Re: Two questions about Esperanto

En réponse à Philippe Caquant :


>In Dutch, "w" is still something else, something close
>to the French semi-vowel "u" in the words "bruit" or
>"nuit". (But who cares ?)
Me, especially since most Dutch people can't fathom what [H] (X-SAMPA for 
the semi-vowel "u") is.

"w" in Dutch varies greatly depending on dialect and on position in the 
word, but its two main pronunciations are [v\] (labio-dental approximant, 
the approximant equivalent of [v]) and [v] (usually lenis). In some 
dialects, and nearly always after "u", it indicates [w]. One thing is sure, 
it is *never* [H] (but a French-speaking person can indeed easily confuse 
[v\] and [H], I know that by experience :) ).

>  I definitely vote for "w",
>well, not "that" W., of course.
All this talk forgets one thing about the history of Esperanto: such 
reforms have already been proposed from the very beginning (by Zamenhof 
himself for some!) and all were democratically rejected. What makes you 
think they'd be accepted now?

What happened is that when Zamenhof first published his first book about 
Esperanto, he immediately relinquished his rights on his invention, wanting 
to be just an overseer, until the language would have enough speakers to 
stand on its own, and called for everyone to criticise the language and 
give proposals of reforms to make the language even more accepted. He 
received many, while the community grew. Among them, you already found 
orthographic reforms like the change of the circumflexed letters, or the 
replacement of "ux" with "w", phonology reforms like abandoning "hx", and 
grammatical reforms like making adjectives invariable, abandoning the 
accusative or making it optional, and changing the correlatives. Zamenhof 
never refused a single reform, nor accepted any. He felt he didn't have the 
right to choose what would be best for the community. So after a while 
(can't remember the exact date, but it was close to the beginning of the 
20th century), he had a referendum organised for Esperantists to choose 
between a series of "Fundamentoj", from the original one to a very 
different one making Esperanto look quite like Ido, along with many 
variants in between. He agreed to accept the results of the referendum, 
whatever they would be, and urged everyone to do the same, saying that once 
done, the chosen Fundamento would be to be left untouched, at least until 
Esperanto was officially recognised internationally and an international 
body would take on duty to protect the language and guide any reform that 
may be necessary at that time. Well, the results of the referendum (which 
was done by mail and received a few thousand answers, a lot at that time) 
was clear: a vast majority voted for the original Fundamento. And so the 
Fundamento became "untouchable".

Years later, seeing growing disagreements in the community, Zamenhof 
proposed to reintroduce some of the reforms that hadn't made it due to the 
referendum, but the vast majority was against it, and they never went far. 
This eventually provoked the defection of some and the creation of Ido (and 
later other projects), much to Zamenhof's regrets.

This is why Esperanto has seen no reform until today: most people don't 
want to see anything change *until* Esperanto acquires a truly official 
status and is protected as such. *Then* only will reforms be welcome.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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