Re: Two questions about Esperanto

On Jul 8, 2004, at 3:25 PM, Ray Brown wrote:

>But syllabic |r| is not a consonant. If a language uses the circumflex
>in something like its original use, i.e. to denote high pitch falling
>to low pitch on the same vowel, and it has /r/ as syllable nucleus,
>then of course we'd expect the circumflex to fall on |r| sometimes. But
>I was talking about true consonants. AFAIK Esperanto is the only
>language that pits circumflexes on true consonants.
Whether or not the sound represented is actually a "true" consonant is
irrelevant to the necessity for (or availability of) the glyph, which is
what I thought we were talking about. If some hypothetical highly-used
written language used <ĉ>, even if they used it to represent a
rising-falling tone on syllabic /z=/, then that symbol would be readily
available for use in Esperanto.  So I was just pointing out that there
are langauges that use the circumflex accent over letters that are
traditionally used for consonant sounds.  That's all. :)

-Marcos

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