because that’s just not where the inspiration struck: my idea was basically to try to parallel the origins of sir/ma’am, by finding a Romance or Romance-sounding language with a non-binary-coded honorific, and contracting that honorific a bunch. Esperanto was actually the third language I looked at, after I didn’t have any luck with Spanish or Italian.
To be clear, I didn’t come up with gesinjoro, either. That word has already been in use for a decently long while, not necessarily commonly, and it refers near-exclusively to non-binary people in practice just because, a bit like xe, if a man is always called sinjoro and a woman is always called sinjorino, then singular gesinjoro couldn’t refer to anyone but someone who isn’t exclusively one or the other. And so this word, even though it was formed in the usual way as most gender-neutral terms in Esperanto, ends up instead being explicitly non-binary in practice, right? At least in situations where the gender of the referent is unambiguous.
I hope this makes at least some amount of sense.
All I was really going to say is that Esperanto doesn’t have that much inflection or conjugation per se, and most of the inflection it does have is to e.g. free up word order to make it easier for people to use the language regardless of the sentence structure of their first language. So I was really just referring to word derivation, which ob-vi-ous-ly exists in every language and lets them have that wealth of general and specific vocabulary you refer to. I wonder how Esperanto would look and how people would react to it if it were written in Chinese characters. Would luejo be like 借所?
I don’t really have any reason to oppose Chinese as a global lingua franca due to its grammar, I’m just not convinced it’s going to happen. Because the status of global lingua franca is one that has to be continuously maintained: the world learns English at present because the Anglosphere continuously exports teachers, textbooks, pop culture, and other resources, inflates the language’s prestige through the wealth of its speakers, and incentivizes learning the language through economic opportunity or military alliance or whatever else… But those incentives will inevitably shrink, as will the prestige, as will the exports. For Chinese to become the global lingua franca, then, we can only assume that China would have to imitate what the Anglosphere is doing now, which would probably be a bad thing.
So it’s in this future environment of the old power falling and the new power not wanting to impose itself that Esperanto would stand some chance as a sort of transitional lingua franca, before humanity ultimately lands on something better like International Sign. This is what makes Esperanto’s similarity to the current global lingua franca and several regional lingue franche a potential asset.
I understand now what you mean especially in regards to gender neutral and explicitly degendered, though I have my reservations of the supposed gender neutral or degendered words that use masculine form as default form still even if they obviously serve that function in terms of grammatical gender. I suppose I was thrown off by the set criteria and them being used as requirements. Nevertheless I think there are many languages that use gender neutral terms that can be bent way better to be degendered proactively than using default masculine forms in Romance languages in this regard.
There is a lot of inertia to lingua franca and because English cemented itself as such at such a crucial time of internet age globalization I don’t think it will be toppled any time soon because it completely left the anglophone world, it is also a pleasant and flexible language without a language academy so it serves that function really well. I also especially don’t think Esperanto will replace it, nor do I think a sign language will. In regards to Esperanto both because I don’t think it is useful or widespread enough for that and in terms of sign language because I think learning a second language comes easier to most people than learning a sign language.
Well, I’ve said my piece.
It’s well appreciated.