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the languages of solarpunk
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this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Why create this new language and start from zero when Esperanto already has speakers and resources?
Esperanto has a lot of good features, but it is binary gendered and default male by design. That hasn't aged well.
Due in part to persecution on both sides during the Cold War, it has skipped a generation in terms of adoption. There are a lot of old speakers, a growing set of new speakers, but not a lot of middle aged speakers. But the dated politics and class interests of the large population of the surviving advanced aged speakers with leisure time to participate in the culture can make them as much a burden as they are a resource, in north America at least.
That's interesting and kind of disappointing to hear - I mostly know of Esperanto thanks to Harry Harrison who loved it enough to write it into his books and add ads about it to the last pages.
Well, it's sadly incorrect. Because Esperanto is not "per default" male gendered. That's a misrepresentation of what the language is.
If the root is male gendered, then yes. For example a father (patro), that's male gendered. But not a "pomo" (an apple). There is this myth of that Esperanto is per default male or something, which comes from the usage of actually neutral root words, which were historically interpreted as male gendered, because of their context.
What do I mean? Something like "teacher", is something which was historically interpreted as a male profession, but when women entered the field, this shifted to neutral. As such an instruisto is the profession of a teacher, but that changed with time.