@erinja
Thank you! I've been there once when I was very young. As I couldn't remember a thing you probably know the town better than I do. I will follow your recommendation and visit there some time~

@ceigered
No problem~ There are just so many "Chinese"s out there. I have no idea about some of them, either~

IberianWolf:the district I live in, Setúbal, would be written "Setubal", I guess

Setubaux(l) or Setubao(l), with the "e" being the schwa, I presume would be how you pronounce it? Or is that Brazilian pronunciation?

and this isn't just in my language. even non-native english speakers struggle with the "th" sound. they don't mind. they say "Thomas" and we say "Tomás" with a T at the start.

Actually, it's pronounce Tómas in English, unless you're saying that the non-native speakers pronounce it "Thomas".
Anyway, give it a good 100-200 years and the T/D/TH distinction won't be there

ceigered:Setubaux(l) or Setubao(l), with the "e" being the schwa, I presume would be how you pronounce it? Or is that Brazilian pronunciation?

I don't know the European pronunciation, since I don't speak Portuguese But in Brazilian, we pronounce it [se.'tu.bɐw]

wow, I though Thomas used the weird th sound. well, we don't pronounce most of the th words like native speakers anyway my father pronounces "think" as "sink" and I'm pretty sure I've heard him pronounce it like "fink", like I was kinda brought into pronouncing. we mostly say "dat" for "that" and similar words. since non-natives don't really know which words use "dh" or "th", it's just funny until we get it right.

In Portugal it's pronounced [sɨ.'tu.bəɫ], my bad! I thought the schwa was some other sound. however, I came across something really weird... the IPA transcriptions I found for Portuguese have ɐ instead of ə, but from what I have heard from sound samples, we definitely pronounce it very schwa-ish in Portugal. in fact, that's one of the things that distinguishes European from Brazilian accents.

well, anyway, my point was that in Esperanto you can't possibly pronounce most Portuguese proper names correctly, and you'd have to get a lot of new sounds into Esperanto in order to do it. that's why it's better to just make some compromises, and understand that the same way you can't say some of our words, we won't be able to say some of yours, that's it. respect

EDIT: ok, I just searched a little bit and it seems that the sound I was trying to describe doesn't even have an IPA symbol. it's apparently somewhere between ɯ, ɨ and ə. that's right suckers, we're too cool for IPA!

IberianWolf:EDIT: ok, I just searched a little bit and it seems that the sound I was trying to describe doesn't even have an IPA symbol. it's apparently somewhere between ɯ, ɨ and ə. that's right suckers, we're too cool for IPA!

Haha! If it's not even in IPA, then there's no hope for it being standardised in Esperanto

And cheers Vilinilo and IberianWolf, you portuguese speakers pronounce things very interestingly, it reminds me of Australian English with the dark L and reduced letter sounds (although, Australian English is more like South African + French + Portuguese + Dutch )

@ the original topic: This discussion of substandard registers existing within Esperanto might be of interest:
Angla Vikipedio

that's funny, 'cause I had a girlfriend who grew up in South Africa, so she is natively bilingual. her English pronunciation was amazingly similar to Australian, immediately prompting crocodile and kangaroo jokes. maybe there's a correlation?

you know, I can easily spot a portuguese or a galician speaking castillian or some other languages, there's this weird "tonality" in some vowels that gives us a noticeable accent.

or maybe it's just that it's my native language

EDIT: wouldn't Esperant' fit into that category?

IberianWolf:EDIT: wouldn't Esperant' fit into that category?

Yes and no - Esperant' is really just Esperanto without the O, from my understanding at least. So it's ultimately poetic Esperanto, which could be considered a register, but its nothing like, say, Popido, which just simplifies everything as might a speaker on the streets of London or NYC (which I can't find any information on - it looks very interesting to me).

IberianWolf:I understand that in malay you have different sounds and you want to preserve them, but so do the portuguese. for example, the district I live in, Setúbal, would be written "Setubal", I guess. and I have no problem with that, and it doesn't turn people away from the language. I'm probably going to say it like I always said, with the schwa, but if a foreigner says it following Esperanto's phonetics it'll be easy to know which city he's referring to. it's a compromise we have to make.

For time and again, i wonder you have read the other earliest posts that i did not talking about Malaysian language.

For your information, the Portuguese did once colonised the Malaya Peninsula in the State of Melaka.

Besides your country, Dutch was one of the other country that colonised the state and left with the sounds that we have.

LyzTyphone:
[Irrelevent]
OK, but I kind of hate this Pinyin system
[/Irrelevent]

It is your personal choice but you did not look at the macro view but rather at micro.

You seem to misunderstand what we meant over there about the "untouchability". Fundament is the untouchable core. Anything else is free to evolve.

If it is so free, thus it would be a chaos and confusion. There must be certain guidelines.

Minority language is a concern. I like @ceigered's explanation. Just to add one point:
Usually what we should do to protect minority language is to ensure they can stand by their own. So it will help more writing literature in that language, or translate classics into that language, or talk in them to many people, etc. Situation varies and Esperanto is not always of help here.

What i said is the mother tongue as it is in the charter of UN.

Would China government able to return my ancestry language She 畲族 to me?

Once destroy it can never be built. It is like the dilemma now the Chinese govornment facing to unified the Mancurian into using the Han language and the court documents which were written in Manchurian language during the dynasty of Manchuria.

It is of whom who faced the lost of his/her own language would feel stronger than those do not as you are Han tribe and is still in the dominance forces.

Also, the topic has shifted from your proposal to... I don't know, the meaning of Esperanto? How is that related?

This is beyong my control for the participants who do not read the text carefully

If you don't agree with our cases , you can refute them. That is what debate is. If you just ignore them, I don't see the space for a productive dialog.

Read my reply carefully, and the msg from others, it is meaningless to hang on when one is not see the point clearly. Further substantial evidents are not being given. What to waste time in replying.

ceigered:

That is a good example you have. Australian aboriginal languages are being promoted at the moment (such as in my regional city, Adelaide, the Kaurna language is being used in more official signage etc (e.g the city is called "Adelaide" and "Tarndanya", with the middle square in the city being called Tarndanyannga ("cxe adelajdo/at adelaide")). Of course, it is not so smooth, and while some idigenous people don't even speak English, English is required for the largest part of society. But it is a good lingua-franca for them, even if it is not native to the indigeonous people, because it is unrelated to their languages (therefore does not favour any of them) and allows them to talk to the rest of Australians, who come from Britain, Italy, Germany, France, China, Greece, Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, and many other countries. If we favour minority languages too much, we end up with the same problems as South Africa or the European union.

If Australia could brave enough to do away the English policy and have one country two languages, the two languages are the mother tongue of respective community and one common language, this would ideally be Esperanto for all. Thus you would see not problem of who ever speaking the mother tongue at home. This is what i am into for my country.

But, regarding the aboriginal languages, I have to say that I think the outlook is bleak for them looking at how lame the government's attempts to promote their languages are. Hopefully though, at the least, some of their languages will further come into English and make Australian English more distinct.

In short, you are still favour English as the main language.

I think though that a major problem here in this forum is that we come from different viewpoints - I come from a country that is historically (after 1800's) monolingual, but is now drifiting towards multilinguism (e.g. Italian migrants will speak Italian at home sometimes, the Chinese might not even speak English, African migrants might have problems speaking English), where as you come from the opposite, a multilingual country that is probably becoming monolingual, correct?

Nope, we still remind multilingual but with no ONE country TWO LANGUAGES, REFER ABOVE?