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From: donh@netcom.com (Don HARLOW)
Subject: Re: Breves (Re: Diacritic symbol names)
Message-ID: <donhCyC2sv.FtK@netcom.com>
Organization: Esperanto League for North America, Inc.
References: <Cy6Gs2.Lz5@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <38glpg$pq@agate.berkeley.edu> <Cy9v56.18B@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 27 Oct 1994 13:29:19 GMT
Lines: 25

iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) skribis en lastatempa afisxo <Cy9v56.18B@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>:
>
>I thought of that, but didn't want to suggest it.  Wasn't Esperanto
>meant to be a language for international communication?  Can it be
>that the man who had the courage to invite the zillions of speakers
>of English, Spanish, Portuguese, French etc. to learn to pronounce
>_c_, _j_ and quite a few other letters in ways unfamiliar to them
>didn't have the fortitude to tell the German and Polish speakers
>(of whom there are considerably fewer) that /v/ would be written
>as _v_ and _w_ would be /w/?  Oh well.
>
Actually, as far as _j_ is concerned, that wasn't courage, just 
necessity. To the best of my memory, _j_ is pronounced differently in 
each of English, Spanish, and Portuguese-French. It would have been 
impossible to consistently satisfy them all. Also, why waste _c_ on 
sounds for which other letters (_s_ and _k_) were doing perfectly 
adequate jobs?

How many fantasticatillions are there in a zillion?

-- 
Don HARLOW			donh@netcom.com
Esperanto League for N.A.       elna@netcom.com (800) 828-5944
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/elna/elna.html         Esperanto
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/donh/donh.html 
