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Carl Edlund Anderson skrev:
Well, indeed! I like /kv/ and /kw/. Makes everything feel so .... Germanic! :) Don't seem at all Esperantish to me (but then I know very little about Esperanto!).
Well, there certainly is a *bit* too much of it in Esperanto. Latin/Romance _qu-_ becomes /kf/ all the time in Polish and Russian, so Zamenhof much likely was too used to it to foresee any displeasure on the part of Western Europeans.
But why would /kv/ (or /kw/) end up like /kxv/ or /kCv/? That doesn't seem to have happened in other Germanic languages (that I know of) .... Couldn't things just stay /kw/? You could even keep the ol' <qu> orthography that crops up in OHG, or you could give it the Gothic-style plain <q> (which I think is pleasantly exotic-looking :)
Well, that's actually strange. I'm not up to date on the
complexities of the HG consonant shift, but the k > (k)x
shift *is* the most restricted part -- OTOH maybe _qu_
did write /(k)xw/ in the dialects where it applied, as
AFAIK there would be no possible contrast to **/kw/,
since *gw had become *w (or *g in some contexts) in
West Germanic. In either case I think Pete can silently
keep _qu-_ and keep the question of its realization
unanswered.
--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se
"Maybe" is a strange word. When mum or dad says it
it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
means "no"!
(Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)