Re: Name mangling (Was: Re: First Sound Recording of Asha'ille!)

Stephen Mulraney wrote:

Still, it's hard to
> imagine that Zamenhof got the idea for including these diphthongs [ew, au]
> in E-o
> *specifically* from Polish, since they're fairly marginal in that
> language, and
> present mainly only in borrowings....
Most likely not from Polish, IMO. Surely he had a pan-European outlook; "eu"
in particular has many odd pronunciations, but [ew] exists in Span. and
Ital. (and presumably Latin and Classical Greek???). But even in Span. and
Ital, I'm hard pressed to think of a word with [ew] in other than unstressed
position, usually initial in Greek loans-- eufónico, Europa et al. Whether
it's a diphthong or 2-syl in something like reunir, reunión is debatable,
since those are clearly /re+.../. What is its occurrence/frequency in E-o?

Perhaps Z devised the diphthongs out of what Borges calls "furor simétrico"
:-))

[aw] is common in most W.Eur. langs, though spelled variously.

I doubt that Dutch was one of Z's criteria, but FWIW it has [ew] of a sort,
in eeuw 'century', leeuw 'lion', for which my little Hugo's gives "ay'oo,
lay'oo"**.  Curiously, derivative forms differ:
eeuwig "ay'oo-v@gh" but leeuwendeel 'lion's share' "lay'-v@n-dayl"

(**The ' indicates stress on the _preceding_ syl.)

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