Talk:Esperanto pronunciation

Phonology vs. Pronunciation

A linguistic article on Esperanto phonology would be good. Should we move/retitle this one and edit it further, or start from scratch? --Jim Henry 00:17, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Personally, I think we should have two articles: a quick pronunciation chart (maybe we could rename this article a "chart"), for people who just want the basics, and a true phonology article. For example, <kv> and <gv> behave very much like single consonants in Esperanto, perhaps due to the fact that /kʷ/ and /gʷ/ are single consonants in several of the source languages for Esperanto vocabulary, but this would be unnecessarily confusing for a pronunciation chart. kwami 22:53, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I went ahead and created a short article, and corrected (some of?) the links. --kwami 22:14, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, I saw this after setting up the merge tag, but in any case I don't agree. "Pronunciation" means phonetics and should be under phonology, and phonology can easily include orthography in the case of Esperanto. --Pablo D. Flores 18:16, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I would keep at least two articles. For someone wanting to read the main article to get the gist of Esperanto, but without enough interest (or comfort with linguistics) to read the grammar or three pages of phonology, we should have a quick & easy guide to pronunciation. Perhaps we could add it to the orthography article instead.

Yeah, pronunciation means phonetics, but phonetics doesn't necessarily belong under phonology. In any case, the phonology article is getting too long, and there are lots of cases where sub-topics are split off to their own articles.

Besides ease of access, the various ASCII schemes in the orthography article have no relevance to phonology or phonetics. But both they and the pronunciation guide are relevant to the basic practicalities of using the language, so I can see lumping them together. --kwami 18:46, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

/v/

Orthographic <v> isn't necessarily pronounced [v]. It's instead ambiguous, or intermediate between [v] and [w], and often [ʋ]. Many languages have only a single phoneme in this range, and <v> is intended to accomodate this. Slavs and Germans who don't control [w] may pronounce it [v]; Spaniards and Japanese who don't control [v] may pronounce it [w]. --kwami

diphthongs

The IPA pronunciations of the diphthongs were based on English. I added a little allophony, but since I'm a native English speaker, someone else might want to modify or add to it.

<kz>

Orthographic <kz>, as in ekzemple, is the one place where Esperanto orthography is not phonemic. This is because most people find it difficult to change voicing in the middle of a consonant cluster. Russian <футбол> "futbol" is [fudbol], for example, and <водка> "vodka" is [votka]. Many Esperantists try to pronounce <kz> as [kz], but in practice it usually ends up being a fully voiced [gz].

(The other solution, a fully voiceless [ks], would cause confusion because the sequence /ks/ is already highly frequent. In fact, it was precisely in order to avoid homographs with <ks> in prefixed and compounded words that Zamenhof started using <kz>. Evidently he decided that spelling this as <gz> would be too alien to people used to seeing these words with <x> or <ks> in their native languages, even if they pronounced them [gz] as the Spaniards do.)

Anyway, <kz> is one of those irregular details that throws people first starting out on the language (I know it puzzled me), and I think should be included in the chart. --kwami 23:07, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

We should also note that some people consider egzismo to be substandard usage. I'm not sure I agree with them; it seems like acceptable allophony to me. But there are a fair number of people who think that way. --Jim Henry | Talk 19:47, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Hmm. The egzismo article states that [kz] in non-compounds isn't habitial for non-Slavs, implying that it is habital for Slavs. However, Russian (and if I remember correctly, Polish and Czech) have complete regressive voicing assimilation of obstruant clusters even in polymorphemic words. [I just changed my examples above.] I can only think that Zamenhof expected <kz> to be pronounced [gz]! --kwami 00:20, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yes, Polish is the same. <jakże> "how" is pronounced [jagʒe]. There are other bits of Polish phonology that show through in Esperanto, such as -ĉj- (Polish <ć>). --kwami 11:48, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

ŭ

Since ŭ doesn't behave like English w, I took out the English equivalent. It's adequately covered in the section on diphthongs. True, it is found as a consonant in a couple words (ŭato "Watt" vs. vato, for example), onomatopoeia, and in foreign names, but v was intended to cover both [v] and [w] in normal vocabulary. --kwami 02:22, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It's a pronunciation guide...

This article in its current form is a very obvious usage guide. Please merge it with any article on Esperanto orthography or redirect it to Esperanto phonology.

Peter ^Isotalo 14:28, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

The ref. you link to doesn't seem to have anything to do with this article. Wikipedia is not:

A usage guide, or slang and idiom guide. Wikipedia is not in the business of saying how words, idioms, etc., are used. We aren't teaching people how to talk like a leet cracker or a Cockney chimney-sweep. However, it may be important in the context of an encyclopedia article to describe just how a word is used in order to distinguish among similar, easily-confused ideas, as at Nation or Freedom. In some special cases an article about an essential piece of slang may be appropriate.

I fail to see how that's relevant. If pronunciation guides are inappropriate to Wikipedia, then they should be removed from all languages articles. If they are appropriate, then I don't see how it matters whether or not they're split off on their own, except that this makes it easier for the reader. kwami 22:49, 2005 July 14 (UTC)

It's telling people how to pronounce Esperanto. Should "usage guide" only apply to vocabulary just because the policy doesn't explicitly say otherwise? Is it that hard to replace "leet cracker or a Cockney chimey-sweep" with "Finnish steelworker or an Arab school teacher"? As far as I can interpret it, the policy supports the idea that we do describe how something is used ("/a/ is usually pronounced [a] but sometimes also [a^u]"), but does not allow for pronunciation guides ("<a> is pronounced [a]"). What basic difference is there between this and writing cooking instructions in an article on dumplings? And please let's try to stay above "it's useful"-argumentation...

Having articles called XXX pronunciation also leaves confusion as to what to include in the article (is it orthography or phonetics?) and of course tends to result in both. It has so far been dealt with by redirecting or moving to proper phonology and orthography articles. I've noticed that a lot of editors working with XXX pronunciation-articles tend to give the impression to the reader that spoken language is bound to writing instead of the other way around.

Peter ^Isotalo 11:27, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

But if a usage guide is moved to Orthography, it's still a usage guide, so I don't follow your point. I'm not trying to be difficult, but don't see how this is different from dozens of other pronunciation guides scattered throughout Wikipedia, both in phonology sections and alphabet articles. You seem to be saying that <x> = /y/ is okay, and /y/ = [z] is okay, but that <x> = [z] is not okay. kwami 11:53, 2005 July 16 (UTC)

Sorry, I wasn't too clear on that. I meant that it should be moved and rephrased. Grapheme to phoneme correspondance in an orthography article is nothing I would object to and seems very relevant to me as long as it's kept fairly general in scope. It's also a matter of avoiding very unnecessary (and potentially endless) discussions and lists of the merits of dialectal variations.

I know there are plenty of pronunciation guides to be found, but I couldn't possible keep track of all of them, let alone fix them all by myself and all at once. My intention is to get them all divvied up into phonology and orthography eventually.

Peter ^Isotalo 13:28, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

Okay, merged with phonology. kwami 13:58, 22 September 2005 (UTC)