Its too late to make wide and sweeping changes like this, and personeely I see a big diference between the ĵ and ĝ.

I've got another idea. We'll keep ĝ and ĵ the same, but both sounds can be used for either letter, like じ and ぢ.

k1attack:I've got another idea. We'll keep ĝ and ĵ the same, but both sounds can be used for either letter, like じ and ぢ.

My reaction aside, the question remains: Why? To what benefit?

k1attack:I've got another idea. We'll keep ĝ and ĵ the same, but both sounds can be used for either letter, like じ and ぢ.

K1attack, Esperanto isn't some language thats still in need of fixing, even if its got flaws, then they are here to stay. Esperanto has been a living language for longer then both you and I have been alive, and even has 4'th generation native speakers. Its not a project still in the alpha stages, if anything... its a more complete and complex language then some national languages.

This is a place to learn the language, not to try and create some breakway group of Esperanto. You will have better lack proposing these changes to IDO adherents which are low in numbers, and like reforms.

You guys are getting trolled. K1 has done this very thing before, and your predictable reactions are exactly what he's looking for. I don't know why he bothers, but at the very least don't encourage him.

RiotNrrd:You guys are getting trolled. K1 has done this very thing before, and your predictable reactions are exactly what he's looking for. I don't know why he bothers, but at the very least don't encourage him.

I was beginning to suspect that based on his complete lack of explanations or reasons, so thanks for confirming.

Here we go again...

witeowl:

k1attack:I was thinking about replacing the letter ĝ with ĵ, as Ido (and Japanese) have done. The new letter ĵ can be pronounced both as an English J sound OR a French J sound. Isn't that a good idea?

I believe that part of what makes the Esperanto language easy and standard is that each letter makes one sound, and one sound only.

Technically speaking it's a many-sounds to one letter relationship. The benefit is that it isn't a many-letters to one sound relationship

@K1attack, I have to say that unfortunately such a radical change for two phonemes to merge like that would be only possible in natural language evolution unless you can get the entire EO community on board. Unfortunately in this case it's not "subliminal" enough to work so artificially, so you'll probably just have to be patient and hope that jx and gx are fused.

Such a change would be running parallel or even not occur in lieu of syllable reduction and consonant clusters in more complex words first though, as linguistic history seems to indicate, and that's not taking palatalisation or lenition or any related phenomena into account.

@Evildela: Good luck with reforming Ido; just because they were the original break-off group doesn't make that less of a language than EO, so the same complaints and what-not will still apply.
Actually...
Back @ k1attack: you might find Ido more to your tastes since I think the ĝ and ĵ were fused in that language.

As we've gone over before, to reform EO is to create a splinter language, or more correctly a daughter language, just as modern English is a daughter language of Old English (Englisc). It does not assure complete take-up of the new idea. If you want to speak EO and fuse ĝ and ĵ in your own speech, feel free, as the average human can probably guess what you're saying in cases where ĝ and ĵ can cause a word to mean two different things.

In terms of ぢ and じ, their fused pronunciations are only a product of language evolution, and popular trends of pronouncing them the same way (as ĝi). This is not a total change though, and some speakers do differentiate between じ (ĵi) and ぢ (ĝi).

witeowl:I guess the question I would have, is... perhaps the cost is small (depending on whom you ask)... but what would be the benefit?

The benefit would be easier pronunciation no doubt, but the cost isn't small since we have aĝo/aĵo conflicts. We'd need a change somewhere to differentiate the two, which has much larger ramifications and is best done by the community as a whole naturally.

Of course, the smartest choice would be to just go back in time and convince Zamenhoff to stick closer to Latin phonetics instead of mixing Latin, Italian, French, Polish, Russian, German and English phonetics, since the language would be easier fullstop (for those unfamiliar with the larger conlanging world, EO is very arbitrary for a language that tries to be naturalistic ). Of course, the cost then: would you REALLY know whether you had successfully changed the future of EO, or just created an offshoot branch of history?


Sorry, I'm in a loopy mood. Forgive my turning this discussion into a Sci-fi movie plot.

I think hardly any languages distinguish between the ĝ and ĵ sound (apart from legion and lesion, of which the latter was originally pronounced leezyun. I almost never use those words).

Why did Zamenhof add both ĝ and ĵ then?

What about ĥ? Isn't that slowly starting to disappear from the language?

ceigered: If you want to speak EO and fuse ĝ and ĵ in your own speech, feel free, as the average human can probably guess what you're saying in cases where ĝ and ĵ can cause a word to mean two different things.

In terms of ぢ and じ, their fused pronunciations are only a product of language evolution, and popular trends of pronouncing them the same way (as ĝi).

So I CAN merge them in my speech.

I got this idea of merging ĝ and ĵ (in speech) from Nihongo and the fact that the 'z' as in 'seizure' sound is ĵ (and corresponds to the English j-sound e.g. ĵurnalo - journal) rather than z^ , but also from Arpee's languages, which goes extremely far to just 5 consonants! (tikalanguage.webs.com)