but there is no comparable way to derive the masculine; there was not even originally a word for "male". Words without a feminine suffix may take a masculine reading, especially in the case of people and domestic animals; , for example, means "chicken", but is read as masculine in "rooster and hen". Zamenhof used the nominal root "man, human male" to make words for animals masculine. Originally this took the form of a suffix -, but in response to criticisms that the resulting words such as "bull" were ambiguous with mythological man–animal hybrids such as minotaurs (also ), Zamenhof switched to using as a prefix in his translation of Genesis finished in 1915. This usage has spread, and - is now widely used as a prefix in the case of animals ( "male-lion", "male-human"), but as a separate adjective for professions ( "male waiter"), with - now considered archaic, though neither of these conventions is as common as feminine -. Moreover, the prefix - is idiomatic, as (man-bovine) could still mean either "bull" or "minotaur/cherub"; it is only by convention that it is generally understood to mean "bull", and writers have coined words such as "bull" to bypass the issue. Common elements to regularizing Esperanto gender Critics such as Dale Spender and Veronica Zundel feel that deriving feminine from masculine words causes women to be either "linguistically excluded… or else named negatively", while others are bothered by the lack of symmetry. Such sentiments have sparked numerous attempts at reform, none of which have been accepted by the Akademio de Esperanto. Reforms tend to address a few key areas: A masculine suffix, parallel to the feminine - An epicene affix An epicene pronoun (like s/he or singular they in English) Three specific proposals surface repeatedly, as they derive from the existing resources of the language. These are the masculine suffix *-, workarounds and expanded uses of the epicene prefix -, and the epicene pronoun . Masculine suffixes The most popular proposal for a masculine grammatical suffix is *-. While preparing his Reformed Esperanto of 1894, Zamenhof considered *- as a masculine grammatical suffix. He considered a male suffix logical but a complication for learners as it was against national customs. Other proposals have been suggested. was created through ablaut of -. (It is, in fact, the only such possibility, as -, -, and - already exist.) Similarly, *- was created through