Re: USAGE: No rants! (USAGE: di"f"thong)

On 5/29/06, Dana Nutter <d_n@...> wrote:
> li [veritosproject@GMAIL.COM] mi tulis la
>
> >  [x] _Esperanto!_ j/k
>
> I overlooked that one in my post. Though it is phonemic, the diacritics
> need to go.  I prefer the <cx gx hx jx sx w> system, but would rather
> see something that doesn't need digraphs either.
Er, you have the problem that Esperanto has more phonemes than there
are letters in the Latin alphabet. Thus, you need to extend the
alphabet -- and diacritics and digraphs are two popular ways to do so.
If you eliminate those, what else is left? (I suppose you could press
into service letters such as <q w x y> which aren't currently used,
but only a Pinyin-reader could love that...)

_If_ you don't want extra letters, a better way is to reduce the
number of phonemes. As several of the Esperanto reforms did :)

For example, Ido got rid of <hx gx> (the first is pretty marginal in
Esperanto anyway, and is often replaced by <k>) and spells <jx> as <j>
(Esperanto <j> is Ido <y>). However, the other two special letters use
digraphs, <ch sh>; I suppose one might have used <q x> had one not
wanted to use those for <qu> = /kw/ and <x> = /ks/ (/gz/?).

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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