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Re: Two questions about Esperanto

From:John Cowan <jcowan@...>
Date:Thursday, July 8, 2004, 19:56
Ray Brown scripsit:

> Dunno - haven't a clue what you're getting at here by suggesting some of > us aren't adults.
I think he means the human race as a whole.
> 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 Fundamento is sacred, but some parts are more sacred than others, as a later English writer didn't quite say.
> But, er, why, if Esperanto felt it necessary to have a letter to denote /w/ > , didn't it just use |w|? Just puzzled.
Probably the pressure of German and Polish orthography. Using u, and marking it with a diacritic, bypassed that right away. In fact, when you get past English and Welsh (and writing systems founded on English, like IPA and Romanized Chinese), I can hardly think of any writing system that uses "w" for /w/. -- Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out. --Arthur C. Clarke, "The Nine Billion Names of God" John Cowan <jcowan@...>