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

Thomas Wier wrote:
> From:    Stephen Mulraney <ataltanie@...>
>>But what am I saying? Surely <Europa>, <auto> and other borrowings have
>>diphthongs, <Europa> with [Ew]. I'm not sure though.
> I'm pretty sure that the E-o word <auto> does not have [Ew], but
> straightforwardly [au].
Well, I never meant to suggest that (in Polish) <auto> had [Ew], only that
it presumeably has a diphthong (by which I meant [au]). Still, it's hard to
imagine that Zamenhof got the idea for including these diphthongs in E-o
*specifically* from Polish, since they're fairly marginal in that language, and
present mainly only in borrowings like the ones above, which have those, or
nearly those diphthongs in many languages.

OT: One thing I find amusing about the phonetics of Polish & Belarusian is
that they both have [w] sounds represented by modified letters; Polish uses
l-stroke <ł> while Belarusian uses Cyrillic u-breve. Assuming that the u-breve
in Belarusian accurately represents the development of [w] from [u], just like
the l-stroke in Polish represents the development of [w] from [l], then we have
two neighbouring languages that like to mangle borrowed & inherited words with
the same rough effect (changing something to [w]), but it different places. So,
for example, while the name "Vladimir" occurs in Polish as [vwadi\mir] "Władymir",
in Bielorusan it begins with [wlad]! Similarly, for "slav" we have Polish [swav]
against (I think) Bielorusian [slaw], and so on :-).


s.
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