Talk:Esperanto orthography

This article discusses Esperanto orthography in general - including the "h" and "^" systems, not just the x-system - so I propose moving it to Esperanto orthography, which in any case would mean more to non-Esperantists. Any objections? -- Oliver P. 16:45 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

Okay, I've moved it and made separate sections for different systems. Somehow its ended up quite a lot longer than before, despite the fact that I haven't added much. I think my writing style may be too verbose. But hopefully it's clear enough. Please check through it if you have time! -- Oliver P. 20:42 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

I like it. Good job! --Chuck SMITH

Phew! Thanks. :) Feel free to improve it if you want... I wasn't sure about including the weird capitalisation method, as I've only known one other person who has used it. I used it for a while when corresponding with Martin Howard. (He was for a time the president of the Orienta Federacio, which is the main Esperanto group for East Anglia and its environs.) I can't remember where he said he got it from, but I seem to remember him being very keen on it! I haven't written to him for quite a while, though. I'll try to find the old e-mails where he was telling me about it. -- Oliver P. 21:04 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

---

Contents

1 Use of upper-case letters 2 <c> vs. <ts> 3 Nearly phonemic? 4 punctuation

Use of upper-case letters

One very unusual system is to dispense with the normal capitalisation rules, and use lower-case letters to stand for unaccented letters, and upper-case letters for accented ones. For example, ŝi would be written as Si, regardless of where it occurs in a sentence. This system has the advantage that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the letters being reprsented and the characters used to represent them. However, the resulting texts look very peculiar to most people, and the system is almost never used.

I removed the above section because this convention is never used in reality. --Chuck SMITH

<c> vs. <ts>

As far as I'm aware, Esperanto does not contain monomorphemic sequences of <ts>, <tŝ>, or <dĵ>, so the argument against the phonemicity of /c/, /ĉ/, and /ĝ/ is spurious. If there are a couple such words in some sources, most Esperantists would agree that they don't fit accepted Esperanto orthography. One could just as easily argue against the phonemicity of English <ch> because it's phonetically [tʃ] and even spelled that way in Tchaikovsky. Bimorphemic sequences may be slightly distinct due to their composite structure, but such marginal cases are found in most languages. --kwami

Since there's been no comment, I'm removing that section. You wouldn't argue the Fijian script is nonphonemic because < b > is [mb], since that is a phoneme in the language. Similarly, affricates are phonemic sequences of sounds. --kwami 02:04, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

About the presence of <ts>, <tĉ> and similars: some words have them (matĉo), as a rule they are not supposed to produce an affricate, so matĉo is pronounced mat-ĉo. These words also appear not so unfrequently in compound words. Orzetto 17:06, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing, Orzetto. Geminate consonants certainly occur, though usually not monomorphemically (mallonga, for example). <Tc>, <tĉ>, <dĝ> are the geminate equivalents of <c>, <ĉ>, <ĝ>, and they do occur occasionally, like in your example of matĉo. (Should we also add the diphthong oŭ because someone coined the word poŭpo? Do we need to recognize as phonemic everything that someone decides to transcribe into Esperanto? [That's an honest question, by the way; I'm not trying to be sarcastic].) However, I don't believe there's any contrast between plosive + fricative and affricate, unless it's across morpheme boundaries and the syllable boundary falls between the two segments. English does this (can't think of a good example offhand; only thing that comes to mind is achoo vs. at Shoe), and you wouldn't argue <ch> isn't phonemic because of that. I don't know if there's any official take on whether <ot-so> should be syllabified as [ot.so] or [o.tso], that is, as contrasting with or homophonic with <oco> [o.tso]. Note also that <dz> is not considered a phoneme in Esperanto, and as far as I know geminate <ddz> never occurs. --kwami 01:57, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

P.S. I frequently read that Esperanto does not have monomorphemic gemination, despite a few words like matĉo.

Nearly phonemic?

As far as I know Esperanto is defined phonemic, so ekzemple is indeed pronounced with /kz/, or it would be written differently. The same goes for ŭ, it is not an allophone of /v/ (even though in normal Esperanto words it is found only as aŭ or eŭ). If someone is pronouncing like that, he/she's simply pronouncing wrong and looking for excuses. It can and should be remarked that some (groups of) esperantists have pronounciation biases, for example Russians tend to use anticipatory voicing quite a lot; this is possibly the origin of some rumours on irregularities in pronounciation. Orzetto 17:06, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

You're right, I should have said "nearly a one-to-one correspondance of letter and sound" or some such, which is quite different. However, there's nothing unphonemic about pronouncing /kz/ as [gz], as long as that's a systematic rule for the language: "voiceless plosives become voiced before voiced obstruents except /v/" is a perfectly normal phonemic rule (and basically the situation of Polish and Russian). Then within a morpheme, it would be an arbitrary orthographic choice whether to write [gz] as <kz> or <gz>, with Zamenhof choosing <kz>. (English is similar here; we write sky, even though *sgy would seem closer phonetically: Compare the sky with this guy – the only difference for me at least is in the placement of the syllable break.)

It could very well be the case that Zamenhof intended <kz> to be pronounced [gz], or even that he pronounced it that way without realizing it, and that people have been trying to pronounce it [kz] ever since, despite the nearly universal tendency for voicing assimilation (and Esperanto is the "universal language"!). Actually, I believe the Esperanto script is usually claimed to be phonetic, not phonemic. Z's phrase was "unu litero - unu sono", but that's impossible in any literal sense. (Can we really expect anyone to pronounce both the /m/ and the /f/ in <emfazi> the same as in <bombo> and <infano>, with one bilabial and the other labial-dental?) There must be allophony in Esperanto, as human speech is impossible otherwise. The only question is how much allophony we allow. Since a good portion of Esperantists – and in rapid speech, probably the vast majority – pronounce <kz> as [gz] (whether they realize it or not), this must be reflected in any descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive) account of the language. Even if Z specifically intended <kz> to be [kz]. Fundamento or no, this is how the language is.

As for <ŭ>, I didn't claim it was an allophone of /v/. I believe [w] is an allophone of /v/, but <ŭ> isn't [w]: it's a diphthongal offglide [u̯]. As an onset, [w] is Esperantized as <v>. Z purposefully created a single phoneme for [w], [v], etc., which at first he wrote <w>, but which he had changed to <v> by the time he went public. He suggested Italian as the model for pronunciation, but that's only a suggestion. So any pronunciation in the [w] to [v] range would be acceptable, and these are allophones of a single phoneme /v/.

As for any contrast with <ŭ>, I do wonder if that's not also allophonic. <Ŭ> may very well contrast with /v/: although Z seems to have avoided any contrast in root words, there are near minimal pairs in derived forms, such as lave and laŭe. Unless the difference is one of syllabification? /la.ve/ = [la.ve] vs. /lav.e/ = [lau̯.e]? I wouldn't go so far as to make such a claim, but you don't seem to find, say, Classical Eŭgenio versus Slavic Evgenio for the proper name. Instead, <ŭ> is found as a syllabic coda, and <v> as a syllabic onset: Complementary distribution. If this is indeed the case throughout the vocabulary (and I haven't researched it), then there'd be no basis for claiming <ŭ> and <v> represent separate phonemes. By "unu litero – unu sono", Z may have merely intended there to be two recognized allophones, that would avoid German objections to [wino] at the same time as they avoided English objections to [avtomobilo]. An allophone, after all, is just a sound, and here we might have two letters for two "sounds" (two allophones). This would fit with the Esperanto alphabet being "phonetic" rather than phonemic. And even if Z did conceive of <ŭ> and <v> as separate phonemes (if he even thought in terms of phonemes!), if he created them to never contrast, then there is no linguistic basis for claiming they actually are separate phonemes in the living language.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and change the wording a bit. Again, I think we should be describing what Esperanto is, not what people (even Zamenhof) say it is. --kwami 06:39, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

punctuation

added a blurb on punctuation. quite rudimentary; needs to be corrected and expanded. kwami 09:48, 2005 May 6 (UTC)