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Syllables

by Oŝo-Jabe, September 29, 2009

Messages: 4

Language: English

Oŝo-Jabe (User's profile) September 29, 2009, 9:43:38 PM

I read that the neologism "hotdogo" is sometimes changed to "hodogo" because of how rare the "td" combination is in Esperanto. Has any serious research been done into which sounds don't tend to occur next to each other? I know about general ones like ŭ is always after vowel, but what about more specific ones?

ceigered (User's profile) September 30, 2009, 4:18:12 AM

I've never actually thought about this. I've always pronounced the 't' as a glottal stop in the English word 'Hotdog'. 'Hotdogo' doesn't sound too hard to pronounce though for English speakers at least, it's like having a double unvoiced consonant that is released with some amount of voicing.

Making it hodogo sounds un-esperantistic though, as written resemblance seems to be emphasised (otherwise I wouldn't dislike saying 'I know' in Esperanto due to the 'sc' combo).

gyrus (User's profile) September 30, 2009, 5:29:16 PM

Hotdogo is hard to say because d and t are made in the same place in the mouth (place of articulation) but d is the voiced equivalent, meaning it is made by vibrating the voicebox. Because of this, to pronounce it the "td" fully one has to insert a glottal stop between the t and d.

ceigered (User's profile) October 1, 2009, 7:47:45 AM

Voicing shouldn't be a problem though as it seems fairly normal in esperanto for voice/devoiced consonants to affect those surrounding them (e.g. kz -> gz depending on the speaker). Essentially then it's like /ho'dshoko.gifgo/* (which technically would be written 'hoddogo' phonetically, and such double letters do pop up occasionally in the language).

* the /d:/ being the sound sound in 'load down'

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