All very high-minded, but psychologically implausible as a motivational factor. The simple truth is that it is uncool to speak with a pronounced national accent. Though of course there is the practical matter of there not being much point if nobody can understand you. Kiooh vohlarse perowlee mahlbownay?

kefga_x:Some clarifications from your previous comment.

espere:In English, we once had "ye". Now we have "the".

"Ye" was never "the". The "y" in "ye" like "ye olde shoppe" was a substitute for an old English letter, thorn, þ, which is a "th". People used "y" as a shortcut for awhile.

Ummm, for the record, the definite article in Old English was se/seo/þæt (m/f/n). The word þe was used as a relative pronoun.

http://bosworth.ff.cuni.cz/031544

I'm not going to comment on the etymology of "Ye olde ..." but keep in mind that "y" in Old English was pronounced like German "ü" and was not an alternate form of "þ".

Amike,

Paul

I tend to lean towards acceptance of national accents. We all have sounds in Esperanto that we find difficult to pronounce due to the phonetical features of our respective native languages.

Some Germanophones, Francophones and Anglophones can't roll their R's no matter how hard they try. Consonant clusters like /sts/ or /kts/ are very difficult to correctly articulate to native speakers of Spanish and Japanese, among others. Regardless of one's native language, it is not so easy to correctly utter a voiced consonant directly followed by a voiceless one as in "bs" (it is much easier to enunciate them as either /ps/ or /bz/). Only to give one more example, the recommandation to phonate E's and O's with an aperture neither too wide nor too narrow is complicated to put into practice.

The main problem is that at a very early age we lose our ability to discriminate similar sounds whose distinction is meaningless in our native language, which is a very rational way of using our cognitive ressources but complicates the task of learning non-native sounds.

Also, while some people can find national accents unpleasant and likely to create misunderstandings, others have expressed their joy that so much accent diversity doesn't hinder mutual understanding. Some people even perceive this broad range of different accents to be a pleasant thing, a proof of authentic internacieco.

I am liking it - more and more! Ethnic accents give the language color and character. Where I live most people sound like they are from somewhere else when speaking eith of the two languages most commonly heard here: (American) English and Spanish. Very few people who live here were actually born here or if they were, into an ethnic enclave, and have retained their particular "flavor". My Spanish wouldn't be have as good as it is if I didn't hear speakers from many different countries and provinces all the time. I still understand the people in English and Spanish - and so be it with Esperanto! La mojosa lingvo!

yyaann:The main problem is that at a very early age we lose our ability to discriminate similar sounds whose distinction is meaningless in our native language, which is a very rational way of using our cognitive ressources but complicates the task of learning non-native sounds

Additionally the shape of the mouth adapts itself to the native language(s). That means that it is easy to pronounce phonemes of the native language(s) but it is quite difficult or even impossible to pronounce phonemes of any other language.
The more native languages one has the bigger the phoneme pool is.
Also the environment influences the phoneme pool. One doesn't need to have two native languages if one's enviroment offers two different languages.

As for Esperanto, a Romance language and a Germanic language, e.g. Spanish and English, provide almost every phoneme that Esperanto's phoneme pool has.

If one speaks just one language natively, one has to approximate some of the Esperanto phonemes. Only a few people master to reach to pronounce those Esperanto phonemes perfectly.

I think that approximations of those phonemes are completely fine if they help to improve the flow of spoken Esperanto and usually contect make clear the meaning.

pdenisowski:Ummm, for the record, the definite article in Old English was se/seo/þæt (m/f/n). The word þe was used as a relative pronoun.

Thanks for the clarification! I should've been more specific, but I was talking specificly about /ði:/ in its modern forms. So, reaching back to early modern and a bit earlier. Old English is another beast entirely, but important to know if you're going back far!

pdenisowski:I'm not going to comment on the etymology of "Ye olde ..." but keep in mind that "y" in Old English was pronounced like German "ü" and was not an alternate form of "þ".

That was what we were working out before. The 'y' (the letter) in 'ye olde...' and whatnot was a shortcut for writing a 'þ', but 'y' (the letter for the 'y' sound) has never sounded like a 'th'.

It's rather common for people to think that 'the' /ði:/ used to be 'ye' /ji:/ because of the orthography used at some point in the past (too lazy to look up exactly when, Espere cited Wikipedia a bit earlier). Espere was citing it as evidence for language shift, and I believed he was referencing a phonetic shift, but he could've been citing it simply for the orthographic shift (still a language shift).

However, going back to Old English, the language has changed much much more, as your example clearly shows.