I admit that I am an eterna komencanto, one of those older persons who never seem to be quite able to master any other languages (including Esperanto) than his/her native tongue. (If E-o should ever become truly the finvenkista international language, as some of us might hope, nevertheless there would be some older citizens who would simply have to depend on younger people for communication.)

I have often wondered why E-ists seem to persist in using 'v' in place of 'ŭ' when the latter would seem to correspond better with the original pronunciation of the original word. If 'ŭ' already exists in the diphthongs 'aŭ' and 'eŭ', why may it not occur elsewhere? For example, in English my middle name is 'Owen'. Why may I not represent it in Esperanto as 'Oŭeno' rather than 'Oveno', when the first spelling more closely corresponds to the original English pronunciation brought over into E-o itself? Why 'vato' rather than 'ŭato' as a more accurate representation in scientific and engineering discourse? It seems to me that this rigid restriction of 'ŭ' to precisely two diphthongs is an impoverishment of what is already in the language.

Thank you.

Paŭlo

In the languages that Zamenhof was familiar with, I think that not too many of them would start a word with a W-sound. I would say that as a rule, in most European languages, words that start with an English W-sound are pronounced with a V-sound in those languages. That includes the W in Watt. A small digression, I once heard of an Italian who pronounced the name Heathrow (as in the airport in England) as "Etrov", because that's the pronunciation that made sense with Italian spelling/pronunciation rules.

When we bring foreign words into Esperanto we choose the most international form (hence Finnlando and not Suomio, though it is called Suomi in Finnish). I am making a guess that this also extends to phonemes, and Zamenhof probably considered V to be a more international phoneme than the English Ŭ. Most languages in Europe, for example, pronounce Watt's name as "Vaht", in spite of the original English w sound.

If you read the Fundamento de Esperanto, it's clear that Ŭ is treated as a vowel, not a consonant. It is described as a "short u" sound; in English and French, it is specifically mentioned that this letter is used only in dipthongs. I think that in the other languages of the Fundamento, that fact went without saying. It's notable also that the Polish pronunciation for Ŭ is given as "u (krótkie)" (short u), and NOT as as W sound like English, which he was certainly familiar with. In modern Polish this sound would be written as Ł; in the Polish of Zamenhof's time, Ł wasn't pronounced as "w" by anyone except the lower classes, but Zamenhof would certainly be aware of this pronunciation, and he could easily have described the letter Ŭ as having this sound if he wanted to.

In the end I'm not overly upset either way. Esperanto tends to simplify down sounds, and you could consider V to be a simplified W sound. Though Esperanto is easily capable of producing certain dipthong sounds, for example, we don't normally replicate those in borrowed words. Therefore although we have words like "hejmo" and "hejti" and "najlo", we translate Iowa as "Iovao" and not as "Ajoŭao". Cambridge is "Kembriĝo" and not "Kejmbriĝo". It has to do with what is considered the standard set of phonemes for the language. Every language does this. Why do we say "Burr-lin" rather than "Behr-lin"? English is easily able to make this sound. But we assimilate the word to the usual English pronunciation, even though English has the phonemes to pronounce it with greater accuracy.

IMHO you can use ǔ for names without restriction, so do write Oǔen/Oǔeno if you prefer it that way. I think it was just a slavic and germanic influence that made into Esperanto phonology as Erinja explained.

Some dictionaries do include ǔato as an Esperanto word (altho it would look a somewhat strange in the x-system: uxato...).

In Portuguese, all dictionaries say that we should say watt as ǔot, but most people prefer vat... As for the word kiwi, some people say kiǔi and others say kivi (I prefer kiǔi). Washington is pronounced Ǔoshinton, but Walter is pronounced Valter...

This kind of sound changes is not an exclusive to Esperanto.

I've seen that some Esperanto speakers are, how can I say, "enthusiastic" about changing W or short U into V while others are less so. When in doubt, I prefer to keep the ǔ sound, but everyone has different opinions about this.

marcuscf:Some dictionaries do include ǔato as an Esperanto word (altho it would look a somewhat strange in the x-system: uxato...).

Sounds like some Greco-Mayan god...
"I AM UKSATO, THE GOD OF the product of voltage and current! FEAR ME!"

ceigered:Sounds like some Greco-Mayan god..."I AM UKSATO, THE GOD OF the product of voltage and current! FEAR ME!"

Haha nice, I like that!
When I was in Mexico I went to a place called Xcaret pronounced /ŝka-ret/ but in mind I was thinking someone had miswritten the word in x-system and I was thinking Ĉaret in my head. It's funny how Esperanto leaks into your everyday mind even when you aren't thinking about it directly

When I visited the town of Marsaxlokk in Malta (mar-sa-ŝlok), in my mind, it was easy to invert a couple of letters, so that it was "Marsxalokk" with a typo.

erinja:It's notable also that the Polish pronunciation for Ŭ is given as "u (krótkie)" (short u), and NOT as as W sound like English, which he was certainly familiar with. In modern Polish this sound would be written as Ł; in the Polish of Zamenhof's time, Ł wasn't pronounced as "w" by anyone except the lower classes, but Zamenhof would certainly be aware of this pronunciation, and he could easily have described the letter Ŭ as having this sound if he wanted to..

In Polish "W" is pronounced as "v". An we (Polish) have the same sounds as in Esperanto:

Europa = Eŭropo
pauza = paŭzo
auto = aŭto
aura = auro

"Ł" is a little different - it is more like "L" than like "U".

geo1963:
In Polish "W" is pronounced as "v". An we (Polish) have the same sounds as in Esperanto:

The first language that Zamenhof created was Lingwe Uniwersala, with W, not V. Since he knew Polish and German, it was natural to associate W more to V than to Ŭ.

I have just acquired a copy of the latest edition of Wells' English Esperanto English Dictionary," and on page XVI he writes, "The glides (semivowels) j and ŭ are like English y and w (IPA [j w]." Now, I am not a professional phonetician, but to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, English /w/ is often considered a semivowel, so that it would be legitimate, if uncommon (and even if not strictly Fundamenta), to use ŭ similar to the English /w/. Thus, as one respondent wrote, I would be justified, even if a little nonstandard, in writing my middle name as Oŭen[o]. Nevertheless, I understand erinja's explanation.

wikipedia gives an answer about
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_phonology#P...

phonotactics is the rules to combine the phonems of a language.