Re: Two questions about Esperanto

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>.

> >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.
The use of <x> avoids any possibility of such ambiguity, because <x> is
not a letter in the Esperanto alphabet.

-Marcos

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