Ray Brown wrote:
>
> On Thursday, July 8, 2004, at 10:15 , Christian Thalmann wrote:
>
> [snip]
> > And "la auxlango" should maybe rather be "la euroklono".
>
> That's better. The |ux| in "auxlango" is ambiguous - it might be read a a
> graphy for u-breve   :)

These would have to be "aukslango" and "euroklono" both with
a breve over the "u", or "auxkslango" and "euxroklono" in the
form with "x" indicating the breve.


> On Wednesday, July 7, 2004, at 09:12 , Nik Taylor wrote:
> > Ambiguity.  Since "h" is an independent letter, there are occasional
> > compound words that have clusters like "ch" or "sh".  Though, I don't
> > know why they don't just introduce the apostrophe to distinguish /sh/
> > (s'h) from /S/ (sh) if they're so concerned about ambiguity.
>
> Indeed - or even use |s| = /s/ and |x| = /S/.
>
> It vaguely amuses me that Esperanto dispensed with |q|, |w|, |y| and |x|,
> bringing the total number of letters to 22, then adds 5 accented
> consonants and one accented vowel to bring the number up to 28. As they
> say in the north of England: "There's nowt so queer as folk".

Certainly if Esperanto were designed today, different choices would
be made. I think we have to place ourselves back in 1887. Zamenhof
knew that to be successful he would have to cater to a wide, diverse
(European) audience. I don't think many people would have accepted
|x| for /S/.  |c^| and |s^| made sense based on Slavic languages, but with
the hacek changed to a circumflex, familiar to most literate Europeans
from French. In the same way, |j^| was used rather than |z^| from Slavic
as it reminds one of the French J.

I think that if you place yourself back in Z's time and consider the
linguistic landscape of Europe at that time, the Esperanto alphabet
represents reasonable choices.

Side note:

Before phototypesetting and computers, printing Esperanto required
having matrices made for the letters unique to Esperanto. This often
was costly. (Today this is easy. I just use Fontographer to create the
needed TrueType characters.)

French uses all five vowels with a circumflex, and French was widely
used as an auxlang in the nineteenth century so that printing type
with vowels + circumflex was readily available. Someone early on
in the history of Esperanto suggested that the circumflex over a
consonant could be moved onto the following vowel. So

   Mia hundo mang^is s^ian c^apelon

would become

   Mia hundo mangîs sîan câpelon.

--Ph. D.