Problemoj pri Esperanto

Problems with Esperanto

Maybe I will continue to study Esperanto because it has been fun. However I continue to be irritated by the keyboard-unfriendly accented letters: even pre-keyboard by accent another letter to create the symbol for a different sound? Then there is the 'ts' sound of the letter _c_: why? Also why an accented _u_ for the sound for which a 'w' would better serve?

As it happens, I buzzed by an Esperanto page on Wikipedia, and thought I would check out the critiques. While there are at least two criticisms I consider trivial (ie some complaints about difficult pronunciations which don't seem too difficult to me, and complaints that Esperanto words resemble English words that they are *not* - {so!? that happens between languages and can help stimulate memory}) many I definitely recognised from my own experience.

Last night I was pondering how to represent the sounds with common keyboard letters. Geoff Eddy, among criticisms on phonology and orthography, offered a solution:

• There really isn't much point in an accent which is used on only one letter; why not spell the accented U (which comes from Belorussian) as W?
• There's no need to write the affricates as single letters. Replace C by TS; you can now spell SH as C and CH as TC.
• There's no harm in replacing J with the otherwise unused Y. This allows JH to lose its accent, and GH can now be more sanely spelt DJ.
• Assuming that HH is really necessary, the unused X (from the Cyrillic alphabet) can be used for it.

Whether X or Q or C is used instead of ĥ (HH) or ŝ (SH), another letter is available to represent another distinctive sound which could be used to create new words, or in suffixes to avoid homonyms. (Is there another distinctive sound that would be useful? I was thinking of 'th' [as in the] or 'th' [as in thin] but perhaps they are too similar to 'v' and 'f'?) Although going back a little... ĝ (as in gem or january) doesn't sound like dj to me.

I like the potential simplicity from word-building but it is regrettable that Zamenhof did not logically ensure that roots did not end similarly to his suffixes (or I guess begin similarly to prefixes). Throughout the criticisms were examples of compound words that could be translated in diverse ways because of this lack of distinctiveness. Justin Rye, among his detailed criticisms, discussed problems surrounding various word-builds.