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
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.