Comment on Non-smart smart move

• rockerface@lemmy.cafe ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Have you looked at which phonemes Esperanto has? If you look me in the eyes and say an international language needs to have a distinction between [h] (written as “h") and [x] (written as “ĥ"), I can only make a conclusion you’re trolling. See also distinctions between:

  • fricatives and affricates
  • voiced and voiceless plosives
  • “r” and “l”
  • “v” and “w” (which is also for some ungodly reason written as “ŭ")

  We only need “th” to become a full fledged abomination.

  Also, yes, all is not most. But it is concerning if the “most” conveniently all happen to be languages from the same family, spoken in the same relatively small region.

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  • zloubida@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Esperanto’s not perfect, for sure. The existence of /x/ is indeed one of its flaws, but it almost disappeared in modern Esperanto because of that.

    For the rest, a language do need some diversity in its phonology or the words would have to be very long and least recognizable. It won’t be a problem if you mispronounce most phonemes a little, as there’s no correct accent; if you pronounce ankaŭ [ankau] instead of [ankau̯] nobody will care… Again it’s not perfect, but perfection doesn’t exist and Esperanto works.

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    • rockerface@lemmy.cafe ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      language do need some diversity in its phonology or the words would have to be very long and least recognizable

      The existence of the distinctions I’ve mentioned is what makes words unrecognisable. In every somewhat widespread language in the world, at least once of those doesn’t exist, so to native speakers of that language, there will be at least one pair of words in Esperanto that straight up sound the same, but spell differently and means different things. Do I really need to explain how that’s bad for an international language?

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