<deinx nxtxr> skrev:
> Kjell Rehnstr?öm wrote:
>> James Chandler skrev:
>>> FWIW I've never fully understood why Z didn't go with the hachek or 
>>> caron used in Czech and other languages:
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachek
>>>
>>> It also has the advantage of being a variation of the breve that he 
>>> used with the letter u.
>>>
>> The explanation I have heard is that Zamenhof did not want the 
>> language to look like Lithuanian. If that is an urban legen in 
>> Esperantujo is more than I know, but I think it is plausible.
>> Many other things indicate similar tendencies.
>
> About the only likely explanation I can think of is that he wanted it 
> to somehow have its own unique appearance but still he should have 
> taken into account the typography issues of the day.
>
>
>> The only good thing was that Esperanto sounded like Italian.
>
> I don't know if that's a good thing or not.
>
I was just quoting what I have heard and read. There is a sotry where 
some of the pionier Esperantists is having a discussion with somebody 
and this other guy sais that Esperanto is un-natural, so this 
Esperantist reads a text in Italian and then something else in 
Esperanto, and the opponent isn't able to tell what is Esperanto and 
what's not.

My personal opinon is that Z kould have taken the diacritics from other 
Slavic or Baltic languages. He couldn't have taken ǧ from Turkish, 
though, 'cause they hadn't yet published the Turkish Latin alphabete, as 
far as I know.

Had he used slavic diacritics we might have ended up inn this series:
c, dz, s, z
č, dž, š, ž and ŭ. The latter he may have been inspired by from 
Byelorussian.  I have also seen in German texts where they have used  ŭ 
for a w-sound.