Re: The last enemy

On 7/26/07, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:

> (Incidentally, and I may have missed an earlier discussion of this, does
> anyone happen to know why it's Viki- instead of Ŭiki-?
/w/ hardly occurs at syllable onsets in Esperanto; /w/ in the onsets of
borrowed word becomes /v/.  Some other posters noted /wat.to/ "uxatto",
but I suspect this is an ill-formed word, since the variant /vat.to/ also
occurs.  Awhile back someone was arguing in the discussion page
of the Esperanto Phonology article in the English Wikipedia that
/w/ and /v/ are actually allophones in Esperanto, which I think is
going a bit too far; they both occur contrastively in syllable-final
position though there may not be many minimal pairs.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm