Re: Two questions about Esperanto

On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 11:27:32PM -0400, Ph. D. wrote:
> I don't think I'd agree that [e] for Esperanto |e| is allowed. That's
> a mispronunciation. It should always be [E].
Based on what?  I thought the allowed range of allophones for each E-o
phoneme was intentionally broad to avoid worries about "proper"
pronunciation, which is a discouraging factor in IAL land.   There
is a "standard" set of phones, but it is only a recommendation; the
important thing is that the sounds be close enough to the recommendation
to be recognizable, and far enough apart that there's no ambiguity.

I've heard [A] for |a|, [e] for |e|, [I] for |i|, [O] for |o|,
[N] for |n| before velars, [p^h] for |p|, [r\] for |r| (usually from
Americans who can't roll their |r|s), etc, all considered correct
pronunciation by the listening Esperantists.

In fact, I seem to recall that someone's doing a study about this - dialects
of Esperanto speech and how people react to them.  There's a web page
where you can listen to snippets and rate them . . . let me dig up the
URL . . . here we go:

        http://sfo.ab.ru/~oxy/index.php

> However, all the Esperantists I know pronounce it as [e] when
> it's immediately followed by another vowel, as in the word "teo"
> (= tea).
In general I hear [e] when |e| is not followed by a consonant, whether
because it's followed by another vowel in hiatus, as in your examples,
or by nothing at all (as in the word "ne").

-Marcos

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