Re: Two questions about Esperanto

On Wednesday, July 7, 2004, at 09:40 , Philippe Caquant wrote:

> Seems there is a very simple way to go around those
> Esperanto 'special letters', it's to use just 'x'
> after the letter, meaning there should be an accent on
> it
[snip]]
> ............ I of course prefer the
> accentuated Esperanto writing, there is more style in
> it, IMO,
As you observe with 'IMO', it is a purely subjective matter.

> but that's only detail.
Yep.

> ............... My God, when shall we be
> adults at last ?
Dunno - haven't a clue what you're getting at here by suggesting some of
us aren't adults.

> --- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
>> On Tuesday, July 6, 2004, at 09:13 , Philippe
>> Caquant wrote:
>
[snip]
>>> The real problem is to change mentalities and
>>> politics. [STOP ! YOU'RE ENTERING FORBIDDEN ZONE
>>> !]
>> Maybe we'd best leave the circumflexed consonants
>> alone. I think the
>> replies about the use of h^ ~ hh ~ hx have shown
>> what, in practice, is
>> going on in the Esperanto community.
Oh well  - if Philippe wants to continue the discussion after all.........
...

 =========================================================================
===
On Wednesday, July 7, 2004, at 09:22 , Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 08:53:23PM +0100, Ray Brown wrote:
>> No, they're not. AFAIK Esperanto alone puts circumflex accents on
>> consonants.
>
> I think there are a few cases where other languages use circumflexes on
> letters we traditionally think of as "consonants" but which can be
> syllabic in that language . . . e.g. <r>.
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.

>>> I don't see it. The "Fundamento de
>>> Esperanto" itself allows you to use digraphs with h instead of the
>>> circumflexed letters
>>
>> It does indeed. But for some reason Esperantists in practice do not seem
>> to like this. Even on the Internet the combos cx, hx, jx etc seemed to be
>> preferred to ch, hh, jh etc. I don't know why.
>
> Because the digraphs with h are ambiguous: does <ch> mean <ĉ> or an
> un-circumflexed <c> followed by an <h>?  The instances where this sort
> of distinction causes genuine ambiguity are rare, but they do occur.
This is stranger & stranger. The Fundamento (which I've known some
Esperanto fundamentalists treat as tho it were holy writ) actually allows
what is potentially ambiguous, but this is not like by many Esperantists!
"Curiouser & curiouser" as Alice said.

> The use of <x> avoids any possibility of such ambiguity, because <x> is
> not a letter in the Esperanto alphabet.
True - but see below.
=============================================================
On Wednesday, July 7, 2004, at 09:12 , Nik Taylor wrote:
[snip]
> Ambiguity.  Since "h" is an independent letter, there are occasional
> compound words that have clusters like "ch" or "sh".  Though, I don't
> know why they don't just introduce the apostrophe to distinguish /sh/
> (s'h) from /S/ (sh) if they're so concerned about ambiguity.
Indeed - or even use |s| = /s/ and |x| = /S/.

It vaguely amuses me that Esperanto dispensed with |q|, |w|, |y| and |x|,
bringing the total number of letters to 22, then adds 5 accented
consonants and one accented vowel to bring the number up to 28. As they
say in the north of England: "There's nowt so queer as folk".
===============================================================

On Wednesday, July 7, 2004, at 09:58 , Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 01:40:59PM -0700, Philippe Caquant wrote:
>> Seems there is a very simple way to go around those
>> Esperanto 'special letters', it's to use just 'x'
>> after the letter, meaning there should be an accent on
>> it (circumflex, but also that sort of small u, like in
>> 'antau', I don't know how it is called):
>
> In English, it's called a "breve".  The dictionaries give the
> pronunciation as either /br\Ev/ or /br\iv/, but I've often heard it
> pronounced /'brE.ve/,
Always /briv/ this side of the pond IME. It's traditional use was to
denote a short vowel, tho it has occasionally been given other uses.

But, er, why, if Esperanto felt it necessary to have a letter to denote /w/
, didn't it just use |w|? Just puzzled.

Ray
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