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From: rharmsen@knoware.nl (Ruud Harmsen)
Subject: Re: phonetic Esperanto (Re: languages with phonetic alphabets?)
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Date: Wed, 5 Apr 1995 15:52:56 GMT
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In article <3lscho$de3@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM> timd@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM (Mercury) writes:
>It would be interesting to see in the future--assuming Esperanto
>will still be around in a few hundred years--what has happened to
>the pronunciation.  I wonder if, even now, there aren't variations
>to the standard...to me, that seems to be the norm...complex
>systems evolve and, where they are spread out in some sense
>like, say, geography, they evolve differently in different areas.
Well, it's already 106 years old, so there should have been some change 
already. Or hasn't it been used widely enough and intensively enough 
for that?
Personally I do expect change. One problem with Esperanto (don't take me 
wrong, I'm a fan!) is that short and often used words like "estas" have two 
syllables, and thus are too long. They violate the redundancy principle, which 
is why the letter e is a single dot in Morse. So these words are the first 
likely candidates for being reduced, which would mean that Esperanto shared a 
feature with most other (Indo-European?) languages, viz. that the commonest 
words are irregular.
